The soundtrack of tyranny: What music did history’s dictators listen to?
One peek at a dictator’s private playlists can spark a spectacular demystification, as well as a worrying humanising.
The Guardian revealed that former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had used an iTunes account registered in New York to bypass sanctions to purchase tunes from Chris Brown, Busta Rhymes, New Order, and, most surprisingly, Right Said Fred’s ‘Don’t Talk Just Kiss’ and EDM duo LMFAO’s ‘Sexy and I Know It’. It’s a weird slice of absurdity that struggles to marry against his highly personalised and brutal regime rule throughout the country’s civil war.
Suddenly, the emblems of implacable, immovable political rule are brought crashing back down to earth. It’s hard to loftily dwell in an elevated cult of personality when the people catch wind that their totalitarian commander taps along to a silly Hot 100 chart topper like the rest of the world’s mortals. It can also puncture state ideologies. Any ruling regime’s gonna have a hard time rehabilitating itself if discovered to enjoy a personal selection of Western pop at odds with the official line against imperial influence.
Then, there’s the fraught pangs of empathy. A tiny detail like a wistful song enjoyed since childhood, or a sentimental number on repeat while imprisoned during their political downfall, can flash an uneasy vulnerability behind the tyrant, a distinct marker that such devastation and abuses of power meted out to a nation are always by the iron hand of a leader, all too human.
Whether confirming the bizarrity of an eccentric regime, exposing the hypocrasies of a brutal elite, or soundtracking the final moments of a despot’s political reckoning, we take a look at the strange history of dictators and their private pop fancies.
What music did history’s dictators listen to?
Kim Jong Un
Like father, like son, leading North Korea’s hermetic state has never impeded an obsessive love of the West’s pop culture. ‘Eternal Leader’ Kim Jong-il was well known as an avid movie buff, quietly shifting aside the Juche clampdown on the outside “vicious cancer” to amass a private collection of over 20,000 film reels and VHS tapes.
Son and Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, however, harbours a deep love for pop music. From rock and roll to synthpop, former classmates at his two Swiss private boarding schools claimed the future leader would spin Liam Lynch’s ‘United States of Whatever’ to boost the basketball team’s morale, enjoyed a good Bond theme, and owned an impressive library of original Kraftwerk pressings. His favourite song, allegedly, was German pop duo Modern Talking’s 1986 hit ‘Brother Louie’, a single he obsessed over, as confirmed by his fellow pupils at Liebefeld-Steinhölzli school.
Colonel Gaddafi
Despite his anti-Western rhetoric, Muammar Gaddafi allegedly held a private admiration for old R&B and soul hits. He was no stranger to contemporary music, eyeing up disco as a vehicle for his cult of personality. Gaddafi funded several easy funk records from the 1970s, scoring his ‘Third International Theory’ around the world.
He was back in the West’s good books in 2006, having obliged international inspectors to Libya to oversee his WMD programme disbandment. Amid the boon in international standing, the regime organised the stellar Hana Festival for Peace show and invited old Commodores frontman Lionel Richie as the starring headliner. While the Motown stalwart was condemned by human rights groups, the Gaddafi family were reportedly delighted to see ‘All Night Long’ and ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ live, and the Colonel even personally requested an autograph after the festival.
Robert Mugabe
The cultural clashes between the Pan-African militias who had fought for liberation from colonial Rhodesia and the ZANLA forces’ figurehead, Robert Mugabe, were starkly revealed when commencing independence celebrations for the newly formed Zimbabwe in 1980. The ZANU-PF party organisers were keen to book Bob Marley, not long after having released his pro-liberation ‘Zimbabwe’ anthem in support.
Mugabe was unimpressed, however. Taking offence to the Wailers band’s Rastafari dreadlocks and ‘crude’ open smoking of marijuana, the conservative prime minister instead wanted the wholly unrevolutionary Cliff Richard to play Harare’s Rufaro Stadium. The party vetoed his baffling headliner choice, and Marely duly played the free show amid a fog of tear gas when the stadium’s fences were broken by the swelling audience. Allegedly, Marely confided to his band his spotting of the writing on the wall, there and then; Mugabe’s rule was quickly shaped by human rights abuses and corruption till his ousting in 2017.
Slobodan Milošević
An ugly record finally caught up with the Serb nationalist in 2001. The first sitting head of state to ever face trial by the former Yugoslavia’s international tribunal, charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and orchestrating ethnic cleansing placed Slobodan Milošević firmly in the cells of the Hague during his landmark prosecution, dying before the trial’s conclusion in 2006.
Politka director and pro-regime journalist Hadži Dragan Antić had divulged Milošević’s private love of Frank Sinatra’s swing hits and, at odds with his strongman leadership style, a sentimental attachment to old Disney songs. Allegedly developing a liking for ‘Ol’ Bue Eyes’ when sent to New York for financial business as head of Beobanka in the 1970s, it was reported that Milošević frequently listened to Sinatra’s 1969 My Way album on a CD player while imprisoned in the UN’s detention unit.
Saddam Hussein
It took Saddam Hussein’s military captivity to finally glean who the Iraqi dictator was as a human being: he wasn’t always America’s arch-villain. Uncle Sam turned a blind eye to his brutal, despotic rule while he fought the Iranian forces across the 1980s, but the Kuwait invasion and later post-9/11 regime changes saw Hussein’s rule finally topple in 2003 amid the devastation of the Iraq War.
According to Will Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid, US military guards in the Al-Faw Palace complex noticed Hussein’s unabashed love for R&B star Mary J Blige, reportedly stopping his radio tuning whenever her hits were played while awaiting trial. Specific songs were never highlighted, but it’s quite likely that 2001’s ‘Family Affair’ global smash was the tune the Iraqi war criminal whiled the hours away to, along with his taste for muffins and riding his exercise bike dubbed ‘Pony’.
