Diagnosis: Mayer

“What’s wrong with John Mayer?” we asked last month. A brand new Playboy interview provides a plausible answer: he’s stoned and pretentious. Also: not good with racial issues.

While it’s tempting to use the new DSM to diagnose Mayer, one commenter has a non-psychiatric explanation for his nonsensical logorrhea: “he is baked off his ass all the time.” Mayer’s interview with Playboy supports this hypothesis. Some evidence:

He makes bizarre analogies.

I have a hard time not looking at anxiety disorder as being like an ATM.

He has the munchies, but is lazy.

Here’s me thinking about stuff: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could download food?”

He talks about time travel.

This is going to sound odd, but sometimes I meet the 40-year-old me and say, “What do I do?” And 40-year-old me says, “Don’t do every scheduled interview. Go to the zoo instead. You’re going to be fine, you knucklehead. Stop overthinking what people say.” I’m trying to fold over time, to see it as a random-access hard disk where I can move to any point in time and change the way I see today.

I think we all knew this guy in high school: the guy who always wanted to talk about, like, what does “time” really mean? Except that while that guy might have been a little pretentious, he was basically harmless. And Mayer’s interview reveals something more fucked up than a little stoner logic. Gossip sites have been salivating over Mayer’s claim that Jessica Simpson was like “crack cocaine” and “sexual napalm,” but more troubling are Mayer’s comments about race and sexuality. On gay rumors, he says:

The only man I’ve kissed is Perez Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve and I decided to go out and destroy myself. I was dating Jessica at the time, and I remember seeing Perez Hilton flitting about this club and acting as though he had just invented homosexuality. All of a sudden I thought, I can outgay this guy right now. I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tongue-iest kiss I have ever put on anybody-almost as if I hated fags. I don’t think my mouth was even touching when I was tongue kissing him, that’s how disgusting this kiss was. I’m a little ashamed. I think it lasted about half a minute. I really think it went on too long.

Mayer should probably be more than “a little ashamed” at trying to “outgay” someone, but the rest of his interview makes clear, neither shame nor sleet nor snow nor concern for sounding like a total asshole can make Mayer shut up. He claims “black people love me” because “I’m just very. V-E-R-Y.” And he, uh, explains:

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.'”

I guess he’s trying to acknowledge his white privilege here, but dropping the n-word is not the way to do it. Then he goes on:

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.

It’s nice that Mayer admits his struggle is not “like the collective struggle of black America.” Teachers across the nation will surely be relieved to cross “Your Body Is a Wonderland” off their Black History Month syllabi. But while his struggle is similar to “one black dude’s,” his dick’s struggle is something else:

My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.