Pop songs in Pyongyang
Pop, folk music and fermented cabbage in North Korea.
A version of this story was previously published at Popmatters.
It is difficult to say for certain but it is likely that, one day in February 2014, Yun Jong Min, the Director of the Foreign Relations Department of the National Authority for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Pyongyang, read Nomination File 01063, For Inscription on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The application was about kimchi, the spiced, fermented cabbage dish popular in Korea. It was completed nine months before the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee were scheduled to meet, to decide which examples of “intangible cultural heritage” were deserving of particular recognition from the United Nations that year. In the paperwork, Yun was given as the main North Korean point of contact.
In the few pictures of Yun that reached the West, he smiled easily. Although his hair was well-trimmed, his fringe was a little untidy and, when he wore a suit, his tie was a little too loose. The lines around his eyes were beginning to harden — he seemed to be in his forties — and his cheeks were slightly sunken. His office, it seems, was close to the river. Music would float over from the far bank, where singers stood beneath the Juche monument.
“Most Koreans,” Yun’s UNESCO application suggested, “eat kimchi at least once a day, and many of them, at every meal… The tradition of kimchi-making is deeply rooted into the life of Koreans.” The documentation explained that the Great Leader Kim Il Sung “regarded every tradition of the nation as a treasure”. He “took it always to his heart to give brilliance to them.”
The previous UNESCO application that Yun had worked on was completed the year before: Nomination File 00914, on “Arirang”, a traditional folk song, similarly popular across the Korean peninsula. Statements of support were attached, signed, and dated in the Western style. One, apparently from a 74 year old woman called Kye Chun Hui, suggested she used to sing “Arirang” at the riverside with her friends, Pom Sun and No Ul. Her mother used to sing it, the statement said, as she tied red ribbons to Kye’s pigtails, or as she prepared food or waited for her father to return home.
Another statement was signed by Kim Jong Ye. It said that he had found himself singing “Arirang” at the Third Concentration Plant of the Youth Heroes Mine at Daehung, when the song played on the radio. The miners’ wives would visit the magnesite mine on White Gold Mountain, apparently, down the long white access roads scarring the valley, and sing the song to their husbands. In another statement, a fisherman called Hyon Su Suk said he sang “Arirang” with his friends, as they returned to deposit their catch at the fishery in Sinpo, not far from the submarine base.
The Arirang application also included copies of work completed by children. In careful, crayoned script, five year olds had written the word “Arirang”, and signed their name. Most likely, the children were at Kyongsang Kindergarten; famous for its music, Western visitors are often shown the children at low tables, beneath walls hung with felt tip drawings and star charts praising the most well-behaved. Tiny guitarists in white socks play in unison, and tall, signless buildings loom through the windows looking out onto Chongjon Street.
Kim Jong Un once visited the kindergarten, with his uncle, who was executed some time after. According to North Korean state media, Kim had commended the felt tip colours that the children used, and the star charts in the classrooms. A 2012 ordinance of the Supreme People’s Assembly called for at least one similar kindergarten in every province.
Not far from the kindergarten, in Primary School Number Four, on Chollima Street, a teacher called Kil Kum Sung, signed her own statement for the “Arirang” UNESCO application. It was Kil’s “sacred duty,” her statement said, to teach the children about “Arirang”. This was the primary school that the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had attended, with its long white tiles and rows of neat windows, four storeys high. The cameras in each room now allow the headmistress to monitor behaviour, from her bare office with its parquet floor. Most children apparently begin school already knowing “Arirang”.
“Arirang,” the North Korean application said, is “about leaving and reunion, sorrow, joy, and happiness.” The words tend to be about a lover walking away, over the mountains, his feet aching. The song is well-known on both sides of the border; South Korea had applied to UNESCO about “Arirang” a little before North Korea, just as they had with kimchi.
