Pres. Obama, the cultural commander

[MBS]

Long and thoughtful piece.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/arts/president-obama-pop-culture.html

. ..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.
. . .
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.

[oldtime dfl_er]

1. When people say

the selection of Trump is a reaction to Obama, they don't mean only to his skin color, they also mean to his cerebral approach, his cultural sophistication (remember arugula?) and his appreciation of the arts. The Trumpsters despised all of that, and not just because it was coming from an uppity black man, but simply because it had the whiff of intellectualism.

I will miss him so much.

[MBS]

3. Me, too.

Sigh.

[qwlauren35]

4. An accurate summary.

This whole idea of snuffing the NEA just busted me up with fury. What's so wrong with sponsoring the arts, or humanities?

This man and his plan are wrong on so many levels.

[JudyM]

5. This belongs on the Greatest page!! Beautifully composed and evocative.

[MBS]

6. I really liked it, too.

Many of us noticed these things in pieces (an Al Green song here, a cool concert there, tears at a Kennedy Honors concert, an ease with these cultural events that few other presidents could match), but this article brought it all together.

In the end, the article showed the wholeness of this man, and the many consequential dimensions of his presidency.