Rolling Stone recently published an interview with President Barack Obama in which he spoke about what music he's currently listening to and it elicited a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from Thomas Chatterton Williams where he chastises the president's endorsement of hip hop as an act against Black America. Of course. Honing in on the music of Lil Wayne and the life story of Jay-Z, he criticizes Obama for promoting violence, among other things, as attempting to appear "relatable and cool to a generation of Americans under the sway of hip-hop culture."
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For example, Miles Davis was a notorious misogynist. In addition to being a musical virtuoso who pushed modern jazz to its limits he was also a heroin addict and a pimp. Why not parade those facts out to support the argument as well? It seems as though actively engaging in sex trade ranks up pretty high up on a scale of injustices against The Community, no? Lil Wayne's lyrics "look, ma, I'm trying to make a porno starring us well not just us, a couple foreign sluts" can be considered from a whole different perspective when considered in relation Bitches Brew. Get it? Bitches.
In an article about George W. Bush's iPod, a friend and colleague said that "no one should psychoanalyze the song selection. It's music to get over the next hill." And while no one is psychoanalyzing Obama's playlist here, perhaps Obama's shouldn't be viewed as an opportunity to espouse the same arguments against hip hop that are always made about hip hop or to make him seem like he is a proponent of systemic problems that affect black communities because he has some Jay-Z MP3s. Maybe, just maybe, these songs are just "music to get over the next hill."
