Barack Obama Singing ‘Hotline Bling’ Is Probably The Best Presidential Mash-Up Dub To Date

You’ve likely never heard of UT Knoxville scholar Fadi Saleh, but you’ve almost certainly come across the creations of his alter ego, BaracksDubs. For three years now, Saleh has been exhaustively stitching the words of US President Barack Obama into popular songs; at last count he has almost 30 videos of Obama ‘singing’ everything from ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson to the Pokemon theme song.

His videos typically rack up millions of views apiece — which you’d hope, because each one must take months of finicky, eye-glazing, painstaking work. And the quality never flags: if Saleh has a lot of time on his hands, he also has a pretty good sense of comic timing. Watching the President of the United States say the words to Pitbull’s ‘Timber’ could get tiresome after a while, but he keeps pulling it off.

Which brings us to his latest one, a Presidential reworking of Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’. There’s probably an undergraduate Psychology thesis in here somewhere, but watching the sitting President of the United States ask his girl why she’s been wearing less and going out more speaks to me in ways I don’t fully understand.