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Barrack Obama and Bruce Springsteen host Spotify-exclusive podcast Renegades: Born in the USA where the duo explore topics concerning their friendship and America.
What We Know:
- The former president and rockstar joined together to host a podcast exclusive to Spotify named Renegades: Born in the USA. The two friends spoke freely about “their lives, music, and enduring love of America – despite all its challenges.” The first two episodes cover the friendship between the two men as “unlikely” and race in America, respectively.
- Bruce Springsteen spoke about his experience with racial slurs said around him, “My friend asked ‘Bruce why did they say that?’ Rather than saying ‘they’re assholes’ I said I don’t know.” Obama added to this conversation with his own personal experience, “Listen, when I was in school, I had a friend. We played basketball together, and one time we got into a fight and he called me a coon.” He then nodded to his upbringing in Hawaii as a direct conflict with the slur. “It’s one of those things that — where he might not even know what a coon was — what he knew was, ‘I can hurt you by saying this,'” Obama continued to his friend, “And I remember I popped him in the face and broke his nose. And we were in the locker room.”
“I explained to him — I said, ‘Don’t you ever call me something like that’,” Obama recounted.
- The episode comes not a month later from Springsteen and Jeep’s controversial Super Bowl commercial called “The Middle”. In the ad, the rockstar advocates for “finding the middle” in such a divided time. The scene for the commercial is Kansas where Trump claimed victory over in the 2020 Presidential Election, thus muting their point of neutrality. The commercial echoes the Biden Harris “Unity over Division” motto, but seems to contradict itself with its placement, its diction, and its timing. Jeep briefly removed the commercial while Springsteen dealt with his DWI charges. The charges dropped and the commercial went back up on YouTube for no one’s benefit as Jeep is troubled with its Cherokee name as of late.
The Spotify podcast will release more episodes over the coming weeks, but for now, you can listen to the podcast here.
