"Music Lessons with John Mayer"
This Month's Lesson: The Pen, the Sword, and the Song
by John Mayer
EVERY DECADE has its struggle, and every struggle has its songs. A song allows some people the opportunity to remember their lives and gives those who weren't born yet a good rough idea. If you're like me and weren't lucid in the '60s, you probably reference the Forrest Gump soundtrack to get some idea of the emotional climate. I listen to Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" and I hear the '80s for everything it was. The '90s were all about micropsychology, and that's where Nirvana came from. We already know the theme of this decade, and too many people are talking about it, and nobody is singing.
We live in a time of intellectual gridlock. The soapbox is now available in regular, digital, and the new best-seller, the pocket-sized, vibrating pride stimulator. That makes for a lot of noise and a lot of cynicism. After all, when nobody's sitting, it's hard to know a good stance when you see one. That's where the magic of music comes in, and that's where it's needed now. It grew out of the cotton field's call and response into blues and jazz, and then rock and punk, where it changed everything and never let anyone forget it. Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind. Bruce Springsteen was labeled anticop after releasing "American Skin (41 Shots)," but the song is so good that I bet he'd still get off with a warning and a picture if he were pulled over in New York. That's some serious kung-fu shit. On a different level, I had Republicans shaking their asses in the aisles on my summer tour while I performed Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues." I'd won. And imagine if Natalie Maines had sung her mind instead of speaking it. Assuming the story would have made the news wires at all, it would have read, "Dixie Chicks perform controversial new song 'Ashamed' at UK gig." At worst, it's a blip on the media radar; at best, it becomes a musical rallying cry.
There'll be a winner in November, and words spoken now will disappear. But songs hang on forever. We just need to start singing them. When we're older and our children are thumbing through our records, will there be emotional accounts of our disgust and dissent? When we finally reach that code green, I don't want my kids to ask me what all the fuss was about back in my day. I want them to hear it.