Granted, he understood in the most generic fashion conceivable, the way your horoscope or an inspirational meme understands. You could tell from his songs that he understood. Dude was catnip to the ladies, and when you look at him, it’s hard to blame those ladies. It wasn’t just the bong-fancier fraternities, both scholastic and drop-out, who loved the guy. He had actually been a surfer, reputedly a good one, until injury knocked him out of that game and he focused on the guitar. He was authentic the way expensively marketed jeans and pleasantly appointed woodland cabins and ethically sourced coffee beans are authentic. (The more overtly poppy and winsome but undeniably similar John Mayer was also a big success in the States around that time, and although he never had quite the international impact of Johnson, it seems apt that whenever you go into a pound shop today, the PA will be playing some kind of cloying, twee indie-folk-pop that resembles a cheaply made John Mayer knock-off, and is no worse than John Mayer himself.) Johnson was buff, he was rugged, he was handsome, he was easy-going, he was sensitive, and above all he was authentic. It wasn’t just that Johnson was a solo act. Yet he was more than that – unfortunately. Certainly, Johnson resembled Hootie & The Blowfish by unplugged means. But these acts shared an outlook and an audience. His acoustic-based sound may ostensibly have had little in common with Counting Crows, The Dave Matthews Band or Blues Traveller, other than its drabness. He slotted neatly into an established market, a school of American music united not so much by a style as by a feel: a torpid, hempen earnestness, recognising no boundaries on its mission to bore the will to live out of anyone insufficiently stoned to withstand it.
He sold records, and he sold them by the eco-friendly articulated truckload. But Johnson did something the others had not.
#Buff dude listening to music meme free#
From the mid-Nineties to the early Noughties you could scarcely move without bumping into some such lumpen iteration of post-Marleydom, whether they were busking throughout the cities of Europe and America, or being foisted on the public by hefty record-company publicity budgets, their character wryly summarised in the Onion headline, “Bob Marley Rises From Grave To Free Frat Boys From Bonds Of Oppression”. True, he was far from the first to do this. But we can absolutely hold Jack Johnson at fault for being one of these. Marley’s influence is vast and varied, and we cannot hold him at fault for the fact it encompasses any number of wholemeal American college types who have devoted themselves to plunking on acoustic guitars while attempting to replicate the vocal style of ‘Redemption Song’.
Now, one should always be wary of blaming an artist for their influence. And for a smaller, more baleful coterie of which I am unabashedly a member – perhaps you, the tQ reader, are too – it was the origin point of something dreadful. It was a record, and the start of a career, that has brought gentle pleasure to millions. Why any of this should concern us, why we should find cause to turn our gaze for a moment to this by all appearances pleasant and benign individual and what we may take to be his agreeable existence, rather than just wishing him the best of his seemingly splendid luck and leaving him to get on with it, comes down to a thing that happened 20 years ago, and that thing was this: he released a debut album called Brushfire Fairytales. If Lisa Simpson’s never had a poster of Jack Johnson on her wardrobe door, somebody in the writers’ room has missed a trick. Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the laid-back socially conscious surfer dude, the enviro-hunk to make all other enviro-hunks greener still with envy. And not just any old particular kind of dude. Although it might be more accurate to call him a dude. Somewhere in the North Shore district of Oahu, third largest of the Hawiian islands, lives a fellow by the name of Jack Johnson.
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