Cultural Bubble Goes Pop

PYONGYANG, North Korea —  The song has a retro feel to it, a bit of swing and the mood of a Vegas house band, and the outfits on the three female singers bring to mind the long-lost word “stewardess.” Behind them, dressed in a blue, sequined shirt, Ri Jin Hyuk builds toward the finish, sticks held high above his head, striking the perfect rock drummer pose.

Then he finishes with polite rat-a-tat pops on the snare. Like he’s playing a polka.

That’s the required style if you want to play in a Pyongyang high school band, where the repertoire is pretty much limited to feel-good North Korean revolutionary folk songs such as “Let’s Study Hard,” “Let’s Become One” and “Let’s Go to the Army.”

Play rock music? Rap? Metal? Ri says he’s never even heard them.

“I have never seen a Western drummer,” the thin 18-year-old with slightly spiky hair says after the performance in his school’s auditorium. Ri claims he’s never heard of the Beatles, never listened to any Western bands and has absolutely no interest in doing so.

Right answer.

In North Korea, a land without Elvis or Oprah, the cultural heroes are supposed to be homegrown. Western pop culture -- especially American pop culture -- is unwelcome here, denounced by Kim Jong Il’s regime as a capitalist virus. So it banned Hollywood and Google, like some stern 1950s parent trying to keep a lock on the kids.

But North Korea is discovering that no country can completely seal its borders against electronic intruders.

Although the demilitarized buffer zone to the south still provides protection against illegal imports from South Korea, the real action is to the north. North Korean defectors say DVDs of foreign music and movies have accompanied the increase in trade and traffic with China over the last few years, leaking across the 850-mile border.

From South Korean television dramas to Chinese martial arts movies and a smattering of Hollywood hits, they are giving North Koreans a break from the relentless pro-regime, anti-U.S. propaganda and a peek into how the much-wealthier outside world lives.

“For decades, this country was second only to Albania, or even second to none, for keeping out all information about foreign countries,” says Andrei Lankov, a Russian academic based in Seoul who lived in Pyongyang in the 1980s. “But the old state supervision, where the police would do random checks looking for things like radios, collapsed over the last decade. It was too expensive to run.”

The relaxation means that more North Koreans are acquiring cheap secondhand VCRs and even cheap DVD players from China. This year, a former North Korean smuggler now living in Thailand described to a Los Angeles Times reporter how he used to sneak 1,000 DVDs at a time across the border into North Korea, laid flat in a trunk under cigarette cartons.

There was healthy demand for American action films such as “Con Air,” said the smuggler, who used the name Park Dae Heung, but his strongest trade was in South Korean fare: TV dramas such as the romantic “Winter Sonata” and action flicks such as “JSA” (for Joint Security Area), about the slayings of two North Korean soldiers in the DMZ.

As more images of well-fed, well-dressed foreigners filter into this downtrodden land, the emerging question is whether they can sow doubt in a population that has endured 60 years of unchallenged propaganda about the perfection of their own lives and the evils of the West.

The prevailing narrative in North Korean culture is an unblinking paean to self-reliance -- the philosophy of juche, articulated by founding father Kim Il Sung. Music and movies celebrate the Great Leader’s apparently single-handed accomplishments, including throwing Japanese and American imperialists out of the nation.

“We will watch movies about how our Great Leader founded the party and our country,” Yon Ok Ju, a 20-year-old university student, says when asked what she and her family will do during the holiday marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party.

That meant one more showing of “Star of Korea,” which tells the story of Kim’s rise to power, or “The Destiny of a Man” from the 1970s, or the post-World War II classic “My Homeland.”

But Yon is a university English student, putting her in a select group that has some access to Western culture. She’s heard of Bill Gates -- “the computer guy!” -- and can borrow Harry Potter books from the library.

She also watches American movies as part of her curriculum. She has seen “Twister,” Adam Sandler’s “Big Daddy” and “Gladiator.” She loved the lead actor in that one. “I only know his name is Maximus,” she says. His real name is Russell Crowe, she’s told. She shrugs. “Never heard of him.”

