To really get a glimpse of the strangeness that is North Korea, you need to hear their pop music:
Sublime Frequencies put together a fascinating compilation of North Korean music, mixing together fragments of shortwave radio broadcasts (including numbers stations), compiliations, and anything else they could get their hands on.
The result is really odd, to say the least. Instead of playing entire songs you tend to get a minute or two here and there, which is probably for the best, as it all sounds very cheeseball, a sort of militaristic synthpop. Don't worry about not understanding the lyrics; all you need to be able to recognize is "Kim Jung Il" and "Kim Il Sung".
I have a couple of North Korean VCDs that really bring home the weirdness of their popular culture. The first is a musical variety show that's like the Lawrence Welk show shoved through the Juche filter. The musicians play in a style that's as far from rocking out as you can possibly imagine, including a row of 30-something women wearing sequined dresses and swaying back and forth while playing top of the line Roland keytars. It's like a glimpse into Robert Palmer's nightmares. And, yes, the finale number is about how completely badass Kim Jung Il is. Well, at least I think so - they sing his name a lot and it's all very upbeat, with strange light effects happening in the background.
However, the real winner are the three episodes I have of a North Korean children's cartoon about militant communist furries. Our heroes, the Flower Kingdom, are trying to infilitrate the Enemy, and the entire plot is about secret agents trying to expose each other, interspersed with violence (blood and all) and the main character heroically sacrificing himself for the homeland at the end of each episode as Communist enka plays over soft focus montages of the beauty of the Flower Kingdom. It makes for fascinating, if somewhat depressing, viewing.
FnordChan
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