Mayor Pete, a fan of Phish? Not really, it does not look like it is.

On Wednesday morning, Mayor Pete was the subject of an interesting report about Mayor Pete (for example, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who is facing a long election presidential election and enjoys a good press lately):

ABOUT BUTTIGIEG PHISH FISHOM … The mayor of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg, has a secret story on Twitter: he is a fan of Phish. In 2017, he thanked a fan on Twitter for having liked "Tweezer Reprise", the kind of deep cut that you would only know if you know. Lis Smith, Buttigieg's Senior Advisor, helped us to clarify the details. Buttigieg's favorite Phish album is "Picture of Nectar" and her favorite song is Tweezer. He went to a show around 2000 in the Indianapolis area.

You can see the tweet in question, in which Buttigieg responds to a user whose avatar refers to Phish's song "Tweezer". right here. The article Politico, and the tweet, have inspired some dynamic players online discussion about what a Phish fan nomination or presidency could mean, for example:

I would like to throw a little cold water on this thriving meme, without, however, showing any disrespect for the investigative work of Politico. Jake Sherman did tracking down details on Buttigieg and Phish. I mean by that it's important to note that even though it sounds like Mayor Pete is definitely a Phish fan in the normal term design fan, that is to say that he likes some of their songs and that he once went to one of the concerts of the group, it is not quite the same thing to be a Phish fan as cultural identity. Fans of Phish, as other hardcore Phish fans generally hear, are people who attend several shows a year, often consecutive nights in the same place, and listen to recordings of entire concerts, for pleasure. Sherman seems to be quite knowledgeable about Phish himselfso he probably knows it; I am only clarifying it for the sake of clarification for the general public.

As for the culture of this mayor, Mayor Pete is culturally incarnate, I would argue that it is another reminder that he is a characteristic member of the Catalan Generation – too young to really be Gen X, too old to be truly a millennium. The people of this age group who went to university did it at the time of file sharing, when one could get almost any song for free (illegally), but that's it. you still had to keep it on your computer to hear it. Many people ended up with one or two songs chosen at random by a ton of different bands. (There's still a pirated copy of Tonic's "If You Could Only See" on a hard drive somewhere in my apartment.) Some of those random songs that everyone apparently has had are Phishing songs, including "Bouncing Around the Room". I would not be surprised by the above description if, in 2000, Mayor Pete had "Bouncing Around the Room" and "Tweezer" or "Tweezer Reprise" on the hard drive of his comically sized Inspiron desktop, and his buds were like, Hey dude, hey Pete, you wanna come Deer Creek with us?he was like, Of course, man, it would be off the hook.

For the record, if Phish's summer tour in 2020 was to take place on the same dates and at the same location as its summer tour of 2019, which would not be surprising, the group's performances at Alpine Valley, in Wisconsin, could very well ride the Milwaukee National Democratic Convention, 40 miles away. Phish for the president!