(Not) Your typical Westlife audience

From Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s

“The music is to scare them. Frank has a penchant for 90s Irish pop—Boyzone, B* Witched, Westlife—and what could be scarier than that? Frank’s rationale is that by playing tunes from his victims’ childhood or adolescence, it encourages them to reminisce, to become teenagers again, to fill up with nostalgic yearnings for stolen kisses and playing truant down on Sandymount Strand. It renders them more vulnerable, makes them feel more isolated, more distant and separated from those innocent days. Besides, he says, you can’t beat a bit of cheery music to help the torturing go by with a laugh and a smile.”

From Vice magazine:

According to a 2012 article in the Nation, after 9/11, a bounty system emerged in which African warlords would sell “terror suspects” to the CIA for cash. Suleiman Abdullah, a newlywed fisherman in Tanzania, was captured in March 2003, possibly by the help of one such warlord named “Mr. Tall.” He was taken first to Kenya, and then shuffled around to various places in Afghanistan, like a prison called COBALT—where, according to the ACLU, he was assaulted with music by the Irish boyband Westlife alternating with heavy metal and kept in a pitch-black cell that smelled like rotting seaweed.

Thanks to Broadsheet.