Nationalist themes co-opt Iraqi music, again
Saddam Hussein took over Iraq’s cultural institutions to produce war propaganda songs, and a similar pattern is appearing today.
When doing a critique of a society, music and songs can reveal a lot about the features of a particular period of time in that society.
Based on this concept, it seems that in Iraq, particularly since the former regime of Saddam Hussein took over the cultural and artistic institutions and used them for war propaganda and internal and external incitement, the quality of music and songs has declined from being a social product that expresses natural human feelings to merely a government-affiliated sector.
During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), song production was used, with rare exceptions, for a specific purpose: to fight the propaganda war. During the war, Saddam’s elder son Uday controlled song production via Al-Shabab radio and TV, which produced low-quality music and songs. The Iraqi music industry was put in a hole from which it could not get out, especially because state institutions cannot, due to their poor structure on the one hand and the bad security situation on the other, produce a different culture that promotes human values rather than propaganda, incitement and poor taste.
In Iraq, music production is technically poor, with rare exceptions by prominent singers and musicians who mostly work independantly out of the country. Some of them are a pan-Arab phenomena such as singer and composer Kazem al-Saher, along with dozens of composers and musicians in the Iraqi diaspora.
