Lois Rosewood - Song

Singer/songwriter John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” was the first single released in 2006 from his Continuum album. He won a Grammy for this song for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. His song carries themes of discontent as well as hope, and is a narrative of resistance as described in our textbook on page 68.

The song begins:

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothin and
there's no way we ever could

now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

These lyrics demonstrate the feeling of a lack of political power among Generation Y, and Mayer specifically refers to the current wars:

now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door

Mayer sings about mistrust regarding the media:

and when you trust your television
what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

It does allude to hope for the future, however, with these lyrics:

one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

Mayer seems to reflect the perceived apathetic stance of Generation Y (and many other people in this country) but when Mayer sang this song at the Live Earth concert event in July he changed the lyrics to “we’re NOT waiting on the world to change.”