Barack Obama will make you cringe: Renegades: Born in the USA reviewed

Barack Obama wants the world to know how much he loves singing. In his new podcast, which takes the form of a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen, he’s rarely without a tune on his lips. ‘Further on up the road…/ you been laughing, pretty baby…’ A shower-singer, a bedroom warbler, an Air Force One air guitarist with an okay voice, the former president is proof that you really can be embarrassing without feeling an ounce of embarrassment.

Oh, to have seen his daughters’ faces when he broke into ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in front of Al Green. The sound team at the fundraiser in Harlem urged him to do it, he tells Springsteen, but no one’s buying it. We’re not five minutes into the third episode before he’s crooning ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ — songs he’s been practising, to the bemusement of his grandmother, since he was ten years old.

Obama may be a ‘shut up, Dad’ kind of a singer. As a talker, though? He’s as warm and lucid as ever. In the last month of his presidency or, as he calls it, ‘our presidency’, he and Michelle invited Springsteen to play a private gig to their staff at the White House. ‘Some of the best music… happened off camera during some of our parties,’ he winks. Springsteen’s set was so good that Barack suggested he take it to Broadway. After that success, the singer seems only too happy to be back at his side, using music as a way in to discussing race in America.

‘How did we get here?’ and ‘How can we find our way back to a more unifying American story?’ are the prevailing questions of the series. Between harrowing passages on shootings and slavery, Obama reflects on the differences between his own and his white schoolfriends’ early music tastes, and Springsteen on the racism directed towards his E Street Band saxophonist and close friend, Clarence Clemons.

In the second episode, Springsteen raised the question of whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of those who suffered the effects of discrimination.