September 21, 2005
Various | Radio Pyongyang |Sublime Frequencies | North Korea
buy it
Oh, strangeness. Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom is, to my knowledge, the first commercial release that allows us to poke our heads behind the last panels of iron curtain and get an earful. The tunes may sound surprisingly slick to some, considering this is a land where famine and oil lamps aren't just things found in history books. But while Kim Jong-il may take the lives of his comrades lightly, he's famously serious about his pop culture. (He once went so far as to kidnap a famous South Korean actress and her director husband, forcing them to make a Godzilla ripoff film, among others.)
Like Mussolini and Al Capone before him, Kim seems to enjoy a good cry, so Radio Pyongyang offers plenty class-A sentimentality. There are tunes that sound like love songs straight from a South Korean variety show--others feature strings and/or huge Soviet-style choruses of men, women or children. These tracks are expertly and mind-bendingly mixed into a continuous stream of sentiment and propaganda by producer Christian Vivraant. It's a twsted DJ set of sounds smuggled through the communist looking glass.
Contrary to the extended title, there's nothing even remotely funky about this disc. (Well, certainly there's something funky about a brainwashed Asian ABBA singing praises to their Great Leader, but not in a Parliment kind of way.) But on the Sublime Frequencies mind-melt meter, I'd rate this as "essential madness."