The year 2025 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq – and the twentieth anniversary of President George W. Bush’s admission that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was itself based on flawed intelligence. According to Brown University’s “Costs of War” project, that war took the lives of nearly 4,600 U.S. military personnel, 3,600 U.S. contractors, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (most of them civilians).
Wars never end neatly, however. “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” novelist and essayist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written. If this is true – as I believe it is – much depends on the stories that we tell about the U.S. war in Iraq, including stories written in sound. What follows are seven efforts to document, interpret, or commemorate the war through music. By turns brash, elegant, and troubling, these works can influence how people remember the conflict in Iraq today.
The tracks in the playlist below span genres from American hip hop to classical to Iraqi heavy metal. They are the work of soldiers and civilians with direct experience in the conflict as well as artists seeking to capture the emotions, memories, and dreams of those impacted by the war. One track – “Stress Position” – uses music and performance to simulate the practice of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or what is more commonly called torture.
Notes on each track appear below. For more on music and war, see my book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), and the book’s audiovisual companion.
- “I Ride” – 4th25 (pronounced “fourth quarter”) was a hip hop group made up of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq, where they recorded an entire album, Live from Iraq, about their experiences. The 15 tracks on this 2005 album span a range of feelings, from the pain of leaving loved ones at home, to fears of infidelity, to the condemnation of civilians back in the United States who took “freedom” for granted. The chilling cut featured in this playlist, “I Ride,” gives a clear sense of the deep strain under which soldiers served and the circumstances under which body counts mounted: “This is for them soldiers that not gonna make it home…/ Shoot ’em dead in y’all memory…/ We don’t get much sleep / When we on the blocks / Exchanging bullets for peace / And once we start pulling these triggers / We don’t stop ’til the whole block leaks / Til there’s not a live body in the streets.”
- “Soldiering On” is the opening song from singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier’s 2018 Grammy-nominated album Rifles & Rosary Beads, composed of songs she wrote with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through a program called SongwritingWith:Soldiers. This song documents the pressure that soldiers (and veterans) felt not to express their emotions.
- “Shush” comes from Holding It Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, a 2013 experimental album by pianist and composer Vijay Iyer and poet and emcee Mike Ladd based on interviews with veterans of color about their dreams during and after their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The vocals on this track are by Maurice Decaul, a poet who served in the Marines in 2003.
- “Post Election News” – In 2006, a New Orleans pianist named William A. Thompson IV (a.k.a. WATIV) released Baghdad Music Journal, a collection of experimental compositions evoking the densely layered soundscapes of Iraq, where he served in the National Guard in 2004-2005. In the liner notes to the album, he writes about this track: “The title of this piece is self-explanatory. The night after the re-election of G.W.B., I went back to my room and recorded some random Baghdadi radio samples. I transcribed vocal pitches and static radio sounds and arranged music around these parts.” The effect is a haunting evocation of the sounds and feelings Thompson’s time in Iraq involved.
- “Stress Position” by Drew Baker explicitly and implicitly homes in on the practice of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – torture – to which many detainees were subjected. Over nine tense minutes, the performer is forced to strike the piano keys in a continual, barely changing monotonous rhythmic pattern, with arms outstretched at the lowest and highest ends of the keyboard – recalling detainees who were forced to keep their own arms outstretched for prolonged periods of time. In live performance, the sound of the piano grows louder and louder and is eventually amplified electronically, ratcheting it up beyond the level of comfort, recalling the sonic torture to which many detainees were also subjected. In the middle of the piece, the lights are also extinguished, plunging the audience into an uncomfortable darkness as well, again mimicking the conditions detainees faced.
- “Rise” is a cut by Acrassicauda, an Iraqi heavy metal band whose defiance and dedication to their music is documented in the film Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007). Eventually, the band was forced into exile in Syria and eventually relocated to the United States.
- “Running Boy” – The final track comes from Rahim AlHaj’s 2017 album Letters from Iraq. A renowned virtuoso of the oud (a kind of lute), AlHaj is another musician-in-exile, having fled violence in Iraq in the 1990s. This moving album consists of compositions for the oud and string quartet, inspired by letters written by Iraqi women and children living under the U.S. occupation starting in 2003. “Running Boy” grew out of the experience of AlHaj’s nephew when a car bomb exploded near the barbershop where he was getting his hair cut. Although all the pieces on the album are instrumental, they give voice to AlHaj’s will to create a more peaceful world. Calling to mind not only conditions in Iraq but also elsewhere in the world, these compositions ask (as he puts it in the liner notes), “Can we do better?”
David Suisman is associate professor of history at the University of Delaware and the author Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024). His other books include Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009), and, as co-editor, Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). A sometime disc jockey at freeform radio station WFMU, he lives in Philadelphia.
