From Decline and Fall, a blog by an American living in Iraq comes this story about music preferences in Iraq...
What do they listen to? Let's just say that there's very little sense of "cool" or "trendy" in their listening habits. One can't expect people who have spent their lives living under Saddam's thumb to have any real sense of hipster do's and don't's, but even those who have lived in America for a while and have come back here to work as linguists can almost be relied upon to be fans of Celine Dion. It's actually gotten to the point where as soon as a discussion of music begins, I say to the nearest Arab, "You like Celine Dion, don't you?" They always reply in the affirmative.
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Then I decided to try an instrumental selection: one of J.S. Bach's Violin Concertos, played by Hilary Hahn. He had never heard anything like it before. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. "This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined," I heard myself say. But the look on his face as he struggled to turn the volume up on that exquisite music made it all better….
It's worth reading the whole thing. Scroll down a bit on the link to get to the relevant entry.
