but i have a camera now and the poodle dog in austin has shuffleboard.

also, i’ll be going to emp this year. here’s my proposal. there’s a good chance i’ll ‘fail’ as much as anyone could ‘fail,’ but i’m going to do my damndest.

The Pyongyang Hit Parade

A segment from an interview with a communist party official in Bradley Martin’s North Korean history Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader:

“‘What is rock-and-roll music?’ he asked me. ‘Do you mean jazz?’”

The DPRK’s pop landscape is less fertile than its soil. Fewer than 15 bands release CDs on one state-run label. The sound—a ghastly jigsaw of militaristic pomp, light jazzercise, and heavy-handed prom balladry—has hung in formaldehyde for decades. In a 1970 address, Kim Jong Il remarked that “Music which merely sings of nature unrelated to the struggle of our people for socialist construction, is utterly worthless.” Foreign music, known as “jazz,” is illegal; there’s little ethnomusicological arithmetic to be done. Superficially, then, it’s radically different from the way pop music tends to function almost anywhere else in the world—as culture that listeners, writers, and actors participate in freely and voluntarily; as art permeable and susceptible to influence; as entertainment or as a readable reflection of the time and place of the sound’s origin.

Oddly, though, DPRK pop resonates with one of Western pop’s richest contradictions—the tension between the idea of pop as an aural manifestation of time and place and the idea of pop as escape or transcendence, a knot most readily found in contemporary hip-hop’s rhetoric (but a theme the permeates music as separate-seeming as the Electric Light Orchestra and Sun Ra).

If there’s anything I fetishize about DPRK pop—because it’s not particularly exotic—it’s the comfortable distance it gives me to consider questions I still have about my own musical time and place. What can pop in North Korea tell me about its place of origin? What can it tell me about the idea of pop in general? Though DPRK pop isn’t the easiest stuff to track down, I’ve had some success, and plan to keep buying more as I’m able. I hope to draw on a formal analysis of the music, my own reading about the country’s history (and its present), correspondence with scholars who have been to the country, and theories of art in Communist countries.