Anyone inclined to find joy when a president’s taste collides with yours had a lot to choose from with Barack Obama.
There was the time he dropped by the Los Angeles garage where the comedian Marc Maron records his podcast or when he sat between the two ferns where Zach Galifianakis pretends to be a boob hosting a talk show. At the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, he did a bit with Keegan-Michael Key as Luther, Mr. Obama’s fictional but legitimately irate “anger translator” from “Key & Peele.” He called Kanye West a jackass, invited Lin-Manuel Miranda to the White House Poetry Jam to perform a song from “Hamilton” before “Hamilton” was even a thing, and, for two straight years, dropped traffic-stopping, thoroughly convincing Spotify playlists. That doesn’t even include the New York Review of Books conversation (in two parts!) between him and the novelist Marilynne Robinson. They talked about … about … well it’s just sobering and oracular, and you should read it.
But of all the culture Barack Obama has been a part of, inspired, commented on or cultivated, of all the ways in which the culture seemed to evolve around — and unconsciously respond to — him, the thing that says so much about his unprecedented relationship to art and popular culture is actually, in the vast scheme of things, just a footnote. Which is to say it’s pretty small yet so illustrative of his sense of respect, professionalism and awe. It was the time he was emailed for a quote.
The occasion was the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors. The inductees included Carole King, who sat in the balcony between her fellow inductee George Lucas and the first couple. And during Ms. King’s tribute, out came Aretha Franklin, who sat at a piano in a floor-length fur coat and sang “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” the classic Ms. King wrote, and Ms. Franklin released in 1967. Her appearance was pretty much expected. The shock was how powerfully good, at 73, Ms. Franklin sounded — so good that you worried ecstasy would send Ms. King toppling off the balcony, so good that Mr. Obama wiped tears from his eyes.
For a critical profile of Ms. Franklin in The New Yorker, its editor, David Remnick, reached out to the president. As a critic, I feel a duty to point out that that’s an unusual move. Mr. Remnick is also, among other things, a critic. He knows Ms. Franklin’s worth as an American treasure and that it has no price. He’s more than equipped to sum her up. But he outsourced that job. To the president of the United States. And if you got to that section of that story and considered rolling your eyes (“When I emailed President Obama about Aretha Franklin and that night …”), you immediately retreated when you read what Mr. Obama wrote in response.
“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll — the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote back, through his press secretary. “American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears — the same way that Ray Charles’s version of ‘America the Beautiful’ will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed — because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”
Mr. Remnick wrote to him because he knew that Barack Obama would deliver. Mr. Remnick asked for two cents. The president gave him a dollar. Mr. Obama, for nearly all of his tenure, was fully aware of, interested in, and knowledgeable about popular culture, even as it grew impossible to take it all in. He tried: sports, movies, television, the internet, music, books. He was protean and catholic. He was thoughtful and self-deprecating, cool and yet far from it. He was a version of America’s dad and the dad some kids wished theirs could be: fit for world leadership, fit for a sitcom.
Lots of smart people are poring over Mr. Obama’s record to divine a legacy. Which policies will last? How did he change the job? How did he distinguish himself? But this was a presidency whose few faint whiffs of scandal included being surreptitiously videoed last year by Usher dancing listlessly to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” which was more than a year old. So to be fair: It’s an addictive song, and he moved like someone who had been dancing to it since it came out.
In other words, Mr. Obama’s place in popular culture has always felt new, alive and mostly underappreciated.
Obviously, other presidents have had a relationship with American culture. Television was in its creative infancy when Dwight D. Eisenhower entered office in 1953, and he took quick advantage of the power of its immediacy. When John F. Kennedy turned 45, he received American history’s most famous “Happy Birthday” from Marilyn Monroe. But it was tragedy and a glamorous wife that ensured Kennedy’s legacy in popular culture. Richard Nixon disliked “All in the Family” and was an avid moviegoer, who according to Mark Feeney’s surprising book “Nixon at the Movies,” watched about 500 films during his presidency. Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood actor before he was a politician, and, as a candidate, Bill Clinton made a lot of sense on MTV and Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show.
