US musician John Mayer
US musician John Mayer (Image: AAP/EPA/Ferdy Damman)

I try to steer clear of hyperbole in Tips and Murmurs, so know that I’m entirely considered and sincere in the following argument: the vast majority of the world’s modern ills can be traced back to John Mayer’s 2006 single “Waiting On the World to Change”.

Aping the chord progressions and easy swing of politically inflected soul artists like Curtis Mayfield (indeed it could be a vaporwave slowing of The Impressions’ exultant “We’re a Winner“) or Donny Hathaway, it sounds on the face of it a decent enough tribute to that sound and its aims, updated from the Vietnam/Watergate era to that of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. Except a glance at the lyric sheet shows it’s actually a paean to indifference, a hymn to complacency, a celebration of passivity posing as principle: “It’s not that we don’t care, we just know that the fight ain’t fair, so we’re waiting on the world to change”.

It’s topped by the video, where dreamy, tousle-haired Mayer looks moodily over the New York skyline, interspersed with graffiti artists daubing walls with topical artwork so broad as to be meaningless; lest the viewer worry the scrawling of “Think!” with an AK-47 replacing the K and a bullet for a exclamation point is too strong, we’re assured at the video’s end that the murals were legally produced on private property. Vague liberal philosophising without breaking a single rule? That’ll show Bush! The song’s primary goal appears to be to soothe people who think working towards a better world sounds like hard work, and it was surely on the playlists of those people who complained that the election of Donald Trump disrupted their brunch plans.

All of this is a long way of saying COP28 has chosen its theme song well. This is a global climate summit held in the United Arab Emirates, a state that owes its considerable status entirely to petrodollars, and whose Sultan Al-Jaber, also the president of the summit, has already had to deny reports he’s abused his position to try to sign oil deals with other governments.

So it’s appropriate that people who visit the website are greeted by a link to a performance of Mayer’s Grammy-winning non-event in a style I like to call “Lionel Hutz’s nightmare”, the video spreading across the globe to find incredible musicians from Senegal to Jordan, China to Brazil, so they could mesh their considerable talents into a smooth, one-world version of the world’s least meaningful song. It’s just the most tuneful example of the summit’s unique tone-deafness.

This year, anyone who buys a local SIM card for their phone during the summit will be greeted with the following text.

Nice to see that kind of thing in a state whose usual approach to “community action” around issues isn’t always so encouraging. Perhaps you’d like to attend the Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence’s presentation — plenty of material there! Wonder if they’ll discuss why they banned the apparently too-trans-friendly latest Spider-Man movie, or whether it’s unfair to expect world leaders to show the same kind of moral fortitude we’d expect of Steps? Or perhaps you just want get down to the real, practical everyday issues — like ethical use of your superyacht.

This absurdity is, of course, innate and heedless of the host: remember when the Australian government hosted some of our biggest emitters in 2021? Or how at the end of the 2022 summit governments pledged to phase out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”, and then spent the next 12 months pumping a record $USD1.7 trillion into fossil fuels? (These must have been the efficient ones that were left over.)

In the words of Mayer: “They say we stand for nothing and … it’s hard to beat the system … so we keep waiting for the world to change.”