How North Korea’s latest propaganda song has become a TikTok hit | BBC News

How North Korea’s latest propaganda song has become a TikTok hit | BBC News

let’s take a look now one of the most read stories on the BBC News website and app and it involves the latest song from North Korea’s Kim Jong-un let’s take a [Music] listen they all look really happy don’t they this is called friendly father it’s gone viral on Tik Tok with jenz users cently loving the stiny electro pop with I imagine um some oblivious to the Korean lyrics which include let’s sing Kim Jong ear the great leader let’s brag about Kim Jong-un our friendly father in the latest in a line of propaganda pop songs churned out by the communist state in the past 50 years many American un users the irony has not been lost on them that it’s gone viral on the chinese-owned app while us lawmakers are trying to ban it while Keith Howard is an ameritus professor of musicology at London in school of Oriental African studies who is known predominantly for his works on Career he explained to me how this video would have been created if you think of North Korea as a monolithic state with one leadership and everything going down from the top then you’ve got people coming up from the bottom so um your musicians your composers your groups they’re all there they’re all appointed by the state and songs are created from the bottom up but the lyrics are approved from the top down so the lyrics have to be ideologically sound and they tend to be distributed around everyone has to compose a song sometimes it’s a competition sometimes it’s a group of composers are approached and then everyone chooses which song is most appropriate and initially the sort of censorship of what’s right comes from the bottom and moves up until it’s approved at the top and of course medor is tightly controlled in North Korea so how are people accessing these songs how are they disseminated well there are songs at the beginning of um television programs every day there are songs at the end um North Koreans tend to wake up to songs on loudspeakers both in in villages and in cities obviously from apartment blocks it’s much easier in apartment blocks you have speakers which put out ideology which put out announcements but also wake you up and you can’t turn those speakers off um you can’t change your your radio or your television stations they’re they’re fixed and fixed at the factory um they’re checked every so often your television and radios they’re checked by the authorities to make sure you haven’t tampered with them in case you could get something from say South Korea or or China or anywhere else so you only get the diet of songs and other material that that that’s decided by state bodies is appropriate for you and do they work as propaganda tools well yes they do and part of the the point here is that the song has to be incredibly catchy and it’s catchy not so much as as K-pop but in terms of readily graspable Melodies simple Melodies but catchy um words that go with them refrains that come around every verse um and fairly simple dance moves which I suppose in South Korea we saw and we all saw basically with kangam style many years ago where everybody took up the dance moves and created Their Own lyrics in North Korea you can’t do that of course but you can grasp those dance moves or the the the hand poed the the the fisting um everything like that which makes the song sort of universally um appreciated that’s the wrong word but everybody takes it up everybody sings it everybody gets used to it Keith just briefly obviously you’re saying it works as a bit of propaganda inside North Korea we’re just talking about how popular this has become with Jers on the likes of Tik Tok how does it work as a bit of propaganda outside of North Korea well it doesn’t unless we consider what the words are and I I I suspect most of the genz people are not considering the words the words Mark a change in North Korea it’s a very significant song because it’s positioning the leader Kim Jong-un as the father the father of all the mothers the father of all the fathers the father of all the people which is actually something that’s been reserved until now to his grandfather hims who was in control from 1948 to 1994 he died in 1994 um so there’s a change in ideology going on there Keith how would that

North Korea’s latest propaganda song “Friendly Father” has proven to be an unexpected hit… on TikTok.

The pop-y propaganda has drawn praise from Gen Z users of the social media app, but experts say it hides something more sinister.

With lyrics including “Let’s sing Kim Jong Un, the great leader/ Let’s brag about Kim Jong Un, our friendly father”, the song is full of praise for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un – who has vowed to “thoroughly annihilate the US” and has launched dozens of ballistic missiles.

Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog

For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news

#NorthKorea #BBCNews