North Korea is particularly burdened by having a dictator who fancies himself a film connoisseur. A movie collector and writer of books on the subject, Kim Jong Il is given to dropping by Pyongyang Film Studios to offer creative advice, and occasionally pointed criticism.

These days, it seems even Kim is bored with the same old theme.

“He criticized us because famous films were not being produced,” says Kim Man Saok, head of foreign relations for the studio, recalling a chewing-out during one of Kim’s visits. “We are competing with the Americans. From now on we are going to focus on making excellent films. Poor films can’t go to the international world.”

Joint productions are the key to improving quality, the film bureaucrat says. The first is a just-finished project with China called “The Secret of Two Hands.” It tells the story of Rikidozan, a professional wrestler who lived in Japan in the 1950s and ‘60s but was forced by Japanese society to hide his Korean heritage.

The studio is also working with South Korean television on a 24-part historical drama set in the 15th century. More joint productions are planned.

The cooperation with South Korea is part of a wider, calculated opening. In August, mainstream South Korean singer Cho Yong Pil performed before 7,000 fans in Pyongyang, a show later broadcast on TV here. And thousands of South Korean tourists have been welcomed to the capital this fall for Arirang, a dance and music performance celebrating an idealized view of North Korean history.

But some things are still locked tight. Although Kim decreed the 21st century the “century of IT,” or information technology, there is still no way to log on to see what the rest of the planet is up to.

The government’s Korea Computer Center acts as the national gatekeeper, downloading Internet pages deemed politically harmless or necessary for research into a nationwide intranet and distributing them as it sees fit. Those with access to a computer at work or school may visit monitored chat rooms or download music for their MP3 players. The devices are loaded with Korean music, students say.

On a bus ride south of the capital, Pang Yu Gyong, a 20-year-old English student and translator, is fascinated by a Western visitor’s iPod.

But she crinkles her nose in distaste after two minutes of New York rockers the Strokes. Brit pop star Robbie Williams does nothing for her. “Do you have the theme from ‘Titanic’ on here?” she asks.

But officially at least, all Western music, even Celine Dion, is considered subversive.

“The main content [of American music] is that capitalism is good,” says Choe Jong Hun, an official in the Cultural Exchange Department. “This is against the aspirations of our people.”

But what about American rock bands such as Green Day, whose album “American Idiot” amounted to a scathing indictment of the Bush administration? It sold millions of copies in America. It won awards. Why wouldn’t North Korea allow in that kind of self-criticism from America?

“We have already got many songs against America,” he replies.

At Kumsong School in Pyongyang, students have taken Kim, who said the future will be digital, at his word. The 1,800 youths there are supposed to focus on the arts and computers, although Vice Principal Bak Ryong Kil says computers are for the boys only because girls lack the ability to concentrate.

The boys work on PowerPoint graphics and the Pascal programming language and, when asked, say they want to become computer scientists.

And the globalization of sports doesn’t stop at the North Korean border. “My favorite soccer team is Real Madrid,” says Pak Song Won, 14, listing the Spanish team’s stars, including Englishman David Beckham. “I want to travel,” he says. “I want to visit India.”

This widening exposure to the world carries risks for a regime that has inculcated its people with the belief that they live in a paradise.

“It is a misjudgment by the regime,” Lankov argues, adding that the dictatorship’s survival depends on the country’s isolation. “It is still only a small part of the population that can watch South Korean TV, but they can’t ignore the huge difference in their lifestyles. People see it.

“Kim is right to be paranoid about foreign culture,” Lankov continues. The Communist leaders of Eastern Europe were praised for showing flexibility as their rule waned, he points out. “And look what happened: The system collapsed.

“Those countries are doing well now,” he notes. “But what happened to their leaders?”

Seoul Bureau Chief Barbara Demick contributed to this report.