South Korean Music Inspiring Defections from North Korea

[lpetrich]

How K-pop is luring young North Koreans to cross the line - The Washington Post

As a little girl, Ryu Hee-Jin was brought up to perform patriotic songs praising the iron will, courage and compassion of North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong Il.

Then she heard American and South Korean pop music.

“When you listen to North Korean music, you have no emotions,” she said. “But when you listen to American or South Korean music, it literally gives you the chills. The lyrics are so fresh, so relatable. When kids listen to this music, their facial expressions just change.”

Something similar had happened during the Cold War, with Soviet young people passing around illicit Beatles records. Listening to the music of the evil empires made those empires seem less evil.

These days, there are many people who smuggle in flash drives containing South Korean news shows and movies and music videos and the like, despite official displeasure.

“The kind of thing I wanted to do was dye my hair and wear miniskirts and jeans,” said Kang Na-ra, 22. “Once I wore jeans to the market and I was told I had to take them off. They were burned in front of my eyes.”

...
Last year, Kim attended a South Korean musical performance in Pyongyang that featured older music divas, male rock musicians and young K-pop acts, including a trendy girl band called Red Velvet. The concert was broadcast in its entirety in the South but only in snippets on news programs in the North.

...
“Kim Jong Un apparently clapped and cheered at the performance, but we could only watch smuggled footage of it in hiding because consuming South Korean music was still a crime that could land us in prison,” she said.

After she defected, Ryu said, she learned from a TV documentary that Kim Jong Il, the father of the country’s current leader, was a fan of South Korean cinema and TV shows.

“I was so, so angry,” she said. “We would literally cry when we sang about the hardships of Kim Jong Il’s life. I never imagined he was watching South Korean TV.”

It's sort of like what happened in the later decades of the Soviet bloc. People would visit the Western nations and see for themselves that those nations are not horrible evil empires.


I'm using "evil empire" here in honor of Ronald Reagan's calling the Soviet Union that -- the Soviet bloc used similar rhetoric and North Korea still does.