George Bush has an iPod, dubbed “iPod One” by White House wags. It was a gift from his daughters, who apparently didn’t have enough time in their busy social schedule to download tunes into it. That task fell to 58-year-old Blake Gottesman, Bush’s personal aide. The songs and albums he bought from the iTunes music store (only 250 loaded into the player’s 10,000 capacity) are heavy on country and feature no Arcade Fire or Scissor Sisters. While the president is tooling around his Texas ranch on his mountain bike, he listens to John Fogerty, Van Morrison, The Knack, George Jones, Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, and, um, oh we just lost interest. . . . What’s interesting is what he’s not listening to. Caitlin Moran, writing in the London Times says, “No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.” (CNN.com)
[Rolling Stone’s Joe] Levy agreed, telling the New York Times: “What we’re talking about is a lot of great artists from the ’60s and ’70s and more modern artists who sound like great artists from the ’60s and ’70s. This is basically boomer rock ‘n’ roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It’s safe, it’s reliable, it’s loving. What I mean to say is, it’s feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it’s not.”