Gordon Brown, Robert Mugabe, Osama’s music playlists revealed
By ANIWednesday, January 20, 2010
LONDON - The dictators and politicians of today have their own music playlists, which may be their personal favourites but have been often used by them to attract the youth.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Arctic Monkeys are his morning favourite, while Conservative leader David Cameron enjoys listening to The Killers.
Tony Blair once said before schoolchildren that he liked rockers The Darkness.
And even dictators have used music to show their human face to their populace.
Zimbabwean premier Robert Mugabe is believed to have complained when he heard Bob Marley was to croon at Zimbabwe’s independence festivities in 1980, saying he would rather have “the perennially wholesome Cliff Richard”, reports the Telegraph.
Colonel Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya, has been a devout fan of Lionel Richie. It is said Gaddafi asked Richie for an autograph after he performed at the 2006 “Concert for Peace” in Libya, to mark the 20th anniversary of a US attack on Tripoli in which Gaddafi’s adopted daughter, Hanna, was killed.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died while he was being tried for 66 counts of genocide and other crimes, was a great fan of Frank Sinatra and often listened to the singer’s classic “My Way” in his prison cell.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is reportedly an ardent follower of Eric Clapton’s music and even invited the musician to perform in the country last year.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reputedly fond of listening to Chris de Burgh and the Irish singer would have become the first Western artist to perform in Iran after 1979 if his gig wouldn’t have been cancelled due to the fighting that started following the elections.
The world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, has a passion for Whitney Houston, revealed Sudanese poet Kola Boof, who claims to have been in the captivity of the al-Qaeda leader as a sex slave in 1996.
According to her Osama, a “devout party boy”, wanted to meet Houston, gift her a home in Sudan and kill Bobby Brown, her then-husband. (ANI)
