By Harry Nuttsaac
David W. Jacobsen‘s album was not at all what I expected going into it: when you hear nowadays an album is about politics, you expect a bunch of dumb jokes about Trump or Obama or something else heard on Saturday Night Live. In this way, POTUS was a pleasant surprise, giving hot takes from the perspective of many nobody presidents like Quincy Adams, Fatass Taft, and Chester A. Arthur (I’m a history major and I couldn’t even tell you shit about this last one). The messages behind these songs are typically about extremely specific events or periods in history, but the songs are well-enough crafted for anyone to like, even the high school drop-out who hated their history teacher Mr. Sima. Jacobsen is extremely talented as a composer and demonstrates that in this album, making songs in the style of 1980s pop, Hendrix-style rock, an unexpected organ piece, and the kinda music you’d expect to hear in a Clint Eastwood western. I hate to rip on this guy, so all I’ll say is that he constantly sounds like that one guy from your school, y’know, who sang really flat but wanted to be Billie Joe Armstrong so bad and just sang grungy pop songs, that guy. The guy sure knows how to write indirect songs about history that are actually pretty good at addressing how problematic people were (hey Lin-Manuel Miranda, next time you wanna write a play where slave-owners are the protagonists, maybe don’t). All in all, I got my history-major rocks off to this album and I’m gonna keep my eye out for Jacobsen, maybe he’ll be writing Miranda’s next play on how Hitler got kicked out of art school so we should feel bad.
The Medium 