When I wrote about Mayer on my blog (available here: http://annehelenpetersen.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/john-mayer-misplays-the-celebrity-game/) I speculated that this particular interview will have no actual effect on Mayer’s ability to sell records. It may momentarily create negative feelings towards him, lowering his overall Q-score, but it’s very doubtful that it will actually impinge upon record or concert ticket sales. This sort of reckless honesty has long been part of his image, so the disclosure of slightly more incendiary commentary does little to alter that established image. Woods, on the other hand, had such an inelastic image that the scandal basically led him to implode.

Finally, I appreciate that you bring up the fact that this is a Playboy interview. Very few commentaries have noted the fact that this interview, if given even five years ago, would never have gone viral, and most likely would never have even been in public discourse. Playboy was once the provenance of highly private disclosures allowing men to feel part of a larger locker room — see, for example, John Wayne’s equally incendiary interview with Playboy in the ’70s. The fact that a Playboy interview is now readily accessible to anyone online further underlines the ways in which the celebrity game — and the expectation of openness — have changed.

I really like Myles’ comparison to the Tiger Woods phenomenon. To my mind, there are some similarities here, but there are also some key differences. Tiger appears to have betrayed his wife’s trust and violated the sanctity of his marriage. These acts do not go over well in America. At the same time, Tiger can be understood as a victim of his appetites. He is taking the steps now to work with those elements of himself and, in the process, is positioning himself to play a starring role in a major new iteration of the classic American redemption tale. As has been pointed out by many, his image depends upon a certain sort of moral fabric and he appears to be committed to repairing that cloth as best he can.

This makes for an interesting contrast with Mayer. He is a confirmed bachelor whose exploits form a large part of the legend that he has worked so hard to make. His indiscretions smack not of an excess of appetite – his work effectively encourages that sort of thing – but a sense of ennui and a lack of judgment. He comes across as a loose canon with a sharp intellect and a notable lack of sense and focus. Tiger can be redeemed because he still retains a connection to those skills and accomplishments for which he was so admired and upon which he made his name. In contrast, Mayer’s considerable skills as a composer and performer were long ago subsumed by his star text project, which was effectively a celebrity sideshow with its own meta-discourse. If we ever collectively cared about John Mayer – and this is debatable – we may now be too far away from that initial feeling to even bother to pick up on his efforts to make amends.

I like the way that you brought in the public/private dynamic. It is true that Tiger’s indiscretions were initially private, whereas Mayer made his in spectacular fashion in the fifth estate. Tiger’s public apology thus carries a certain sense of weight; the public figure acknowledges that his private life has an impact on the way that his fans perceive him and moves to address this. In contrast, Mayer’s graceful apology has the unfortunate fate of coming across as just another tweet.

Finally, thanks for your observations regarding the manner in which the interview was conducted and then prepared for publication. Those details certainly help to explain the events in question. It seems to me that it is a bit of journalistic sleight of hand to edit an interview and then print it as a straight Q & A. With a profile piece, editing is generally assumed. With this sort of thing, I think it is easier for some readers to consume it uncritically as an accurate transcript of the conversation.

I think that the interviewer (>who wrote a piece about the furor regarding the review on The Daily Beast) has it right that Mayer was as much the victim of his favoured medium as he was of his big mouth: in the context of the nearly 7000-word interview, his comments probably made sense, but all that got posted (for the most part) were choice quotes or excerpts, the kind of bits and pieces that work well in 140 characters. And so Mayer’s attempts to be self-aware and honest become cherry-picked in order to create a more sensationalist story. Of course, since his comments were insensitive and poorly phrased regardless of context, he has reason to come out and apologize, but there’s a cruel irony that the same sort of shortened, quick form of communication that Mayer relied on to construct his online identity ended up distilling that interview into sound bytes that had him backtracking.

Personally, I think Mayer heard the name Playboy, heard the questions being asked, and decided that if there was any place to be candid about those kinds of questions then Playboy would seem like the logical place. I read another response from Melinda Newman who noted that Mayer had been oversharing in interviews for years, just never with outlets who could actually print what he was saying.

[And just on one final note: Mayer’s reputation clearly wasn’t that great before the interview, as NBC’s Parks and Recreation had a joke at Mayer’s expense (in which Leslie Knope warned Jennifer Aniston to stay away from him) that happened to air only days after the interview broke, despite having been taped long before.]