Revelations about the contents of George W Bush's iPod were, one suspects, a fairly carefully managed media exercise — notwithstanding the disclaimers urging people not to psychoanalyse them. But if you look at the way people have responded to alleged new discoveries of Adolf Hitler's private record collection, you get a very clear idea of how impossible it is to resist such analysis.
One of the things that makes Hitler's 'playlist' so salient is precisely that it wasn't intended to be shared. If it had been published while he was alive, the inclusion of Jewish or Russian performers would have undermined his public pronouncements that denigrated the talents of those ethnic groups. Now the collection appears as a 'text', subject to interpretation both in terms of Hitler's hypocrisy and in terms of his preparedness for compromise in the private sphere and acknowledgement that the views he espoused in public were not as clear-cut as he pretended. He is either even more or slightly less of a monster than we thought before. (To be clear: I am not suggesting that either option mitigates the terrible crimes that Hitler orchestrated or the man himself. Arguably, exposing the traits that he shared with 'normal' humans makes the lessons for the rest of us all the more grave.)
Another thing that makes analysing playlists so irresistible is precisely their lack of context and their openness to different interpretations. As Steven Isserlis says of Hitler's collection, it's a puzzle. A playlist is both a projection from someone's personality and something you can project personality onto. If we had access to Hitler's blog (someone's bound to say they've found it sooner or later!) describing his record purchases and what they meant to him, his playlist might not be such a perplexing and portentous artefact.
That may be why, to stick with the anti-Nazi theme, it can be a commonplace for critics (such as Mark Cousins) to praise the films of Leni Riefenstahl in detailed terms of aesthetics without being construed as Nazi apologists. But when Bryan Ferry does the same in more general and passing terms, he gets vilified. If you have any dodgy selections in the nether regions of your iPod, either make sure you keep them secret forever or write a detailed and convincing explanation of why you have them into the metadata.
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