Arcade Fire appears on President Obama’s playlist

Grace Stanisci

So, the President is a hipster?

Yesterday on microblog site Tumblr, President Barack Obama released his "2012 Campaign Playlist" on Spotify, which features "picks by the campaign staff and a few of President Obama's favourites." Among the list, which includes Bruce Springsteen's "We Take Care Of Our Own" and No Doubt's "Different People," is Montréal band, Arcade Fire.

The President (and probably members of his public relations team) chose "We Used To Wait," from the band's Grammy winning album "The Suburbs," as part of their yearly musical selection for the campaign trail. The song contains lyrics like "Now our lives are changing fast/ Hope that something pure can last" and "It seems strange/ How we used to wait for letters to arrive/ But what's stranger still/Is how something so small can keep you alive." The President couldn't have chosen a better song to reach Americans in their quest for unity and searching for what really matters.

In 2010, the song was part of the online HTML5 campaign, produced by music video director and photographer Chris Milk, called "The Wilderness Downtown." Time Magazine described the project as, "The first HTML5 music video [that] lets viewers set their own childhood neighborhood as the backdrop to a teenager as he runs through the streets and dodges virtual trees. Viewers can interact with flocks of black birds and even write sprawling, branching messages to their childhood selves. It's the first video that truly harnesses the digital age — and one of the most personal you'll ever watch."

Obama has used popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and now Spotify, to relate to more Americans. His choice to connect with the public in this manner is something we haven't seen from any other public leader. Do you think he can reach voters on a more personal level through music?

Check out the full "The Wilderness Downtown" experience here, or watch a virtual walk-through below.

Arcade Fire - We Used To Wait (The Wilderness Downtown full experiment)

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