Alex Hogan in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/pyongyang-goes-pop
29 March 2011: Despite there being no internet access in North Korea outside the offices of the few western companies (you can count them on one hand), Pyongyang’s embassy enclosure and a couple of very high-up officials, digital materials still have ways of spreading.
The state runs a nationwide intranet for the exchange of sanctioned material, while USB drives and CD-Rs are becoming more and more common among college and middle school students. It is through these means that the trade in illicit and anti-state media such as the sexy Wangjaesan girls in hot pants is exchanged and passed on, while the ever-growing traffic between North Korea and China has increased opportunities for the cross-border smuggling of pirated films and music from Hollywood and Seoul.
Although these outside cultural influences can be spotted in small doses here and there, North Koreans are understandably loth to admit it. The high-end Japanese-built tourist tour buses shuttling foreigners around Pyongyang are aeons more advanced than the rusting hulks North Korea has been using for average citizens since the 1970s. But ask most Koreans and you’ll find that they are not Japanese. Until they break down, that is, when they become “shitty imperial Japanese technology”.
Given this push/pull attitude to things from the outside, it’s perhaps no surprise that western pop songs penned in a more “communist” vein can ease the North Korean listener into a new state of openness and ease inter-cultural tension. By pop in a communist vein I do, of course mean, Jarvis Cocker.
North Koreans find Pulp’s Common People very, very funny. When one 24-year-old of wealthy descent living in Pyongyang heard the song, he creased up in hysterics as he tried to understand why rich people would pretend to be poor because they thought it was cool. He did concede, however, that he was happy such a song could be so popular, as it suggested people in the west could appreciate the revolutionary spirit of communism after all. You can kind of see what he was getting at.
On hearing about the Rage Against the Machine Christmas No 1 story, the same North Korean said he felt “proud and overjoyed that a socialist band could be the greatest force for good in the British nation,” despite him not quite grasping the concept of record sales or The X Factor or the fact the band is American. He didn’t particularly like Killing in the Name, either.
At times throughout my travels in North Korea, I’m sure I’ve been misunderstood by the locals. Likewise, I have no doubt misunderstood the motivations and explanations that locals brought to the table when I confronted them with pop as the world gives it to us. But the process itself of discussing pop has always eased the initial standoff that North Koreans are trained to have set as their autopilot, and reminded me of the humanity of the people held in the grip of the government’s ongoing tyranny. So, if you find yourself caught up in the regime any time soon, for your sake and theirs, find out what their verdict on the new Kanye record is, won’t you?
10 march 2011: All pop music in North Korea is sanctioned by the state, so if you don’t like songs about The Importance of Fertiliser or Uniting Happily Under the Powerful Juche Idea, then tough – go and listen to the frogs croaking down on the river bank instead. Of the bands permitted, two of North Korea’s most famous are the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble and Wangjaesan Light Music Band, who have been churning out pro-socialist revolutionary singles for decades.
Wangjaesan were reportedly conceived by the ever-talented Kim Jong-il, who handpicked the group’s members. He’s not just a despotic dictator, you know – he has a reputation in his homeland as being quite the artisan. As well as his taste for fine light music, he’s also a cultured film producer, as this monster movie he made in the 80s tastefully proves.
Pochonbo, meanwhile, have kept themselves busy as Wangjaesan’s main contenders by clocking up 140 albums, some of them with specially created English-language cover art so they can be sold to tourists in the many gift shops Koreans insist on taking you to at every opportunity (only hard currency, Euros or fine imported cigars accepted).
There was mild controversy last year when a secret video featuring Wangjaesan’s female dance troupe entered the public domain. The video was being privately circulated among the elite, but reached the North Korean public before making it over the border to China – and therefore the world. Normally seen in traditional, body-cloaking hangbok dresses as they perform polite folk numbers, this little clip revealed unprecedented levels of sexiness in Pyongyang, as the girls popped up in sparkly hot pants and did the splits. Western displays of decadence like this are illegal but, given Kim Jong-il’s alleged love of pornography, perhaps he turned a blind eye to this one.
