The supreme leader of North Korea Kim Jong-Un described Korean popular music (K-Pop) as a “vicious cancer“, as per a New York Times report. He said that the South Korean genre was corrupting North Korea’s culture. The country’s state media has issued a warning that if left unchecked, K-Pop would make North Korea crumble like a damp wall, the NYT report adds. 

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Kim Jong-un’s apparent dislike for K-Pop is not something that developed overnight. In fact, the leader had imposed new laws in North Korea to curb the popularity of the South Korean in December last year. The laws entailed a sentence of up to 15 years of hard labour for anyone who was caught watching or in possession of South Korean entertainment content.

Why does Kim Jong-un dislike K-Pop?

According to the New York Times report, Kim said that K-Pop is corrupting young North Koreans’ attire, hairstyles, speech, behaviour. 

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A defector from North Korea, who also runs a network that smuggles K-Pop into the country told NYT that Kim Jong-un is trying to implement an ideological control over the youth so he doesn’t lose the foundation for the future of his family’s dynastic rule. 

Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, attended a K-pop concert in Pyongyang in 2018. The concert saw the North Korean leader meet the South Korean musicians. 

However, none of South Korea’s boy bands were invited to participate in the concert.

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“North Korea is still very conservative about men singing and dancing. K-Pop boy bands who show off their dynamic dance moves will be too much for people in Pyongyang to take in,” Philo Kim, a professor at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies in Seoul, told ABC. The chief editor of Asia Press International was quoted by New York Times saying that Kim Jong-un sees K-Pop as a cultural invasion.

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Who is affected by this cultural war?

Along with the people who consume South Korean content in North Korea, several K-Pop bands might be affected by Kim Jong-un’s ideology. In the past few years, several K-Pop bands, including BTS, BIGBANG, BlackPink and SuperM, have become popular around the globe. However, their North Korean audience has to rely on illegal smuggling to consume K-Pop.