Pop Rocks: Dear John...Mayer

I’m sorry, but this isn’t working out.

I think I speak for bloggers everywhere when I say: we had a great thing
going. Every so often you’d tweet something borderline repulsive about farts
or Miley Cyrus, and we’d dutifully respond. Usually with some sort of mock
indignation about “TMI” and then by calling you a douchebag. Then you’d
appear on TMZ and complain about all the negative attention, which
would only set us off again. It was a comfortable cycle of mutual
self-abuse, and everyone was happy.

But then you had to go and do that
Playboy interview.

At first, it almost seemed like a gift from the gods to every “kid” who ever
called you names on his “terrible blog” (your words, not ours). By our
count, the expression “douche bag” was used 11 times, and there was reliable
mention of bidets and your compulsive need to tweet/discuss every
conceivable detail of your personal life. This would, unfortunately, come
back to bite you on the ass:

MAYER: Someone asked me the other day, “What does it
feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a
contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could
call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood
pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood
pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told,
‘We’re full.'”

PLAYBOY: It is true; a lot of rappers love you. You recorded with
Common and Kanye West, played live with Jay-Z.

MAYER: What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not
taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a
struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that
my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my
struggle is similar to one black dude’s.

You can take the boy out of Bridgeport…

It was bad enough you dropped the dreaded n-word in an interview not
directly related to the history of racial epithets, but when the interviewer
tried to steer you back on track by alluding to your cred in the hip-hop
community (maybe so you could fall back on the old “I have lots of black
friends” defense) you shoveled another few hundred cubic feet of dirt out of
the hole you’d already dug by speaking with authority about the “black
experience.”

Your pathological inability to shut the fuck up was always one of the things
that made our relationship so much fun, but your little problem finally
reached critical mass as you went on to discuss your “David Duke cock” and
then described kissing Perez Hilton “like you hated fags,” an interesting
comment considering that earlier you talked about how you want to
(metaphorically) fuck all your girlfriends’ exes in the ass.

I probably don’t need to remind you about it at this point, but some of the
last few guys who felt they could toss around words like “nigger” and “fag”
with impunity were named Axl Rose and Michael Richards. Neither of which
have graced an Entertainment Weekly cover in a while.

So we’ve got to end it. Your self-imposed
exile from Twitter and meltdown in Nashville might
have carried more weight if they’d come before everyone started
piling on. You could’ve issued a swift, pre-emptive apology, put your head
down, and continued making your unique brand of adult contemporary “blues”
music and — possibly — put the incident behind you.

But that didn’t happen, and now we have to turn our back on you. Because
what was once a relationship based on shared goofiness — like two friends
going to parties and taking turns doing naked keg stands — has now become one
of one-sided embarrassment, like when one of the friends gets drunk, paws
through the host’s underwear drawer, and tries to fuck the dog.

Douchebags we can handle, John…dog fuckers, not so much.