22 February 2011:
I’ve written before about Pyongyang’s only nightclub, the Taedong Diplo. Despite it only having one CD to its name, it’s still your best bet for catching Koreans co-mingling with Western music. Unfortunately, this Western music normally involves little more than playing the aforementioned CD (the incessant call of Trance Hits 1993 on loop) or someone sticking on the karaoke edition of the Titanic soundtrack, which North Korean students dig big-time thanks to its frequent showing in Pyongyang’s universities as an example of western culture (according to Korean ideology, industrial revolution: good. Leonardo DiCaprio drowning: better).
This grim legacy of disco downers was all to change, however, on the night DJ Ian Steadman turned up last year, coming fully prepared to man the mic long past the 10pm electricity curfew with a bag of indie hits.
Just prior to Ian’s debut on the decks, visitors to the club were treated to the airing of a new CD held in the North Korean pop vaults – Madonna’s Die Another Day from the soundtrack to the James Bond movie in which James Bond is, er, held captive in North Korea (it’s veiled threats like this that make doing things in the country so much fun).
After this, it was Steadman’s time to step up. What was quite probably North Korea’s first ever indie disco saw a handful of drunken local guides and a large group of foreign tourists dancing to a playlist that included Buraka Som Sistema, Hot Chip and Talking Heads. According to current trends, it seems indie couldn’t be hitting North Korea at a better time. The ever-reliable North Korean Economy Watch recently reported that skinny jeans are all the rage in Pyongyang these days. We’re not sure if this was entirely down to fashion reasons, though, and those holding their breath for a full-scale hipster revolution will have to wait a little longer for the fixie bikes and lens-free glasses to roll through. After all, the other top consumer products listed alongside trouserwear were reportedly pig-intestine rolls and, er, human manure.
According to Steadman, it was TV on The Radio’s Dancing Choose that elicited the biggest response, with one North Korean vigorously grabbing his arm and demanding to know where he could get a copy of this “very, very, very good band”.
If only all nights out in North Korea were so successful. My last visit to the same club culminated in an angered security guard unexpectedly pulling the plug on the music, grabbing the karaoke microphone and bellowing, “Look, you fucking drunk bastards! Get the fuck out of here! Get on the fucking bus! Go! Or I’ll take your fucking passports from you and you’ll stay in fucking North Korea forever. FUCK OFF!” – a more high-stakes ending than a punch-up and a battered sausage outside the Sheffield Leadmill on a Friday night, that’s for sure.
9 February 2011:
On my first trip to North Korea in 2009 I asked my state-sanctioned guide (and very likely government spy) what the most popular song on the North Korea airwaves was at that moment. Mr Lee – a lithe, boyish gentleman with a clean-split centre-parting – sighed and told me it was a heroic ballad about being a diligent farmer. In the North they can’t get enough radio – every kitchen is fitted with one that can’t be switched off. It’s a government order, so from morning to night citizens must enjoy revolutionary hits and paeans celebrating the multifarious talents of Kim Jong Il (lest anyone forget). So even though Mr Lee may have secretly be craving South Korea’s Girl’s Generation, he and millions of others are forced to stick with what their leader gives them: boring revolutionary anthems about being a good socialist. But as more outside materials sneak under the radar, the tension between Kim’s socialist utopia and the real world is increasing.
Earlier in the morning Mr Lee had been sitting on the tour bus ferrying us around Pyongyang, avidly reading a copy of the New Yorker that a tourist had given him the week before. The issue featured a story about an author’s drunken homosexual awakening that had taken place on board a night train. Mr Lee read it with much curiosity. Clearly he wanted to know more about the world than just diligent farmers.
Pop music in North Korea hasn’t always been this boring – during the economic glory days of the 1970s and 80s, when the socialist North were well ahead of their southern neighbours, Kim Il Sung loosened the rules on what kind of entertainment could fly with the people. That all changed after the song Whistle caused so much popular frenzy that the state reclassified it as dangerous material and repressed it, returning airplay rights exclusively to the diligent farmers and their ilk. All this despite the song in question being about as provocative to western minds as a kitten doing a cute sneeze.
