President Obama's Politics of Eclectic Taste
Rockism, Spotify's genreless future, and taste-as-politic
To former president Barack Obama, all art is political.
Not in a marxist-revolutionary sense, but rather in the sense that all art has the potential to shift our hearts and minds. And what is democracy but the sum total of thoughtful, thinking hearts?
The prospect of the culture we consume shifting our political reality must be an important premise of the former commander in chief. In recent years, Obama has expended a considerable amount of energy in the domain of culture. As I wrote about over a year ago, President Obama has joined the likes of other mega-elites such as Prince Harry and Bill Gates in creating media and content companies that hope to expand the collective conscious, leading to a number of Obama-backed documentaries for Netflix such as Crip Camp, American Factory and a new docuseries on national parks. And he has grand, lofty aims about all of this. Per the press release announcing his production company, Obama hopes to “curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples.” Culture, to Obama, is no frivolous matter.
So it is with a similar zeal for media that the former president recently shared his yearly, summertime cultural recommendations. The mediums he highlights vary from year to year, but books are always in the mix and since 2016, music too has been featured annually.
Now we can easily view these recommendations as no more than the ultimate “cool dad” move, but given his cultural-political project, there is a real, if not overt, politics to the recommendations he's making. He writes above his latest music recs, “Every year, I get excited to share my summer playlist because I learn about so many new artists from your replies—it’s an example of how music really can bring us all together.”
Obama’s recommendations then are not just expressions of his own discrete taste, but also an open-sourced project that engages with the recommendations made in his tweet’s “replies.” Now of course this probably isn’t literally true. And if some poor intern has to skim through the thousands of responses to his tweet, then I am so sorry my dear, UChicago grad. But I think his statement is more an allusion to the fact his recommendations are made by his team as informed by a popular awareness of what constitutes good taste, and then finally stamped by him for final approval.
It makes sense then how such a diverse, genre-expansive collection of songs could end up on the same curated, taste-based playlist. To name a few such examples, his recommendations include such classics as Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” and Joe Cocker’s “Feeling Alright” alongside Lil Yachty’s talk-shit bop “Split/Whole Time,” Spanish pop star Rosalia’s club-thumper “Saoko” and Hope Tala and Amine’s dreary bedroom rnb number “Cherries.” Very little connects these songs, and there have been many a tweet scratching the digital head in regards to some of these choices, namely Yachty. But all of this is exactly the point. Obama is open-minded, respectful of the classics, but also feels warmly to the rising crop of young artists and entertainers. He is easy-going, empathetic, cool and non-judgmental. His taste is eclectic.
Eclecticism is the point. The premise that undergirds the playlist is that liking a wide array of music, and having a stated openness to new and different kinds of music, is a good quality in and of itself. As he wrote, “music can bring us all together,” so he makes a playlist to do just that. “Here’s some recs for these folks, some for those, and look at all of us here in the same room. We span age, creed, color and political affiliation. And we’re all here, vibing.” Being open to the possibility of this communion is a trait of which Obama hopes to inspire.
The caveat though is that individuals generally don’t actually listen to that diverse a set of musical artists. People tend to like what they like, and that stuff over there? Pass. So Obama has compiled these recommendations with a spirit of representative populism. His hope is that all can see something they like on the list, but nothing that will scare them off. All of this requires a careful balancing act from the tastemaker-in-chief. If he really hopes to have folks engage with new and different music, and inculcate within themselves a cultural eclecticism that bleeds into a wider way of being, then he must curate a set of songs that is both engagingly foreign, but also . . . familiar.
Regardless of the task’s likely impossibility, there is an open-minded ethos to this. Obama, whether explicitly or not, is taking part in a discourse that has been well-trod. For years, but especially around the turn of the century, music critics have heatedly debated the pillars of rockism and poptomism. To put things simply, rockists wrote about pop with a smug and self-assured disregard, comparing its glittery artifice to a romanticized ideal of the ultimate rock genius hero (i.e. white, boomer, man). In this debate, there was “good music” — raspy-voiced rockers who wrote all their songs — and “those people” — rappers, pop singers, samplers who were debasing the sacred domain of the good.
Obama, of a generation of dorm-room intellectuals who were weaned on these strict debates, is maybe shirking off the strictures of his generation. And because rockism was so often a stand-in for grumpy complaints about POC, women and queer artists who helped to overtake rock as the dominant popular American music through hip hop, RnB and pop, there was a moral necessity to push back on rigidly narrow conceptions of tastes.
As Kelefa Sanneh declared in his landmark piece explicating the rockist v. poptomist debate, “To obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces.” With the rising consensus that narrow definitions of good and bad music as determined by rock geniuses was not just old-fashioned, but steeped in bias, it became a low-key political imperative of the liberal-left to express cultural open-mindedness via eclectic taste. So open your mind folks! Listen to something new! In this house we like all types of music. In this house . . . we like house and country.
