Has North Korea Spawned a Sixth Sex Pistol?
'God Save Kim Jong-un -- We Mean It, Man!'
Is it 'Anarchy in the DPRK'?
Is there really punk rock north of the DMZ?
In May of 2012, The World's Seoul-based reporter Jason Strother investigated the legend of Ri Seong-woong, who must have been the loneliest punk in Pyongyang.
Strother's radio segment is worth a listen:
Except that Ri Seong-woong doesn't exist. There's no punk rock north of the DMZ. Ri Seong-woong is a collaboration not a rock star, a piece of political performance art not a refugee from North Korea. His name is spelled many ways; it has been romanized in translation as Rhee, Lee, or Ri, Seong-woong or Sung-wung.
Ri is the creation of two tipsy ROKers, Oh Do-ham and Park Jun-chul from the band Pavlov. They dreamed him up and recruited members of other bands to give him a back story complete with a band called the Bamseom Pirates.
The story of the Ri Seong-woong's birth, rise and fall was performed in a three performances in Seoul in the spring of 2012. Ten South Korean indie bands pretend to be North Korean punk rockers. According to "Punk in Pyongyang is Art in Seoul," the pseudo-DPRK punk rock club was filled with the ROK rockers: Pavlov, "Nocontrol, Mukimukimanmansu, The Alligators, Yamamgata Twikster + Phal bo che, Kuang Program, Paryumchiakdan and Dan Pyeon Son."
LeeSungWoong even has his own Sound Cloud page with 16 tracks from the performance. Here are the Bam Pirates performing a song that may be called 밤섬해적단 - 철창살 ('A Year Behind Bars'?)
Korean Joongang Daily reporter, Moon So-young interviewed Oh Do-ham for "Punk in Pyongyang is Art in Seoul," Moon asked Oh how he and Park came up with an imaginary Pyongyang rock club full of punks:
“Suddenly, the question ‘What if there were a punk rock club in Pyongyang?’ hit me when I was out drinking one night and the question never left me,” said Oh Do-harm, a member of participating band Pavlov. He and his friend Park June-cheol curated the event under the name The AWDWs.
“I mentioned it to my musician friends, e-mailed an inquiry to a music critic, and even asked a North Korean defector about that idea,” Oh said. “Then, one day, we brought ourselves to ask, ‘Why don’t we become punk rockers in North Korea?’”
The Huffpost Blog published a great piece by John R. Eperjesi, an english prof at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Dr. Eperjesi summarizes the tale of "North Korean Punk Rocker Rhee Sung-wung" as it was dramatized during this "punk performance piece" created by the ten bands organized by Mr. Oh and Park Jun-chul.
The imaginary Rhee has lived quite an eventful life which says a lot about what these South Korean musicians think about life in the north where the punk rock sun doesn't actually shine. According to Eperjesi, Rhee was born to a life of privilege in the North Korean elite but soon rebelled:
"The legend of Rhee is made up of fragments. He suffered from a mysterious illness when he was young which was cured by soaking in the Mt. Pal-bo hot spring. He spent time studying in Leningrad. At some point Rhee went crazy and retreated to the mountains. He was arrested in North Korea and convicted of possessing and distributing South Korean cultural trash: magazines, toys, videos. His first sexual experience was with a girl at a mandatory military camp. A pirate radio station hidden in Hamkyung Buk-do in North Korea triggered Rhee's musical enlightenment."
Rhee was arrested for possessing South Korean media. Eperjesi then contrasts this fictional arrest of Rhee in the north to the actual indictment of a real young man named Park Jung-geun by the South Korean government.
According to Eperjesi, what led to the Park's incarceration in February of 2012 was the
"the real arrest of 23-year old Park Jung-geun by the South Korean government for satirically re-tweeting messages from a North Korean website. Jung-geun was accused of violating the National Security Law, which bans acts that "benefit the enemy.""
It turns out that the re-tweeting of North Korean content and satirical messages in general are dangerous under the National Security Law of South Korea. Life in the never-ending cold war of the Korean peninusula is just too tense for political irreverence. Perhaps they will be looking to lock up Rhee and his Banseum Pirates as well. On the other hand, a parody of North Korean punk 'rebellion' maybe politically correct in the South these days.
So, is it more dangerous to be fictional punk rocker in Pyongyang or a real re-tweeter in Seoul?
Dr. Eperjesi quotes a NYT interview with Sam Zarifi of Amnesty International. Zarifi described the South Korean government's arrest of photographer Park Jung-guen for "re-tweeting" as a travesty worthy of the humorless North:
"This is not a national security case; it's a sad case of the South Korean authorities' complete failure to understand sarcasm. Imprisoning anyone for peaceful expression of their opinions violates international law but in this case, the charges against Park are simply ludicrous and should be dropped immediately."
In November of 2012 Park received a suspended sentence for his tweeting. Mr. Park, who the Times described as a "social media and free speech activist," claims that it was parody:
"Mr. Park was accused of resending 100 posts from an official North Korean Twitter account until late last year, including one that said “Long Live Kim Jong-il!” After Mr. Kim, the longtime North Korean dictator, died last December, Mr. Park also wrote on his Twitter account that he wanted to send North Korea “uranium and plutonium” as a show of condolence. He also uploaded Web links to North Korean propaganda songs.Mr. Park denied praising the North Korean government and said his intention was to lampoon the North Korean government. In a North Korean post that he sent out on Twitter, he replaced a swarthy North Korean soldier’s face with a downcast version of his own and the soldier’s rifle with a bottle of whiskey."
Kim Jong-un's nuclear threats and missile tests have led the conservative administration of South Korean president Lee Myung-bak to enforce the rigid National Security Law against anyone re-tweeting or disseminating internet content from north of the 38th parallel. This has free speech watch dogs on alert.
Choe Hang-sun of the New York Times cites the Amnesty International 2012 annual report which mentions Park's case and describes how the South Korean government is monitoring social media platforms and censoring websites for national security reasons. It seems that tweeting about North Korea can get you indicted if your humor is not broad enough for the censors. According to Choe this National Security Law has long been an obstacle to free expression in the South:
"The United Nations and human rights groups have called on South Korea for years to repeal or revise the law, which the country’s past military dictators had used not only against people suspected of being spies but also against political dissidents. The law has proved resilient in a society where many fear North Korea, which has launched military provocations against the South."
Clearly the repression in the North is far more severe than the censorship in South Korea. There are no punk rockers allowed on one side of the DMZ and there are plenty of punks, indie-rockers, hip-hoppers and K-pop celebrities on the other. According to Eperjesi, the bands who created this 'punk performance art' are recording a CD to smuggle north when the tensions ease and there is already South Korean indie bands making waves as SXSW.
Interested in more media news from Seoul? Consider following Jason Strother. He describes himself as a "multimedia journalist." Strother reports regularly from Seoul and many of his stories are media related. His most recent report is about "Dating Flash Mobs in Seoul." Check out his segment on the political pop/agitprop art of Song Byeok : "From North Korean Propagandist to Satirist in Exile: The Work of Song Byeok"