According to leaked emails, Syria President Bashar al-Assad’s iTunes account includes the music of Chris Brown and Leona Lewis. See what Kim Jong-il, Osama bin Laden, and other tyrants have rocked out to.
Bashar al-Assad’s days may be numbered as Syrian president, but at least he’ll have plenty of music to listen to in exile. According to emails obtained by the Guardian, Assad has been spending quite a lot of time and money buying up music on iTunes. And boy, does he have eclectic taste: Assad’s purchases—which have spawned several Spotify playlists—include “Bizarre Love Triangle” by New Order, “Look at Me Now” by Chris Brown, and “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” by Right Said Fred. And showing his more sensitive side, Syria’s dictator also downloaded “Hurt” by Leona Lewis and LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It." He also once sent his wife Blake Shelton’s love song “God Gave Me You.”
You say you want a revolution? That’s going to require a soundtrack. And in 2008, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez released a CD of 18 of his favorite songs called “"Musica Para la Batalla" (or “Battle Music”). The artists on the album—which included Tierra Brava, Lilia Vera, and Grupo Ahora— all donated their songs to the cause, and Chavez himself even contributed a track, “The Ballad of Chivalry.” (It wasn’t Chavez’s first musical effort either: in 2007, he released an album of Venezuelan folk music called “Songs for All Time.”) Two years ago, Chavez also sang a few bars from a song about the current U.S. secretary of state: “"I'm not loved by Hillary Clinton ... and I don't love her either."
Ariana Cubillos / AP Photo
In the early 1960s, when Ferdinand Marcos was running for the Philippines presidency, his wife, Imelda, would sing at campaign stops. And as Marcos lay dying in exile, Imelda recorded an album—her first—of 12 of his favorite love songs, including “Feelings” and her signature Tagalog tune, “Dahil Sa Iyo” (“Because of You”). “This is all so new to me, but it's nice to be recognized for something positive, something beautiful, like music,'' she said when the limited-edition cassette was released in 1989. And when her husband heard the songs, she claimed, “'his eyes slowly opened and he gave me a smile and he even blew me a kiss.''
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For a man who clearly hated the United States, Osama bin Laden always loved Whitney Houston. According to one of bin Laden’s former mistresses, Miss Boof, “He told me that the singer Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and that she never wore her hair braided … He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar.” And bin Laden’s musical tastes went beyond Houston: “Other times he would become this devout party boy who wanted to hear Van Halen or some B-52s,” Miss Boof revealed. “To this day I hear the song ‘Rock Lobster’ in my sleep.”
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Here’s one link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein that the Bush administration could have pointed to: both men loved Whitney Houston. In 2002, when Saddam was running for re-election in Iraq, his campaign song was “I Will Always Love You” recorded in Arabic by Syrian pop star Mayyada Bselees. And last year, a man who claimed to be Saddam’s favorite musician—his name was withheld to protect his identity —applied for asylum in Australia, claiming that his life was in danger because of his association with the late Iraqi leader.
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He was known as “Dear Leader,” but Kim Jong-il really wanted to be the King. The late North Korean dictator was obsessed with Elvis—right down to his Vegas-era jumpsuits and bouffant hairstyle—and owned a huge collection of Presley records and movies. Even his funeral last December had a touch of Elvis—the car used to carry Kim’s casket was a Lincoln Continental, one of Presley’s favorite cars.
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Was it her piano playing? Or was Muammar Gaddafi just enamored of a powerful woman? Either way, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed in her memoir that she was creeped out by the Libyan dictator’s fascination with her. As Rice confessed to Jon Stewart, when she met Gaddafi in 2008, “Everything was going fine and then all of sudden he said: ‘I have this video for you.’ And I thought: Uh oh, what is this?” Gaddafi then showed her a video he had made of her with other world leaders set to a song he had written called “Black Flower in the White House.” And in 2009, one of Gaddafi’s sons, Mutassim, showed he had broad musical tastes when he threw an extravagant New Year’s Eve party in St. Barts, where Beyoncé and Nelly Furtado performed.
While Adolf Hitler publicly advocated “racially pure” music in his infamous book Mein Kampf, and was an avowed fan of Richard Wagner’s operas, a collection of his old gramophone records (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/07/secondworldwar.germany) was discovered in 2007 that contained “forbidden” music by several Jewish artists, inlcluding a Tchaikovsky concerto performed by the Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman and a record by the Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel. Of course, he didn’t live to see The Producers.
