Obama, for his part, fares better in his Rolling Stone interview. He discusses (read: justifies) his musical tastes at length, rooting them in his life story (re: the “Stevie Wonder geek”iness: “When I was just at that point when you start getting involved with music, Stevie had that run with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness’s First Finale, and Innervisions, and then Songs in the Key of Life. Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve ever seen”)—and, even more interestingly, in his connection to mass culture:

I know Jay-Z. I know Ludacris. I know Russell Simmons. I know a bunch of these guys. They are great talents and great businessmen, which is something that doesn’t get emphasized enough. It would be nice if I could have my daughters listen to their music without me worrying that they were getting bad images of themselves.

But Obama doesn’t need the pop-culture cred that Kerry (and Gore and even Bush the Younger) so desperately did. Obama is a cool guy in his own right (Donatella Versace doesn’t design an entire line of clothing for just anyone); he’s a pop-culture phenomenon unto himself. He doesn’t need to pander to the “what’s on your iPod” tradition—and he certainly doesn’t need to pander to the “yeah, the Rolling Stones really speak to me” brand of catch-all triteness that other pols have engaged in.

He doesn’t need, in other words, to attract through embellishment, or, as e-Cyrano might say, to “rebrand and market” himself in order to charm voters into giving him a shot. Obama can actually—dating profile scandal!—be honest about who he is. Yet what music does he list in his Rolling Stone profile? Why, the Stones! And Bruce Springsteen! And Yo-Yo Ma! Et cetera. The music Obama lists in the interview might have been hand-picked for him by e-Cyrano himself. One wonders: if Obama were a fan of Cat Stevens—whether pre- or post- the Yusuf Islam name-change—would he come out and say that?

Regardless. If music be the food of love (between candidates and their constituencies), one wonders why, exactly, that’s so. There’s a line between humanizing candidates and normalizing them, after all; it’s understandable to want to relate to our politicians, but it’s unrealistic to expect that that relation will be one of equals. Why do we care so much what our candidates are listening to—and why, more to the point, do we want to assume that they’re listening to the same stuff we are? Why are we so desperate to believe that our candidates are just like us?

The Wenner interview makes a telling example in that respect. The piece, even if it’s a tad fawning (Wenner is a professed Obamaphile, and Rolling Stone itself endorsed the senator back in March), is a good read, both substantial and entertaining. And Obama’s musical picks are very much a side note, if you will, in the overall interview—over the course of which the candidate discusses his plan for lowering carbon emissions, his plan for curbing lobbyists’ power over politics, his personal transformation (“the older I get, the less important feeding my vanity becomes”), and the transformation he hopes to bring about for the country (“I want us to rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics”). When it comes to the question of the kind of leader Obama will make if elected, the Q&A is revealing in its own right.

And yet the attention it’s received—and, for a magazine story, it’s already received a lot of it—has been distilled, in the mainstream press, to The Huge, Breaking News that is Obama’s iPod playlist. We were greeted, yesterday, with the following headlines:

- Rock, Pop, Classical—Music to Obama’s Ears (Washington Post)
- Obama talks about music tastes (Dallas Morning News)
- What’s on Obama’s iPod? (Arizona Republic)
- The tunes that get Obama moving and grooving (The Globe and Mail)
- Obama’s iPod choices underwhelm (Houston Chronicle)
- Baracking out: Candidate’s playlist ranges from Jay-Z to Dylan to Yo-Yo Ma—‘I have pretty eclectic tastes’ (Chicago Sun-Times)
- Barack Obama has a serious iPod (Chicago Tribune’s blog)
- What is on Barack Obama’s iPod? (U.K. Telegraph)
- Obama’s iPod: everything but Garth Brooks (U.K. Guardian)

And here’s the lede for the NYT’s June 24 blog post on the Rolling Stone interview:

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine to be published on Wednesday, Mr. Obama revealed that his iPod was full of dozens of selections from, top to bottom, Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, Jay-Z and Yo-Yo Ma. (Joining perhaps every other Democratic politician alive, he also confessed a deep love for Bruce Springsteen.)

You could argue that there’s an element of substance hidden deep within all these sedimentary layers of musical frivolity; a president’s cultural attitudes can certainly have a trickle-down and ripple-out effect on his or her moment in the mass culture. (See “Clinton, Bill,” who all but introduced Maya Angelou to the American public when she read her poetry at his 1992 inauguration; or, of course, “Kennedy, John,” who made cultural advancement a focal point of his administration: “I am determined that we begin to grow again, and that there will be an American renaissance in which imagination, daring and the creative arts point the way.”)

But this isn’t about culture so much as acculturation. Why, after all, do we still seem to have so much invested in the everydayness of our presidential aspirants—why do we expect candidates to force themselves, like the elitist stepsister meeting Cinderella’s slipper, into a mold that fundamentally doesn’t fit them? Politicians are simply not average. And they shouldn’t have to “rebrand and market” their personalities, e-Cyrano-style, in order to lure us into agreeing to a date. We’re not signing up for dinner and a movie, after all, or even a casual drink. (The fallacy of the “who’d you rather have a beer with” logic of leader-selecting is obvious. It shouldn’t have taken a failed presidency to make us realize that.)