Lowkey, a 24-year-old British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent, in an interview on RT News, describes “Obamanation” by saying:

It was an examination of America’s role in the world. The main purpose of the song was to draw the American people’s attention to the way in which they are perceived by the rest of the world. Because I think they very much live in a bubble — I’m somebody that has travelled the United States quite thoroughly, and the media in the United States, by and large, does not actually show what is really going on and people have genuine grievances with United States foreign policy. Whether a person thinks those military bases should exist or not [earlier in the interview, Lowkey referred to the 1,000 US military bases located around the world], I think it would be very hard to disagree that those military bases represent the building of empire and the expansion of empire. And I am not anti-American, I am anti-empire.