This happened yesterday during my morning TikTok sojourn, when I spotted not one, but two short videos of Vice President Harris emerging, bag in hand, from a record store. Relatable content alert!
A clip from February captures her exiting Della Soul Records — a Black woman-owned record store in Grand Rapids, Mich. — toting a newly purchased Funko Pop figure of Parliament-Funkadelic honcho George Clinton as well as an undisclosed Miles Davis album.
“Anybody know who Bootsy Collins is?” she asked a throng of reporters who remained silent. “Okay, so there’s some education that needs to be done. I can see that.”
Another clip, from May 2023, finds Harris in D.C., leaving Home Rule Records with an armful of vinyl in a paper bag. Although I already knew that Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff run a jazz household (his children from his first marriage, Ella and Cole, are respectively named after Fitzgerald and John Coltrane), it hits different seeing the veep out and actively crate-digging — to me, one of the most human things a person can do.
And eyeing her purchases triggered an instinctual interpersonal curiosity, a good-natured nosiness that should be familiar to any “music person.” Among her selections: Charles Mingus’s orchestrally enhanced 1972 album, “Let My Children Hear Music”; Roy Ayers’s 1976 studio album, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” (“one of my favorite albums of all time”); and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s 1959 recording of “Porgy & Bess.” An objectively solid haul.
In a pinch, there’s perhaps no better, nor finer, way to silently judge someone than by flipping through their record collection. Is it fair? No. But neither is politics, baby.
The way things used to work, if you found yourself in a relative stranger’s home for … whatever reason, you’d wait for them to go to the kitchen to fetch you some water, and you’d seize the opportunity to thumb through their collection for telling titles, deep cuts and red flags.
This time-tested technique for divining the humanity of others has largely been lost to our digitalized culture, where music seems to collect us more than we collect it, and where I’m told that to furtively rifle through someone’s phone would be not just wrong, but also “insane of you.”
But even if you did go through playlists, you don’t really get the same resolution of character sketch from someone’s streaming library as you might from their record shelves. Last week, reporters discovered what appear to be seven public Spotify playlists belonging to Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, and a’clicking did I go.
Going by their titles alone, the playlists seem to convey more about Vance’s daily activities than his inner self: “Making Dinner,” “Running #1,” “Rockabye Baby!”
And a dig through their contents — featuring hits by Justin Bieber, Of Monsters and Men, Florence + the Machine, and Backstreet Boys — only reveals that dinnertime at the Vance household shares a vibe with the average Target.
Granted, glimpses like these into the musical tastes of politicians are of limited use. For years, former president Barack Obama has posted annual lists of his favorite tracks of the year, sporting an inscrutably beige assortment of artists and styles — Zach Bryan, Big Thief, Jon Batiste and beyond — seemingly designed to please everyone (and impress his daughters).
In books, former president Donald Trump has opined on his fondness for artists such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett (a former tenant of Trump’s), and (especially) Elton John. In 2004’s “Think Like a Billionaire,” he mentions Rachmaninoff’s concertos and the strangely calming effects of Toots and the Maytals.
Then again, the pugilistic Trump of today seems most recognizable in an anecdote from his boyhood, recounted in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal”: “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled.”
(Brace yourselves: This may have been a fib.)
A friend recently told me that the late, great rock producer Steve Albini once warned, “Don’t trust anyone who isn’t a Slayer fan.” It’s a sentiment I endorse in particular, but also in a more general, democratic sense: Music people know music people. We spot each other in the checkout lines and across airports. We nod at each other in traffic. We communicate through T-shirts and tattoos. We are a nation among ourselves.
And although one’s individual tastes can only tell us so much, the presence of those tastes can at least assure us that a living, breathing person exists somewhere behind the big smile and the media training.
None of this amounts to instant trust in a potential president, but there’s a promising note to Harris’s reentry into the current political mix: She’s a listener.
