WASHINGTON—Court proceedings began Monday regarding the new John Mayer Tom and Jerry single, with prosecutors alleging systemic artistic theft across the pop landscape.
Q: Mr. Mayer, did you compose the guitar solo on the John Mayer Tom and Jerry track using standard musical notation?
A: I did not. I smashed an acoustic guitar over a frying pan. Then I hired an orchestra to play the exact frequency of a anvil dropping on a cat's head. That is traditional blues technique.
Q: Isn't it true that your former label, Columbia Records, keeps a vault of vintage slapstick audio files specifically for your recording sessions?
A: Everyone does it. Taylor Swift uses slide whistles for bridge transitions. Ed Sheeran gets all his melodies from old Looney Tunes dynamite explosions. You cannot prove I sampled the classic Hanna-Barbera scream without incriminating the top forty.
Q: So you admit the John Mayer Tom and Jerry sound design relied entirely on stolen cartoon physics?
A: I admit nothing. But if I go down, the whole record industry collapses with me.
