THE PEOPLE UNITED: MUSIC FOR NORTH KOREA’S ‘GREAT LEADER’ AND ‘DEAR LEADER’ Keith Howard Senior Lecturer, SOAS, and Director, AHRB Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance 1. Introduction 1 2. Ideology and music 3 3. Thinking as one 8 4. Popular music: out with the new? 11 5. Concluding remarks 13 1. Introduction A recalcitrant Stalinist anachronism? This is the common perception of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) beyond its fortified and hermetically sealed borders. North Korea considers the bad image it has abroad as proof of a capitalist attempt to destroy it, and tends to restrict access further still whenever it encounters hostile press reports. Recent international attention has focused, critically, on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and this will likely make the regime even more wary of the outside world. Pak Dong Tchoun, North Korea’s representative at UNESCO in Paris, in July 1995 noted how “extremely reticent” his country would remain to open its doors to journalists who “write horrible calumnies about our regime the minute they leave the country. We want journalists who show good will and want to promote friendship between peoples, not subvert our regime and sovereignty. The [Western] mass media must not write articles that are not encouraging”. Negative press, or TV serializations of ‘untruths’—and occasionally interviews with defectors—notably those published by public and private organs within its southern cousin, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), generally induce bellicose threats, as North Korea shouts it will kill the responsible reporters and bomb newspaper buildings. Typing “North Korea+Censorship” on the Internet offers a fruitful search. North Korea, we read, is the only country in the world where people have neither the right nor the technical possibility to access the Internet; countering this, North Korea established a national intranet, the Kwang Myong Net, in 2001. Television and radio sets are preset before distribution to receive only North Korean channels; the import of videotapes, CDs, and foreign publications is strictly controlled. The press is routinely censored, we are told, because its function is “to explain, disseminate, advocate and help accomplish Kim Il Sung’s instructions and Kim Jong Il’s policies, and to further strengthen the Proletariat dictatorship as well as to strengthen politico-ideological unity and solidarity among the people.” There is no freedom of expression in print; all publications must reflect the unitary policy (yuil sasang), a policy fostered by the fact that the leadership and the people are said to be in complete accord. From here we read that the mission of the press is to glorify the leadership, to advocate party policy, to generate popular agitation, and so on. Article 46 of the Penal Code does indeed dictate harsh penalties, from confiscation of property to the death penalty, for “reactionary propaganda and agitation”, the publication of materials overtly or implicitly criticising state or leadership. And, some reports claim as many as 250,000 North Koreans are imprisoned as ‘criminals’ guilty of “ideological transgressions” amongst the possibly two million held in an extensive gulag. Other reports tell of hagiography surrounding the autocratic and monolithic leadership, seen best in the virtual deification of Kim Il Sung (1912-1994), in life the Great Wise President-for-life Dearly Beloved and Sagacious Leader, and in death the Eternal President. He is still president, although his son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il (b.1942), is de facto leader by virtue of his appointment as head of the Korean Workers Party. Kim Senior, we hear, effectively expelled the Japanese colonial power from the Korean peninsula in the 1940s and defeated the Americans in the Korean War; he single- handedly built the socialist paradise, overseeing industrial and agricultural reforms (based most notably on ‘models’ he developed at the Kangson steel mill and during 15 days spent with the farming community of Changsan Village). Histories are doctored to prove his paramount role. Inscriptions praising Kim cut into the bark of trees in the mountains 2 on the border between North Korea and China are claimed to be the writings of 1930s guerillas—and are meticulously preserved under glass. Photographs are altered, removing those later found to be “enemies of the state” and moving Kim to the center; photographs of Kim himself are now subject to judicious use of an air brush to remove the unsightly growth on his neck present for the last two decades of his life. And visitors arriving in Pyongyang are today routinely presented with flowers. These are not a gift, for the first port of call for all visitors is a massive 20m-tall bronze statue of Kim where, in front of TV cameras we are expected to place the flowers, showing to all and sundry that we have come to pay our respects. North Korean promotion of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, not surprisingly, feeds the cynicism of international observers. North Korea, though, maintains that the reality is different. North Korea signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1981, submitting its first report in 1984 and the second in 2001, some 17 years later (and 12 years overdue: the covenant prescribes the submission of reports every five years). The 2001 report admitted to 30 cases in which publication was prohibited, 27 concerning encyclopaedias, maps and magazines, and three dealing with military matters. It reported two or three annual demonstrations, but matched these to 600 public rallies held in support of the state and its leadership. The suggestion is that little censorship needs to be practiced. And so, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, addressing the Human Rights Committee in July 2001, brushed aside all criticism with the comment that “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has developed a Korean style of human rights which reflects the desires of the people”. 2. Ideology and music What, then, is the truth? In artistic policy and practice, the problem and the solution are bound together by ideology. Ideology is a matter of control, imposed from the centre, but this, within a “revolutionary” spirit, is said to reflect the wishes and desires of the people. The centre controls access to training and work, and so requires people to conform. Many reports fail to notice, though, that ideology shifts over time (although, of course, the regime does not admit to this). I will start my discussion of ideology with quotations from 3 Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, as is customary and compulsory in North Korean publications. Here, though, I offer annotations that would be missing from official publications. Kim Jong Il, then: We are making a revolution, and we should inspire the people to the revolutionary struggle by means of songs. Here is our cue, taken from socialist realism, but now a Korean ideological policy influenced not just by Maxim Gorky and Andrei Zhdanov, but also by Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’. A problem soon emerged with this ideology, though, as the artists-turned-ideologues who were part of the Korean communist faction at Yan’an, most prominently the established literary scholar Kim Yubong, represented a challenge to the autocratic rule of one leader, namely, Kim Il Sung. They were purged during or shortly after the Korean War. Power was consolidated as Kim built his base alongside those who had been active on North Korean territory through the last years of Japanese rule, who were made up preponderantly of the illiterate and the indigent. This was an unfortunate beginning for North Korean art, literature, and music. Revolution required something new to Kim Il Sung: It is unthinkable that songs which the aristocrats of old days used to sing while drinking could also suit the emotions of our youth who are building socialism. Musical genres associated with any élites of the past must go. Instruments associated with the aristocratic literati, notably the six-stringed long zither, the kŏmun’go, despite its historical importance as the only distinctly Korean instrument developed on territory now belonging to North Korea, had to be abandoned. But artistic production, by its very nature and because of the requirement for high levels of skill, is élitist. In Korea, this extends to art genres with roots amongst the folk, and p’ansori, the celebrated one-person vocal form mixing song (sori), narrative (aniri) and dramatic action (pallim) quickly suffered, after Kim Il Sung announced it was “…ridiculous to imagine soldiers rushing to battle inspired by p’ansori”. 4 Music must serve the revolution, but such a view has a number of unavoidable implications. First, artists must suffer. Those in Korea had trained in élitist institutions, often in Japan or elsewhere abroad, and their families would have had to have money, either because they were aristocrats or landowners of some standing, or because they had worked for the hated Japanese colonialists who had ruled Korea until 1945. Filtering socialist realism through Mao, Kim Il Sung in 1951 gave his ‘Talks with Writers and Artists’. Artists, he said, were “engineers of the human soul,” whose works should serve the people as a “powerful weapon and great inspiration.” They had, though, “lost touch with life” and lagged “behind our rapidly advancing reality”. Artists must “learn from the lofty spirit of ordinary people,” since they “should know that the genuine creator of great art is always the people.” Purges began. In 1945, the centre of Korean artistic production was Seoul. But the 1945 division of the peninsula left a capitalist-leaning South Korea sponsored by America and a communist-leaning North Korea sponsored by the Soviet Union.