To indulge Mr Lee’s urge for outside culture and indeed my own curiosity as to his response, I showed him how to use my iPod. He embraced the challenge with enthusiasm. His first choice was unexpected – UK thrash urchins Gallows. Yet my surprise probably did not outweigh his as he went through what was evidently his first guitar thrash experience. The pained look on his face belied his polite disapproval of the sounds in his ears and he moved on swiftly. After a few more minutes of wheel-click browsing, he told me quite assertively that “Lethal Bizzle would not suit the Korean people” as it “has no proper melody”. Yet he warmed right up to Coldplay and listened to one of their albums from start to finish, further widening the sample that proves Chris Martin’s gang produce music so damningly average and inoffensive it can even pacify citizens living under a fear-inducing totalitarian regime.
1 Feb 2011:
During North Korea’s “arduous march” of the 90s, brought about by the collapse of the USSR and a series of natural disasters, illegal markets of smuggled goods sprang up across the country. It marked the beginning of a slow influx of outside culture still enjoyed by North Koreans today.
Charles Jenkins, a Korean war veteran who was captured and detained for 40 years, has witnessed this cultural transition. As a propaganda tool he was kept close to the elite and – weirdly – forced to become a film star. He escaped in 2004 and now lives in Japan. When I met him in 2008, he told me the only non-Korean music he came across before the 90s would be nationalist tomes imported from Soviet Russia. As a result, it wasn’t until the mid-90s that he discovered who Michael Jackson was, when a smuggled Jacko cassette tape found its way into Jenkins’s hands.
Although most North Koreans are still oblivious to MJ today – leaving them ill-equipped to offer an opinion on the authenticity of his posthumous releases – those who are allowed to interact with foreigners consume pop music enthusiastically. These days most students on the foreign relations course at Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University will at some point encounter MJ, while the penetration of South Korean pop music (and TV dramas) in North Korean cities is widely reported, with both enjoying a wide following despite the act of consuming them being an imprisonable offence.
On a recent trip to Pyongyang, a guide by the name of Mr Oh took great relish in his regular party trick of “accidentally” confusing North Korean revolutionary songs for flashy South Korean pop. “Whoops! It’s North Korean after all … what a shame, I mean South Korean is much better, just don’t tell any one,” he would say. We later discovered he was not a tour guide at all, but a government spy keeping an eye on the “evil” Americans in our entourage. He’d done tae kwon do at the Mass Games and is pictured in the official Pyongyang guide book. The guy was an absolute gun. The North Korean Arnold Schwarzenegger. No wonder the government let him listen to South Korean pop and wear a Paul Smith shirt.
27 January 2011:
If someone had fulfilled Pyongyang’s request to pack Eric Clapton off to North Korea, perhaps all that bother on the divided peninsula would never have started. That is what the hermit government of the north reckons, at least, as one of the less pressing Wikileak cables recently revealed that Kim Jong-il’s second son, Kim Jong-chol, was “a great fan” of the rock legend and that a Clapton performance in the capital “could be an opportunity to build goodwill”.
Using pop to build bridges is perhaps naive, especially in the context of a potential nuclear face-off, but maybe we shouldn’t rule out the idea. If you ask a North Korean their true feelings about pretty much anything they’ll stick to whatever the party line tells them they should think (which is why so many tourists get frustrated after probing about General Kim’s next move). But ask the right questions and the facade that greets most outsiders will occasionally be broached with genuine warmth. During trips I’ve made in and around the hermit kingdom over the past year, I’ve used one uncontroversial topic of conversation to do just that. It seems talking about music is one way for North Koreans to relate their perspectives on the world without being politically controversial. Pop diplomacy will not solve territorial disputes or prevent governments going head-to-head, but it does offer another perspective on North Koreans.
Pop weaves its way into North Korea in unexpected ways. Last September, I was held under 24-hour house arrest in the outpost of Raijin after refusing to pay a bribe. The most perturbing part of the experience was not the fact there was no guarantee of release, but that the hotel foyer we were held in had the EastEnders theme tune playing on loop for the duration of the internment through a croaky speaker. Perhaps the aim was mental attrition; to irritate us into paying bribes by reminding us of the east London we’d left behind and may never see again. It didn’t work – I’m from Putney.
Eccentric glimpses of the world North Korea left behind are not so few and far between – in this series I’ll be revealing more from inside the secret state: the truth about Michael Jackson’s North Korean debut; introducing the best of North Korean pop and revealing the Communist cadre’s opinion of Jarvis Cocker. Come join me for the ride.
