Why South Korea went into a media frenzy over this North Korean singer
It’s propaganda
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield.
A frenzied media posse, the kind usually associated with K-pop stars, has been chasing Hyon Song Wol, a singer in North Korea’s all-female Moranbong Band and a rising political star in Kim Jong Un’s regime, on her two-day visit to South Korea.
She led a seven-member delegation to inspect facilities in the South where the North’s Samjiyon orchestra — also led by Hyon — will play on its visit during next month’s Winter Olympics, in which 22 North Korean athletes will compete.
As she made stops Sunday and Monday, breathless local journalists reported, paparazzi-style, on what she was wearing — was that fox fur around her neck? — and what she had been eating. Fish soup and abalone porridge for breakfast Monday morning, in case you were wondering. Hyon’s face graced the front pages of almost every newspaper in South Korea that day, too.
The focus on Hyon
Hyon, 35, is the focus of so much curiosity partly because of her role at the center of one of North Korea’s biggest cultural exports, the Moranbong Band.
The band was established on Kim’s orders in 2012 and was like nothing North Korea had seen before. Instead of women in tent-like traditional dresses with a repertoire consisting entirely of songs about revolutionary fervor, Hyon and her fellow singers made their debut in sparkly short dresses and performed the theme from Rocky and Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”
The band, led by Hyon, was due to play in Beijing at the end of 2015 but abruptly returned home just hours before its members were set to go onstage. This was apparently because China objected to the high propaganda quotient in the band’s repertoire.
But the fascination with Hyon also stems from rumors that she was once Kim’s girlfriend and that he’d had her publicly executed with a machine gun as punishment for making pornographic videos. The fact that there’s absolutely no proof for any of that — putting aside the minor detail that she’s clearly still alive — hasn’t stopped the repeated retelling of this sensational tale over the past four years.
Propaganda
In that way, protests about intrusive media coverage aside, Hyon’s visit is a propaganda coup for North Korea.
The glamorous singer represents a very different side of North Korea from the one with rampant starvation and human rights abuses — the one that is reality for the vast majority of North Koreans.
“North Koreans are very proud,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert on North Korean culture who teaches at Korea University in Seoul. “They are saying, ‘We may be a communist state, but our girls are the most beautiful, they’re not like those plastic girls in the South,’ ” she said, in a reference to the extensive use of cosmetic surgery in South Korea.
The cheering squad
That rationale prompted North Korea to keep using attractive young women in closefitting uniforms to direct traffic in Pyongyang despite the arrival of traffic lights, and is behind its decision to dispatch a 230-member “cheering squad” to South Korea for the Winter Olympics.
