A couple of times a year, Barack Obama will show up online to tell the world what songs, movies, TV shows, and books he’s been enjoying. Obama’s playlists always seem conspicuously fake — as if concocted by a PR agency who’s trying to convey the message that Obama is a cool guy. In December, for instance, we were led to believe that Obama is sitting around listening to Bad Bunny, Ethel Cain, Plains, and the original version of Rema’s “Calm Down” without Selena Gomez. The prevailing theory is that these playlists have been assembled by communications-staff interns, or maybe by Obama’s daughters. But now Obama insists that it’s all him, baby.

Obama recently sat down for a half-hour interview with the comedian Hasan Minhaj, and Minhaj opened the conversation by asking whether Obama really reads the books, watches the movies, and listens to the songs. His answer: “I do! Listen. I am so glad that I have this opportunity. People, they believe the books and the movies, but the playlists, they somehow think — and this is mostly coming from young people like you — somehow, y’all think you invented rock ‘n’ roll. You invented hip-hop. And so the fact that my lists are, you know, pretty incredible — people seem to think, well, he must’ve had some 20-year-old intern who was figuring out this latest cut. No, man! It’s on my iPad right now.”

Minhaj asks Obama specifically whether Obama has Sir and Scribz Riley’s song “Life Is Good,” which was on Obama’s end-of-year playlist and which has 1.4 million views on YouTube, on his iPad. Obama’s response: “Yes, I do. Come on, man. Don’t play with me.” Minhaj then asks Obama to give the plotline for Abdul Razak Gurnah’s novel After Lives, and Obama says, “Dude, how much time do we have here? Come on, man.” I sympathize with that one. I never remember the plots of books that I’ve read, either.

Obama continues:

Look, here’s the bottom line of my playlists and my book lists and my movie lists. I am very scrupulous about making sure that this is stuff that I actually like. I will confess that there are times — on the playlists, on the music lists — where I will get suggestions. Because it’s not like I got time to be listening to music all the time. So typically, at the end of the year, what happens is folks will be like, “Man, you need to listen to this. This is good.” But unless I’m actually listening to it, watching it, reading it, I won’t put it on there.

So Obama knows all about the end-of-year list-making crunch. Every single working music critic can relate. Here’s Minhaj’s video:

If you’d prefer to ingest the playlist exchange in TikTok form, as I understand young people sometimes like to do, it’s below.

https://www.tiktok.com/@hasanminhaj/video/7247234626194935086?_r=1&_t=8dN0xDpu4ZH&social_sharing=v4

In related news, nothing matters. Current and former elected officials are simply trying to fill holes in their souls, hoping to get approval from whatever demographics they’ve targeted, and nothing will ever get better.