The US presidential election is less than a fortnight away, and tensions are running high. But at least Barack Obama is having fun. The former president, no longer having to campaign for himself, has become the political equivalent of a chilled-out character actor gunning for Best Supporting. Earlier this month, he riffed on an audience member shouting out that Donald Trump wore diapers. (“I almost said that, but I decided I should not say it.”) In September, he noted Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” punctuating the line with a hand gesture that indicated he thought it might be connected with a slightly different size anxiety.
Now he’s taken up rapping. At a Democratic rally in Detroit last night, the city’s most famous son, Eminem, introduced Obama to the stage. “I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kinda way following Eminem,” Obama said. Then, he started rapping the intro to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. I say rapping—it was a bit like rapping, and a bit like preaching, in the tradition of the Black American churches in which he spent some of his formative political years.
By the time he got to “vomit on his sweater already” he was almost shouting; at “on the surface he looks calm and ready,” he was bobbing his knees to an imaginary beat, which he emphasised with short slashes of his outstretched right hand. At “drop bombs,” he cut off, giggling and looking slightly sheepish despite the roaring crowd’s approval. He stepped away from the podium, then stepped back, briefly doing a very vague approximation of the song’s guitar riff: “dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun…”. Then he made a joke of the whole thing. “I thought Eminem was gonna be performing—I was gonna jump out,” he said. “Love me some Eminem.”
It was the kind of kooky political stunt designed to make headlines. Whether he pulled it off probably depends almost entirely on your opinion of Barack Obama. But it certainly fit into the dominant vibe with which he’s become associated post-presidency: the cool dad. As we said in August, when Obama released his biannual culture picks—the foundation of his cool-dad branding campaign—this essentially means being cool, but not too cool. It’s kind of neat that a former president can do a half-passable rap, but it’s kind of cheesy too. It’s relatable. Will it win Harris the election? Probably not, but it injects the discourse with a fun Democrat-flavored energy—which, given that Trump is clearly running away with this race at least on a memeable-comedy basis, is undoubtedly valuable.
The fact it’s an Eminem rap makes sense too. Partly, because it’s the kind of rap that a middle-aged man is most likely to know. And if Obama, 63, has made the journey to semi-cool dad-ness from one direction—loosening himself from the stiffness of the presidency to have a bit of fun in his retirement—Eminem, 52, has made the journey from the opposite direction.
In the early years of his career, the abundance of slurs and prejudices in his lyrics made him politically toxic. Now that he’s older—and his audience is too—he’s naturally become less edgy and more palatable, despite his best efforts to continue to shock. In fact, he’s become more or less like all the other famous middle-aged musicians—Bruce Springsteen, for one—who campaign for the Democrats. By meeting memorably on stage, Obama and Eminem have shown that it takes all sorts to make a cool dad.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
