CCMSAI 2026

This paper examines AI-generated music as a twenty-first-century form of propaganda, analyzing how synthetic songs shape collective identity and political belonging without top-down institutional control. Focusing on the viral AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk” and its accompanying YouTube video, I trace how AI tools construct an in-group world of Christian nationalist imagery, drawing on ethnomusicological and media theory frameworks alongside historical precedents in fascist radio broadcasting, Nazi martyrdom songs, and Cold War-era country music and Hollywood film. Using reverse-prompt research on the commercial platform Suno, I show how a simple prompt can generate a fully realized martyrdom ballad, revealing the racialized and class-coded assumptions embedded in AI music generation. I further show how ironic remixes and covers of the Kirk song, rather than subverting its message, extend its circulation and reinforce in-group and out-group dynamics. A comparative case study of Iranian-produced AI Lego-animation videos targeting American audiences demonstrates how the same techniques can be weaponized from outside a political community. Together, these cases suggest that AI music generation has collapsed the cost of producing emotionally persuasive, identity-forming media, enabling a decentralized form of participatory mythmaking that parallels, and extends, twentieth-century propaganda infrastructures.