Now that a couple weeks have passed and Jessica Simpson has been allowed to respond to the “sexual napalm” comment, let’s take a moment to reflect.
First of all, a small part of me regrets the backlash that’s washed over John Mayer concerning the remarks he made in his recent interview with Playboy magazine because it probably means most celebrities will continue to regurgitate safe, boring pabulum. Regardless of the content of Mayer’s words, you have to admit that was a pretty rollicking interview with crazy, unguarded comments flying like shrapnel. I now know more about Mayer than I do most of my closest friends.
Mayer’s use of a racial slur drew the most fire, even though in context the word wasn’t used in a derogatory manner. Now Mayer’s comment about his penis being a white supremacist, and comparing his own struggles to that of “one black dude’s” were much more suspect.
After reading Mayer’s Playboy interview and his recent profile in Rolling Stone, I get the sense that Mayer has two big problems, aside from his music being dull. The first is that he seems to view his own life as some kind of great piece of performance art.
The second — out of which the first problem flows — is he is monumentally self-involved. One gets the sense reading these interviews that the only person he ever thinks about is himself, and even when he thinks about other people or larger issues, such as race, he does so only insofar as they relate to and affect John Mayer.
Maybe this is a natural consequence of celebrity, but in an era where every young person is the star of his or her own Facebook, Twitter and YouTube feed, I worry that such toxic narcissism will eventually be inescapable.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: “The Brutalist Brick”
Rating: A
Ted Leo strikes me as the kind of guy Bruce Springsteen was at some point in the distant past, back before he played stadiums and only sold his albums at Wal-Mart.
Leo plays music like it’s a blue-collar job, heroically cranking out album after album of melodic, finely-crafted guitar rock. On “The Brutalist Brick,” his sixth studio album with the Pharmacists, Leo successfully turns leftist ideology into lusty-pop lyrics such as: “The means of production are now in the hands of workers/ But I still want to be guided by your expert hands/ Oh, lay your expert hands on me!”
His background in Washington D.C.-area hardcore colors some of the tracks, such as “The Stick” and “Where Was My Brain?”, but he also turns in some of the most optimistic pop songs of his career. On the album’s standout track, “Bottled in Cork,” he somehow moves from a failed United Nations resolution to the beautiful, repeating exhortation, “Tell the bartender, I think I’m falling in love.”
Seriously, this guy is a national treasure. Download “Bottled in Cork,” “The Mighty Sparrow” and “Even Heroes have to Die.”
Song of the week
William Bell: “I Forgot to Be Your Lover”
The last time I was in Joplin I picked up William Bell’s 1969 album “Bound to Happen” for $3 at Eccentrix.
It was one of my favorite finds in a record store in a long time, mostly because of the first track, “I Forgot to Be Your Lover.” Bell’s biggest single and one of my all-time favorites, the song begins with a peeling guitar that sounds, to paraphrase George Harrison, as if the strings are crying.
The song is a two-minute apology: “I’ve been working for you doing all I can / But work all the time didn’t make me a man / Oh, I forgot to be your lover /And I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you somehow.”
Bell, one of the soul label Stax’s greatest singers, turns in a beautiful, understated performance, never giving into the histrionics that some of his peers were known for, but still managing to wring a novel’s worth of emotion from the plain, straightforward language.
Address correspondence to Jeremiah Tucker, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, Mo., 64802.
