Coldplay – "Paradise" (2011)

She dreamed of para-, para-, paradise

Para-, para-, paradise

Para-, para-, paradise

Every time she closed her eyes

It’s almost September – which means it’s almost time for yours truly to announce the newest members of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  (I see you shiver with an-ti-ci . . . PA-shun!)

I pick every recording that’s inducted into the various 2 or 3 lines halls of fame personally . . . and I stand behind my choices 110%.  The same can not be said for all the lists of favorite books, movies, and music that various politicians have issued in recent years, most of which are as phony as three-dollar bills.

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As Louis Chilton of The Independent has written,

When politicians profess to adore this or that cultural product, it should usually be taken with a pinch of salt. . . . Name-dropping a popular band, movie or TV series is an easy, cost-free way of barnacling oneself onto the hull of something with greater cultural cachet. 

Politicians want people to think that they’re cool – partly because they believe that voters are more likely to vote for cool candidates.

But politicians are mostly eager to appear cool because they are painfully aware that they aren’t actually cool – and probably never were cool.  (Unlike 2 or 3 lines!)  

Take Bill Clinton.  (Please!)  Clinton wasn’t cool in high school – he was a nerd who got his blue jeans in the “husky” section of the J.C. Penney’s boys department, and who played saxophone in the marching band.  He couldn’t have gotten a date with a cheerleader if his life depended on it – which probably explains why he chased women so obsessively after going into politics.

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In 2015, the White House issued a press release announcing that it had signed up for Spotify, and sharing President Barack Obama’s inaugural playlist.  (From what I can tell, this was the first time that a president or other prominent politician had published his or her musical favorites.)

In fact, that press release contained two Spotify playlists – one for daytime listening and one for the evening.  Click here to see both lists.

Obama continues to release not only music playlists but also reading lists every summer.  You can click here to get his 2024 recommendations, which were published in Medium.com just a couple of weeks ago.

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That 2015 White House press release goes to great lengths to persuade us that Obama personally drafted those Spotify playlists.  For example, it includes a photograph purporting to show him working on them along with his Chief Digital Officer in the Oval Office.

Of course, that photograph doesn’t show the former President’s face, or anything else that would definitively identify him – e.g., a copy of his Nigerian birth certificate:

(That could be anyone’s hand)

So it’s not surprising that there are a lot of skeptics out there who doubt that Obama was really responsible for those 2015 playlists and the ones that followed.  Louis Chilton of The Independent is one of those skeptics:

There is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding the authorship and agenda of Barack Obama’s yearly cultural recommendations lists.

Obama has waffled a little when asked whether the lists are truly genuine.  He told one interviewer that

I am very scrupulous about making sure this is stuff I actually like . . . . [But] I will confess that there are times on the playlists, on the music playlists, where I will get suggestions because it’s not like I got [sic] time to be listening to music all the time.

I suspected as much.  I have plenty of time to waste creating such lists and sharing them on 2 or 3 lines, but SURELY Obama has more important things to do.

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I have to say that Obama’s original 2015 Spotify playlist doesn’t ring quite true to me.  And even if he did construct that list personally instead of delegating the task to a press-office lackey, it looks like his choices were made in hopes of scoring points with the voters.

For example, exactly half of the songs on the list are by black artists, and half aren’t.  (Kind of like Obama himself.)  Does that mean that he truly likes black and white music equally, or does the 50-50 split more an indication that he is trying very hard not to be seen as favoring the music of one race over than of the other?

Did the former president include two songs by Hispanic musicians on his playlist because he is really a fan of those records, or was he just trying to make sure no one could criticize his playlist for being lacking in diversity?

Obama’s playlist has something for boomers and millenials alike: about half of his selections are from the 1960s and 1970s, while the other half are from the 2000s and 2010s.  (Remember – this list was created in 2015, so don’t expect to find anything from the last ten years.). 

It seems odd to me that the playlist includes a number of recordings from the previous two or three years, but almost nothing from his high school and college years.  After all, do you know any 55-year-old guys who listen mostly to music released in the last two or three years instead of the music that was popular their senior year in high school?  (Me neither.)

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Note that most of the records on the original Obama playlist that were recorded by black musicians are from the sixties and seventies, while it’s the records by white artists that are relatively new.  

That makes me think that while Obama himself might have chosen the records by Temptations, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, that someone younger and whiter picked the newer songs by white artists – e.g., Justin Timberlake, Coldplay, and Okkervil River – that made the list.  (The two older white artists on Obama’s list – Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones – are so famous that even an intern fresh out of college would have been familiar with them.)  

Does that indicate that 44th president chose some but not all of the songs on his playlist?  Perhaps.

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One of the recordings on Obama’s 2015 playlist is Coldplay’s 2011 release, “Paradise,” which was a #1 hit single in the UK but peaked at #15 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

I can’t believe anyone with half a brain would think “Paradise” is a good record because IT’S NOT!  Rather than think that Obama actually liked this piece of crap, I’m going to join the ranks of the skeptics who believe that he had little if anything to do with choosing what songs to include on his annual recommended lists.

My personal theory is that “Paradise” ended up on his 2015 playlist because a group of female White House interns who were assigned to come up with a draft playlist went out to a karaoke bar one night and saw a really cute guy get up and sing it.  

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Do you remember the brilliant but very odd seventies band Devo?  Devo believed that the human race was in a downward spiral of decadence fueled by moral decline, mechanization, and overconsumption – that we weren’t evolving, but de-evolving.  Click here to watch the “Paradise” music video, which conclusively demonstrates that Devo was on to something. 

Click here to buy “Paradise” from Amazon.