Charli XCX, Bad Bunny, Artemas, Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion and, of course, Beyoncé have all made it onto Barack Obama’s summer playlist this year: “With summer coming to a close, I wanted to share some songs I’ve been listening to lately. And it wouldn’t be my playlist if it didn’t include an eclectic mix. I hope you find something new to listen to,” the 44th US president wrote. on their various social media accounts.
The former president has been a cultural influencer since he entered the White House. From the beginning of his presidency in 2009, he presented himself as an avid consumer of popular culture, in a strategy that sought to bring him closer to his voters. In other words, Obama talked about what any other American would talk about on Monday morning when they got to the office: the series of the moment, the book of the year or the song that his daughters can’t stop listening to. As journalist Emily St. James wrote in a profile about him published in the American media Vox: “Whereas Ronald Reagan regularly hosted film screenings at the White House, generating waves of publicity (something fitting for a former movie actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild), Obama seemed to understand that his cultural moment coincided with a cultural moment in hip hop and prestige television, and adjusted his viewing patterns and listings accordingly.
Every summer since 2015, he has shared a list of songs and books that stands out for its variety and always includes a surprise. For example, it was a trend in Spain when in 2022 he included the theme Saoko by Rosalía, an artist who was already included in her 2019 list with her song With height. This year, as always, it combines current themes (Charli XCX could not be missing, the protagonist of this summer with her album Brat), along with classics like The Supremes, The Rolling Stones, Sting and Bob Dylan. His two daughters have a hand in this mix of the new and the more traditional, since as Obama himself acknowledged when questioned on the subject: “I get references from my daughters, which prevents me from getting stuck in the eighties.”
Obama has always shown great mastery of social media. He was the first US president to use Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat, although this was merely a coincidence of time, as he entered the White House in 2009, when social media was in full development and later boom. But few control the narrative in the digital world like he does. The choice of his songs and books of the summer is a good example and it is easy to intuit in these lists winks to political and cultural movements to which the former Democratic president wants to give relevance.
This is best seen in his choice of books. The first name he includes on his list this summer is that of the American writer Percival Everett, who has been writing satires about the racism he himself has suffered for 40 years and who published it in 2024. Jamesa reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, but told from the perspective of Huckleberry’s travel friend Jim, who is a runaway black slave. Within the fiction, Obama includes author Adelle Waldman and her story Help Wanted on job insecurity. Author Liz Moore sneaks in again, whose novel The long river of soulsa thriller Set in a Philadelphia neighborhood shaken by the opioid crisis, it was already included among her favorites of 2019, and this year she repeats with her latest novel, The god of the forests. More female authors than male authors on this list, which also mentions Rita Bullwinkel, Lisa Ko and Kaliane Bradley.
Among non-fiction, the former president includes the essay Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by journalist Jonathan Blitzer, which has already been chosen as one of the best books of the year by The New York TimesIn this essay, Blitzer investigates decades of flawed policies and corruption that have fueled the crisis of Central American migrants seeking safety in the United States, in what appears to be a response to the migration policies of Donald Trump, former president and again a Republican candidate in the presidential elections in early November. It also includes an essay on the rise of tension and conspiracy theories in his country and another, signed by Richard Reeves, on new masculinities.