“Most Koreans learn ‘Arirang’ from the cradle,” the South Korean application suggested, “but its widespread popularity as the nation’s most representative folk song is also due to its consistent presence in their everyday lives.” “‘Arirang’ unites Koreans as one community,” it said, and “is often described as their unofficial national anthem.”
“During the colonial period,” the application continued, the song “gave expression to personal and national sufferings of Koreans and fanned hopes for independence in their hearts.” “Arirang” was banned during the Japanese occupation of Korea, before World War II. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, in a widely praised show of unity, athletes from both the North and South sang “Arirang” as they entered the opening ceremony together.
With no fixed text, and a melody that allows wide variation, according to the South Korean application, “‘Arirang’ has been rearranged into modern ballads, rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop, as well as symphonic pieces, appealing to a wide array of audiences.” “Affection for ‘Arirang’ is evident throughout today’s ultra-modern Korean culture,” it said, “well beyond the realm of traditional music.” According to the North Korean application, the “Arirang of Reunification” and “Arirang of Great Prosperity” had been recorded, “reflecting the realities of our time”.
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Ji Hae Nam loved music, and kimchi. Each day, at Kyohwaso Number One women’s prison, she ate her 180 grams of rations, which came with kimchi as a side dish. “I became so emaciated,” she told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, “that I felt that the pickled cabbage they provided together with the ration was the most delicious food.”
Before her imprisonment, Ji had been employed by the North Korean state to sing patriotic songs at factories. She was arrested in 1993, during the famine that devastated much of the country. In prison, at the daily mutual criticism session, she remembered, “the inmates would give false accusations against other or else a portion of their ration was taken away.” She said that many of those without family nearby to bring them food died of malnutrition.
When she was arrested, Ji was with three friends and a fortune teller, on the day the Christians celebrate Christmas. Her marriage had recently broken down and she had begun to suffer with depression. She danced with her friends, she remembered, and sang a song that had caught in her head recently, “Don’t Cry Little Sister”. It was a South Korean song, included as background in a North Korean film, called Nation and Destiny.
Someone reported Ji, and she was charged with disrupting the socialist order, and with falsifying documents to get extra food rations. She was sentenced to three years imprisonment in an “enlightenment centre”. “I was subject to torture and sexual harassment that cannot be imagined by another human being,” Ji told the American senators. “The beatings I received in jail were so severe that my entire body was bruised,” she said, “and I was unable to get up for a month.” “Those who criticized the social order, those who sang foreign songs, those who wasted state assets, those who ate but did not work, those who drink, those who swindle, were harshly punished and were even subject to a death sentence.”
In prison, Ji tried to kill herself, by eating sewage and swallowing her hair. She cut cement into four square pieces and ate it, but survived. The young guards who abused her, who were half her age, continued to bring her the meagre rations, of rice and kimchi. “As I was accused of a misdemeanour of simply singing a wrong song, my preliminary hearing was relatively lighter than others. Imagine what the others with more serious sentences endured?”
South Korean music of the type that Ji sang with her friends still creeps into North Korea. Korea Focus suggest about half of all North Korean refugees have experienced some form of South Korean culture. Websites run by refugees and dissidents — Daily NK, New Focus International, 38 North — tell stories from people still in the North. Some, they report, own illegal televisions that are able to receive broadcasts from the South. Some have radios that can be tuned to South Korean stations, hidden under rice containers. South Korean soap operas are popular, but their international references make it difficult for some in the North to understand. South Korean MP3s are sometimes traded by young North Koreans, often on the North Korean “Arirang” brand smartphone.
In 2015, Na Sung Min and Han Eun Kyung, two young refugees, told New Focus International about secret parties in the North, where South Korean music is played. “At the start,” Na said, “the volume is turned down to the lowest level but as the night progresses and people have had one or two drinks, the music gets turned up louder and the atmosphere loosens more.” It’s better if one of those present is related to a senior official, he said, as the surveillance patrols rarely check their homes. A CD of patriotic songs is left unopened next to the player, in case they arrive. “South Korean music makes you move naturally and triggers deep emotions within,” Han said, “and in that moment, lovers can slip into fantasies together, enjoying the thrill of capitalist culture while living on socialist territory… lovers can share one another’s feelings and hold each other while dancing… we take turns standing guard.”
