On a Scale of Problematic to Racist, How Bad Is John Mayer's New Music Video?

John Mayer, a man who once described his penis as a white supremacist, recently insisted to The New York Times that he was ready to resuscitate his flatlining career by making new music that “moves and throbs and has women in it again.”

With that in mind, Mayer’s just dropped the music video for the first track from his upcoming seventh (??) studio album, The Search for Everything, which he described as being influenced by “ancient Japanese R&B.” A more accurate description of the video includes the words “Orientalist,” “feverish,” and “wet dream.”

There are whispering geishas, silent samurai, and (of course) dancing pandas who seem more than happy to get down with Mayer in a “disco dojo” (his words!) plucked right out of a Tarantino film. But don’t worry! Mayer’s certain that he and his team were as “sensitive as [they] could possibly be” in the planning of the video.

“Part of cultural appropriation is blindness,” Mayer told the Times last month. “I’m on the right side of the line because it’s an idea for the video that has a very multiethnic casting, and nobody who is white or non-Asian is playing an Asian person.”