PYONGYANG, North Korea — On the sculpted entrance to the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, a woman, graceful as a mermaid, played the flute as she floated through a sea of stars. Out in the parking lot, locals played tennis in the September sun on a court painted onto the concrete, making do with a ball long since stripped of its green fuzz. "This is a special theater of the president!" a loudspeaker boomed.
I was here to see Samjiyon, North Korea's "newly formed popular band." This being North Korea, "popular band" has somewhat different connotations than the usual guitar-bass-drums four-piece singing about girls: Samjiyon is a collective of dozens of performers who jam on violins, pianos, and accordions in praise of the ruling Kim dynasty and the exploits of the North Korean people. It's a church band for North Korea's state religion of nationalism.
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Samjiyon would be playing for the benefit of the tour group I had joined, a group of almost two dozen people from the developed world who came to see the sites of Pyongyang. Officially, North Korea welcomes American tourists. My minder on a 2008 trip warned me that when someone referred to Americans as "U.S. bastards or U.S. imperialists, I will just translate that. I hope that's OK," he said, adding apologetically, "I'm just doing my job."
Each year hundreds of Americans complete the simple application process and visit Pyongyang on package tours, which include a visit to the Mausoleum of Kim Il Sung, the USS Pueblo -- moored in Pyongyang since 1968 and the only U.S. Navy ship held captive abroad -- and the hysterical Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, which details the iniquities of the Americans during the Korean War. Tourism seems to be expanding: It is now easier for Americans to visit the country for longer than the customary four-day trip, and a government-overseen investment group recently started offering cruises.
North Korea, like Annie Oakley with tunnel vision, feels the need to prove that anything you can do it can do better. (Like Paris, Pyongyang boasts an Arch of Triumph -- only Pyongyang's, with its 25,500 blocks of white granite, stands 33 feet higher.) Nowhere, save for the country's outsized military, is this more apparent than in North Korea's cultural endeavors. The Mass Games, a staple for tourists, has the Guinness world record for largest gymnast display, with 100,090 performers. Keith Howard, an expert on North Korean music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, recalls seeing an Italian conductor play in Pyongyang; afterward a local conductor repeated the performance, to rave reviews on local television.
North Korea also turns out less overtly competitive cultural products. The country's publishers sell fairy tales about imperialist landlords. Its film industry -- famously favored by the country's mercurial ruler, Kim Jong Il -- turns out movies about pure Koreans suffering under the Japanese. Its largest art studio employs thousands of workers who paint pictures of steel foundries and various Kims gazing over cliffs. There is even an artist rumored to have long hair.
But it is music that truly permeates North Korean life, at least the parts of it that have been approved for foreign consumption. Karaoke machines and attractive singing waitresses feature in practically all North Korean restaurants open to foreign tourists. On a recent trip plaintive music wafted out of the escalator to the Pyongyang metro, so deep underground that people sat down for the ride. North Koreans whom my group approached in parks or at tourist attractions would occasionally spontaneously break out in song.
The Kim dynasty has long fostered this kind of musical enthusiasm. Kim Il Sung played the organ at his church as a child. In his essay "On the Direction Which Musical Creation Should Take: A Talk to Creators," Kim Jong Il writes of two versions of the song "General Kim Il Sung Is Our Sun": one in E major and one in D major. Although the younger Kim prefers D, the elder Kim said, "When the song was sung in a higher key, it was better for expressing emotions richly." Kim Jong Il listens carefully and concludes that "the song expresses the writer's emotion more vividly" in a higher key.
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