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North Korean music can seem strange to Western visitors. At the Yanggakdo International Hotel, with its revolving restaurant in the middle of the river, some giggle a little at the CDs for sale at the gift shop. (This was the hotel where Otto Warmbier, an American student, was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years hard labour for stealing a political banner.) Others snigger nervously at the releases on the Pee label: “We Shall Hold Bayonets More Firmly”, “I Also Raise Chickens”, “Song of Bean Paste”.
Just as Western pop music tends to be about love, North Korean pop music tends to be about North Korea. There are songs of longing, of tenderness and affirmation, optimistic songs and tragic songs, all for the regime. No one alive remembers a time before this. A vast monoculture is arranged, glorifying and reassuring, patriotic and commonplace, seemingly inevitable, like “Arirang” and kimchi. It is preserved carefully.
The full weight of the state bureaucracy is behind the endeavour. The North Korean UNESCO application lists “Arirang” safeguarding societies and national heritage protection committees in every district and county. It highlights the work of the Korean National Heritage Preservation Agency, and the Folklore Research Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences, and musicians at the Pyongyang Kim Won Gyun Conservatory. The application says that the North Korean state has been collecting folk songs since the mid-sixties.
The supportive statements offered with the “Arirang” application tell a similar story. Jo Jong Rim, aged 73, of the Korean National Music Research Institute, apparently suggested that “reaching the twilight of my life, I find the greatest pleasure in transmitting our excellent cultural heritage to the young generations. ‘Arirang’ represents the emotions and feelings of our nation, thus becoming a favourite song among the youth.” Choi Chung Hui, aged 72, signed another statement: “since my maidenhood with pigtail hair, ‘Arirang’ was my life. So I regard it as my duty to devote the rest of my life for the transmission of ‘Arirang’ to our younger generation.” She said she liked to go to Mount Kyongam, to “Folk Street”, a park which celebrates North Korean folk culture. She enjoyed seeing women from her city there, she said, dancing to “Arirang” by the houses with tiled roofs and the traditional food stalls, “while recalling my younger days.”
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The music is unavoidable. Every hour, on the hour, across Pyongyang, from soon after sunrise, songs play from hidden speakers in the quiet streets. Music drifts into the hotels and schools and offices of the city. The melodies linger, as the workers go about their business. When the power is running, children sit with their families, while state approved songs play on the television. It might be at quickstep pace, or lightly syncopated. There might be synthesisers or traditional instrumentation or an accordion or massed orchestration. Each year, for the public holiday celebrating the Great Leader’s birth, parks fill with families, singing and eating homemade food. Westerners are kept away, as the people drink and dance.
Photographs smuggled out by Eric Lafforgue in 2008 captured some of this all pervasive music. One showed men building a road, wearing their dun military caps backwards, accompanied by a cadre of French horns, trombones and drummers. In another, Korean karaoke machines, known as noreabang, play instrumentals with bright blue lyrics superimposed over images of missile launches. Patrons sing along, in restaurants that Western visitors say smell like kimchi.
The songs are everywhere. They play from beige radios with no tuners, on the walls of public buildings with symmetrical, pastel interiors. They resonate in marble lobbies, for women in traditional, luminous dress. They resonate for the men in Western suits, who stand in front of world maps aligned to the east of the Pacific, for the women with bikes laden with plastic bags, passing open brown fields and blue-grey mountains, for the workers painting the white bands on traffic cones, for the weathered rice wine drinkers, for the children clinging to their mother’s shoulders as they kneel in the dust, for the families with neatly piled fruit at illegal roadside stalls, for the men picking edible weeds from sculpted grounds.
“Music is my first love,” the Great Leader once said, “my eternal companion, and a powerful weapon of the revolution and construction.”
