Pop Goes Obama
One of the most enjoyable side effects of the Obama campaign, for me, was the impact that it had on pop culture. Suddenly politics was mixing with art and music and culture in a way that I had never seen in my lifetime. The endlessly savvy Obama campaign staff of course allowed this to happen, and in a lot of ways silently encouraged it.
I remember at one point, I wanted to tweak the avatar that I use on Twitter, and I needed a copy of the round Obama logo. My first thought was a Google Image Search, which would have immediately given me what I was looking for. Before I went that route though, I checked Obama’s official website. I remembered there being a “Media” section with computer desktop images, etc. I figured there may be something that I could use. A few clicks into the site and not only had I found the images that I was looking for, but I found an entire “Obama image suite”—a zip file containing multiple versions of the logo, all in EPS format. With its ability to be endlessly manipulated, publicly releasing a logo as an EPS file struck me as being the same as a hip-hop artist releasing an a cappella, or instrumental, version of their album—it opens the doors to it being endlessly remixed and repurposed. This is what happened time and time again in billboards, street art, cupcakes and even Barack O’ Lanterns. These guys simply got it.
The Summer and Fall of 2008 was an enormously exciting time. Everywhere you looked there seemed to be references to the campaign and to Obama. There was a feeling in the air that was hard to escape. One of the things that I love most about living in Boston is that come late September and early October, when the Red Sox are doing well and making a run, there is a feeling in the air; an unspoken excitement wherever you turn. It seems like every person you pass on the street is thinking the same thing. It’s truly one of my favorite things about Boston.
This same sense, with very few exceptions, of everyone being in it together for the same cause is one of my lasting memories of the Presidential campaign of 2008. Apart from the political changes that people were longing for, and the sense of Hope and optimism that had been missing, I ate up the cultural impact that the Obama juggernaut has on everything that circled around it. I was lucky to spend a week in New York City in late October, and the feeling and momentum was as strong there as anything I had ever seen, both emotionally and visually. I took photos of some of the things I saw wherever I went; on the sides of buildings, from bootleg street vendors, in the doorways of small businesses. It felt like you couldn’t escape it, and I was glad to be in the middle.
I also had the chance to stop by an event being thrown by Jailbreak Toys. I had picked up one of their vinyl Obama action figures earlier, and he proudly sat right next to my computer. Jailbreak had artists design and decorate the Obama vinyl toys they were producing, and auctioned them off as a benefit. The event was packed to the gills, and it was hard to snap photos, but I was able to capture most of them. Some were funny, and some were serious, but it was impossible to deny the range of emotions that people were feeling in those weeks leading up to the election.
One of my favorite passages in American literature has always been this from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened … There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning … And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave … So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back
I was probably fifeteen years old when I first read Fear and Loathing, and that passage has bounced around in my head for the better part of my life—the idea of the high-water mark, of the wave that finally rolled back. I always associated it with my Mother’s generation, which was HST’s generation. The sense of profound sadness and disappointment that is expressed in that passage is something that I connected with that era, but hadn’t seen in mine.
As the momentum built in the Fall with the Obama campaign, as the country rode the Obama wave if you will, I found myself thinking of that passage constantly. I didn’t want the wave to break and roll back. I didn’t want to look at 4 November and have it be my generation’s high water mark.
Tomorrow Barack Obama will be sworn in as the President of The United States, and we’re still riding the wave.
