RAMBLE ON: "Wordplay" by Jason Mraz

“Ramble On” is just a feature I came up because with I wanted more money, and I needed to give people a reason to subscribe to this Patreon. But I found it’s been helpful for me, to help me get out my thoughts on things that in a little more thoughtful, deeper way than I do with my whole “YouTube snark douche” routine. But sometimes I come across a song that deserves the whole “in the Shadows” treatment but doesn’t really fit into any of the formats I use on YouTube; normally, that would leave me out of luck, but fortunately I have this series as a backup, where I can present things for more discerning fans such as yourself.  So: here’s a piece of shit that fucking sucks that no one remembers but me.

In 2002, the idea of a white person rapping was still a joke, an anomaly, something not necessarily to be taken seriously. Eminem was of course the biggest music star in the world, but he stood alone, and the flood of clones he rapped about in “The Real Slim Shady” would take a decade to really take hold. But judging by Jason Mraz, the kind of hip-hop flow we now think of as “white” was already starting to spread. There may not have been many white rappers but white people were rapping; the white musicians inspired by hip-hop were getting airplay on the pop and rock stations, with catchy upbeat bops like “Semi-Charmed Life,” “One Week” and “Walkin’ on the Sun,” which were very far from hip-hop but were clearly doing a beach-party imitation of the intricate flows favored at the time. Jason Mraz emerged some time after those, in a summery VH1 haze alongside Michelle Branch and John Mayer, but unlike his folksinger brethren he wore his hip-hop influences on his sleeve. He wasn’t necessarily a rapper but he loved four-syllable rhymes and would cram them in whenever he could. He was self-conscious about it; “I’m all about them words,” he admits sheepishly in “You & I Both” (his best single). “This is a strange enough new play on words,” he says on “The Remedy” (his biggest single). His vocabulary became integral to his aesthetic, just as much as his trademark fedora; he was a wordsmith, a lyricist of complexity, a poet with an endless lexicon at hand. The title of his second album nodded to his image: Mr. A-Z, a nickname that nodded to his dictionary-length arsenal of words, and also a shockingly apt play on words for his last name. Ta-da: wordplay. That’s what he was about. That would also be the name of his lead-off single.

I came up with the idea of the “I’m Back, Bitch” single a few years ago (one of my best concepts). I defined it by three characteristics, 1) it’s by someone extremely famous, 2) it’s the start of a new album cycle, 3) it’s either about how great the artist is or about nothing at all. I said this about Taylor Swift’s “ME!,” which I thought failed because it didn’t have the fourth criteria. 4) It has to sound huge.  So let’s say that to qualify as an “I’m Back, Bitch” single it has to hit three of those four points, because I’ve also heard singles that functioned the same way even though they were from artists who weren’t that famous, or weren’t technically leadoff singles, or actually did have actual topics. I want to include Jason Mraz’s “Wordplay” in this, because that’s clearly what it’s going for – the point of this song is nothing but Mraz bragging about his lyrical skills – but even by this expanded criteria, Mraz falls short. Mraz isn’t famous enough, and the song isn’t big enough. And in all of pop musicdom, there is nothing in the world sadder that an artist that tries to hit you over the head with their greatness and fails miserably.

To be fair to Mraz, he’s very upfront about the fact that he doesn’t want to be here, singing this stupid song. In what plays like an excuse, Mraz talks openly about the fact that he has to write a single or the record label will give up on him. He also sings about trying to avoid the sophomore slump, and worrying about being a one-hit wonder (I watched VH1 enough that I didn’t realize “You and I Both” wasn’t really a hit). I assumed that the label had rejected the record and made him go back and write this, but according to Mraz, he wrote this to deal with the anxiety of trying to follow up his first album, and once it was out of the way he was able to do the rest of the project.

This kind of meta-narrative will be familiar to any high schooler who’s ever turned in a creative writing assignment about a high schooler struggling to finish his assignment. It’s lazy; it’s sophomoric; it’s baby’s first attempt at being clever, like making “password” your login password. His big hit, “The Remedy,” meanders all over the place, but its soaring chorus (rented from superproducers The Matrix) hit a breezy groove that made it pretty relatable. I like songs about not worrying, and I hate songs about songwriting; I’m not a songwriter, I don’t relate. I don’t care about Mraz’s struggles with the record industry. This is sterile ground that Mraz should never have tried to plant on.

Again, you could maybe forgive this on the grounds that Mraz just needed a bullshit radio single; many great artists have been forced by their labels to write bad singles. But Mraz disgraces himself beyond writing garbage for the radio; he commits a truly fatal error with the central act of the song, which is Jason Mraz bragging about how good he is at words. Because here’s the thing: Jason Mraz is a terrible fucking lyricist. For example, those lines I mentioned earlier from his previous big singles, about words. “Strange enough new play on…. words” is a forced rhyme with “dangerous liaison.” The next line after “I’m all about them words” is “…over numbers, unencumbered, numbered words.” What the fuck are you talking about? Long before Logic or NF, long before “lyrical miracle” became an insult, Jason Mraz was pioneering the entire concept of being a tryhard white boy writing multi-syllabic nonsense.

And even if he was good at rhyming: So what?? Who told Mraz he could boast about it? Jason Mraz is the opposite of a guy I want to see get up his own ass about how great he is. Mraz seems to be not aware that he’s a mandolin-playing dipshit in a stupid hat who looks all of 12 years old; he dares to call himself “Mr. A to Z” out loud as if that was not the most dork-ass thing in history. (It reminds me a bit of Martin from The Simpsons daydreaming about being the master of Latin conjugation.) Jason Mraz doesn’t have the right to be this impressed with himself. Especially since the brags themselves also sound ridiculous – “I’m the wizard of oohs and aahs and falalas,” “I built a bridge across the stream of consciousness,” What the fuck are you talking about? Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up, Jason Mraz!

“Wordplay” tanked into the ground, the more respectable but still overwordy follow-up “Geek in the Pink” didn’t do much better, and I expected to never hear of him again. When he shockingly reemerged at the end of 2008, he was emphatically not doing this folksinger-with-a-flow shtick and trying to write something that resembled an actual song (although his new style was no less annoying.) For what it’s worth, I’ve listened to Jason Mraz albums and heard songs I like, though I can’t recall them off the top of my head. “Wordplay” still annoys me deeply, one of the most indelibly awful songs I’ve ever hard, and it should be marked as a signpost of a new level of cringe on the horizon, it predicts both Ed Sheeran and latter-day Train. This song makes me think of words, all right – most of them four letters long.