Thread by @BonicMichael

Music as cultural change in the DPRK

A North Korean school of rock: teaching heavy metal to Pyongyang school girls
Funky Sueyoshi reflects on his time at the June 9th school — and whether music could ever inspire change in the DPRK
[Oliver Jia 8 Jan 2020]
nknews.org/2020/01/how-a-…

2/“This is the first ROCK SONG in North Korea that is recorded in 2007 PyongYang.” - F. Sueyoshi
北朝鮮初のオリジナルロック曲「Murumpyo (Question mark)」

3/In contrast to S Korean K-pop or Japanese idol culture, DPRK doesn't have a capitalist-driven music industry that creates pop culture idols/icons and fills corporate coffers. DPRK is just hip & down-to-earth having music students learn rock music from Japanese hipster Funky S..

4/The fact that female DPRK music students in socialist DPRK are learning to play heavy metal music, and aspirational dance students learn Western, tap & modern dance styles at Pyongyang U of Music & Dance and try out for the Wangjaesan Dance Troupe, tells us that North Koreans

5/are a people that values high culture. Altho isolated (not by their own choice but an imposition by UNSC Resolutions that blasts and sanctions DPRK simply for defending themselves against a US that threatens them using nuclear deterrence), students learn music, dance & other

6/fine arts K thru University. DPRK's most passionate dancers are in Wangjaesan Dance Troupe.

Closed off from the world?? North Korea celebrates Western music & dance

Wangjaesan Dance Troupe danced to Irene Cara's Flashdance What A Feeling in the 1980s

https://twitter.com/BonicMichael/status/1328077018848587776?s=20

7/A reminder to all philistines and academicophobes around the world: Universities are place of higher learning, including in North Korea. When the Western world pigeonholes your entire socialist belief system & culture, sanctions and isolates you what do you do? You carry on

8/traveling to the beat of a different drum. This is visibly indisputable when Wangjaesan Dance Troupe dances literally to Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What A Feeling" in the 1980s contemporaneous w/ Madonna's "Like A Virgin" release. Not only their passion for Western dance

9/songs, but their distinctly North Korean style of choreography (DPRK is the undisputed master in the art of Choreography, just look at the Arirang Mass Games) is on full display. DPRK music & dance students, teachers & choreographers are quick to assimilate Western music, dance

10/& fine arts in their K-U education system and extracurricular music & dance clubs. Why? B/c North Koreans want to be as much a part of the world as everyone else. The leadership, elite & Jangmadang Gen are trying to lead the DPRK out from under the Western hegemonic sanctions

11/regime that seems hellbent on taking away their National Defense of nuclear deterrence, and all the socialist DPRKers know it'll take time, it is the very socialist struggle in their anthem and ideology which they proudly believe. Not only are DPRKers learning to "own" the

12/modern and classical music & dance styles of the US/West, Europe, Russia & China, their socialist pride shows thru. This screen grab shows two of the dancers on bended knee holding their forearms vertically, bent at the elbow, making a fist in a signature choreographed gesture

13/I interpret to mean "solidarity in socialism". Another classic DPRK dance move is reaching out w/ both arms, taking hold of something by the hands and, w/ strength, pulling it into one's own sphere.
이 밤이 좋아

Music: Let's Dance Tonight by Pia Zadora

14/It has the feel of "seizing the day". Or could it mean: "pulling the imperialist capitalists into the sphere of socialism"? I.e. a gesture meaning the "victory of socialism"? It is a disgraceful fact that the West/US/Europe/ROK, in their closed-minded willful ignorance, in

15/claiming that North Korea is a "pariah state" "hermit kingdom" "closed off from the world" whose people "know nothing of the external world",

Rock music is seen as a creative musical genre in North Korea, a country that reveres and excels in fine arts.

https://twitter.com/BonicMichael/status/1328088280156389376?s=20

16/unwittingly reveal the root cause of their perceptual blindness, which is mistakenly believing that DPRK is "closed off from the world". On the contrary the projection of their fears onto the DPRK prevents them from realizing that it is their ideologically closed-mindedness,

17/habitual two-dimensional thinking and philistine nature that makes THEM the party that, seeing everything thru the categorical lens of "Western democracy vs autocracy", has closed itself off to the realities of socialist DPRK and China. In such a

https://twitter.com/BonicMichael/status/1375337521421316097?s=20

18/polarized and categorical world perceptually defined by its two-dimensional thinking, US's North Korea policy rarely gets beyond the "us vs. them" mindset. Fixation on "defending the homeland", a military industrial complex that thrives on conflict, hawks spoon-fed Cold War

19/propaganda, an IC having a political agenda and all of the square NK policymakers who know virtually nothing of DPRK socialist experience cannot possibly know that the appreciation for the high culture of music, dance & fine arts in the socialist DPRK equals that of America's.

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