The problem is though that fostering eclectic taste in the masses is similar to promoting empathy in that it is completely materially nebulous as a political project. We come together, we share communion in the joyous aura of music that we can all potentially get behind, and then . . . I don’t know, shirk off our biases and class interests to organize for universal health care? Of course the notion sounds silly because it is.
But worse than being merely native, there’s a nefarious strain that runs through it. That eclectic taste, to which to Obama denotes a certain virtue, is not free from the biases and cultural preconceptions of which an expanded palette is meant to treat. It is, rather, indicative of those same biases, albeit under the veneer of openminded hipsterdom.
Obama’s genreless and expansive recs remind me of Spotify’s popular playlist POLLEN, which is described by the company as “Genre-less. Quality first always.” Like Obama’s politics of eclectic taste, POLLEN is also selling us a vision of communion and utopianism. It’s a future where we can all get along, at least musically, and revel in, rather than be revolted by, difference. Similar to Obama’s recommendations, difference is sold to us on POLLEN while also being heavily managed and stylized to fit a prescriptive box.
POLLEN is an important playlist for Spotify. It represents the vanguard of taste to the mood-oriented music corporation. What can be found on POLLEN is not music of one genre, but rather songs that fall within a variety of genres. These songs all share an affinity for sonic-intermixing and an optimistic, eclectic vibe. Lizzy Sazbo who edits LOREM, an offshoot of POLLEN geared towards younger, usually female listeners, once described their hopes in regards to genrelss playlists as the following: “Our hope is that because we have opened the boxes, that creators feel more comfortable leaning into whatever new sound that they wanna experiment with or that they’re inspired by, because we’re trying to open more doors for them.”
Spotify hopes then to foster a space for musical creators to move between genres and even be rewarded for new and different sounds. But this notion of genre-intermixing and a future-of-amorphous-distinctions is not freeing us from the strictures of genre, but is instead creating new taste-based distinctions. To put it bluntly, eclectic taste, at least as it conceived by corporations like Spotify, is rarely a signal of an earnest engagement with a wide ranging group of music; it is often, a surface-level integration of many different types of music that probably, on aggregate, share some fundamental attributes.
Robin James made this clear in a 2021 lecture at University of Hartford’s Hartt Conservatory focusing on POLLEN (the text of which she has thankfully published). James’s insights have really shaped my thinking on Spotify, vibes and genre. She writes:
“Studying POLLEN in March and April 2021, I found songs ranging from neo-soul and neo-disco to underground hip hop, sad synthpop, and literal jazz. Despite drawing on a wide range of genres, this heterogeneity at the level of genre doesn’t translate into a wide sonic or musical spectrum: all these songs have more or less the same feel or sonic profile. Extremes of any sort are absent, and all the songs feature understated (even nonexistent) percussion and bass.”
James, using the work of anthropologist Nick Seaver, who has studied the programmers at major music streaming companies, describes the axis by which the minds behind POLLEN judge quality as “avidity.” It’s an enthusiasm for newness and difference, but within that preference is a subset of preferences that implicitly castigate extremes — the very genre’d, the very subculture’d, the “not easy to get into” — as provincial and backwards.
Could you imagine the most ecstatic, most well composed death metal song on POLLEN? What about a 7 minute Afrobeat excursion? A 1.5 minute, condensed and nonsensical hyperpop trip? Now this is not exactly a checkmate. Curation is curation and you have to draw the line somewhere. But I use these examples to show the limit of POLLEN’s avidity. And by extension Obama’s.
On Obama’s list, there is something for everyone, and by interfacing with all this newness, Obama, like POLLEN, hopes to potentially install in us a sense of “avidity.” In Obama’s neoliberalism, which has so deeply naturalized the status of the consumer as representative of the citizen, what we consume (i.e. listen to) says something about our ability to be careful, conscientious citizens. But the eclectic taste of which Obama likely hopes to inspire is not so much an impassioned love for difference, but a benign appreciation of familiar difference. Nothing on that listen falls outside a narrow range of acceptable difference.
And what is liberalism at this point but that?
On Obama’s yearly recs, you won’t see the wierd and extreme. You won’t see the niche and provincial. At the end of the day, Obama’s recommendations, alongside POLLEN’s, are the sonic equivalent to the fusion-hipster restaurant that outprices the immigrant joint in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood.
So enjoy your cultural poo-poo platter as curated by our former head of state, just don’t expect to leave the dinner table fully filled after a helping of what turns out to be pretty empty carbs.
I always find the Obama playlist odd and strange and funny.. I guess I wonder how many people actually listen to all of the songs he suggested. Or like, idk, a 60 year old liberal putting on Split/Whole Time because Mr. Obama put it on the TV... like I still don't really understand why he started doing this in the first place, other than maybe assert, as you're saying, that he is a tastemaker and part of the culture himself? Is there an aspect of "coolness" or "hipness" that could be dissected further?
My real question is though: what's in it for Spotify to create a "genreless" future?