But has any president been as conversant in the art and popular culture of this country as Barack Obama? Who has been as committed to opening up the White House to the sorts of artists he has? Lunches with the novelists Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers and Colson Whitehead. One lunch, actually. That was one lunch. Initiative summits that included Alicia Keys, Nicki Minaj, J. Cole, Ludacris, Rick Ross, Pusha T., Common and Chance the Rapper. (So many different rappers and R&B singers have come through the White House in the last eight years that the BET Awards could sue for copyright infringement.) Last year, Barack and Michelle Obama hosted “Jazz at the White House,” which featured appearances by so many magnificent, important people that to type out all the names — Chick Corea, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ms. Franklin, for openers — is to make a very fancy shopping list.
Mr. Obama brought all kinds of art and culture into the White House, and he sought culture out. At the same time, how we experience that art and culture, changed as much as the culture itself. When he entered office, in 2009, Netflix was a movies-by-mail service. Now it’s a major reason we no longer watch TV; we scarf it down.
But that disruption — from channels and networks to platforms and apps — also unleashed TV that looked more like America: more nonwhite characters, more women, more gays. He presided over an era in which television and movies grappled with the meaning and meaninglessness of race, whether to laugh at it or take it seriously or ignore it altogether, whether the idea of a so-called postracial America was ever possible, as though electing a black man for eight years erases the traumas of 400.
To that end, “30 Rock” was the great Obama-era situation comedy — a workplace farce, on and loosely about NBC, that hit its stride in 2008 and ran until 2013. Not so secretly, it was about the insurmountable work of race and gender. Meanwhile, the American movie industry went all in on franchises and sequels while leaving art and humanity for TV. But the “Fast and Furious” movies did bounce off the assembly line. The series started in 2001, essentially died in 2003, and came roaring back to life at the start of Mr. Obama’s first term and is ludicrously yet thankfully on the verge of an eighth installment. The protagonists are car thieves turned action heroes, who are mostly black, Asian, Latina or racially ambiguous. These aren’t great movies. But they’re great, Obama-era fun: serious and self-aware without too much (or any) self-seriousness. And they take an issue that Hollywood has always struggled with — what to do with all these talented, interesting people of color? — and laughs at it. What to do? It’s not that hard: Let ’em drive.
Mr. Obama had his priorities straight, of course. Pop culture and art aren’t aspects of American life that should dominate a two-term presidency. They have little to do with the business of governance. But Mr. Obama has always seemed to understand the importance of culture as mirror, window, escape hatch and haven. The Obamas were catholic in their tastes not because they had to be, but because that’s what we should be: open. Their minds were open, their hearts were open, their arms were open — to the Willie Nelsons, the Beyoncés, the Junot Díazes, to all kinds of excellence.
One of the happiest cultural events I’ve ever watched was the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in November. The honor went to 21 men and women, from Robert De Niro and Tom Hanks and Michael Jordan to Cicely Tyson and Diana Ross and Ellen DeGeneres. Bill and Melinda Gates were honored. So were Maya Lin and Robert Redford. Mr. Obama had good material for most of them — philanthropists, movies stars, architect, alike. And, as he so often does and gets nary enough credit for, he delivered it with perfectly timed drollery. (He could easily enjoy a second career as a comedian.) These people meant something to him. His joshing notwithstanding, a few of them appeared to mean everything.
The knock on Mr. Obama was that he was dry and aloof. Perhaps but not always. He understood what laughter could do. He knew the power of songs. He knew the power of singers, even if the only person doing the singing was, at first, only him.
In 2015, at the memorial service after the Charleston massacre, he takes a dramatic, deliberative pause before intoning the lyrics to “Amazing Grace.” He starts and the choir behind him rises, out of surprise. You can tell he’s not singing because he thinks his baritone sounds good. He’s singing because something’s come over him, the way it does me, the way it does lots of people. What appears to have come over him at that memorial is both a sincere holiness and a rare, powerfully particular recognition of the glory and tragic risk of being black and American: He had to sing. In that moment, that song was all he seemed to have. That’s not a sensation you go looking for. It finds you.
Good historians tend to know the right moment to evaluate a president’s place. They wait until the office is behind him, for the right mix of distance and scholarship. In the meantime, Barack Obama’s performance as president — meaning the performance he gave in the role of president of the United States — was flawless. Culturally speaking, he didn’t use his office to lift up, enlighten and entertain so much as share it. He wrote to David Remnick that he loved Ray Charles’s version of “America the Beautiful” because “it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.”
The man knows his country and his Ray. But it’s entirely possible to read that quote and catch a chill because Mr. Obama could easily have been writing about himself.
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