Cultural Bubble Goes Pop

PYONGYANG, North Korea — The song has a retro feel to it, a bit of swing and the mood of a Vegas house band, and the outfits on the three female singers bring to mind the long-lost word "stewardess." Behind them, dressed in a blue, sequined shirt, Ri Jin Hyuk builds toward the finish, sticks held high above his head, striking the perfect rock drummer pose.

Then he finishes with polite rat-a-tat pops on the snare. Like he's playing a polka.

That's the required style if you want to play in a Pyongyang high school band, where the repertoire is pretty much limited to feel-good North Korean revolutionary folk songs such as "Let's Study Hard," "Let's Become One" and "Let's Go to the Army."

Play rock music? Rap? Metal? Ri says he's never even heard them.

"I have never seen a Western drummer," the thin 18-year-old with slightly spiky hair says after the performance in his school's auditorium. Ri claims he's never heard of the Beatles, never listened to any Western bands and has absolutely no interest in doing so.

Right answer.

In North Korea, a land without Elvis or Oprah, the cultural heroes are supposed to be homegrown. Western pop culture -- especially American pop culture -- is unwelcome here, denounced by Kim Jong Il's regime as a capitalist virus. So it banned Hollywood and Google, like some stern 1950s parent trying to keep a lock on the kids.

But North Korea is discovering that no country can completely seal its borders against electronic intruders.

Although the demilitarized buffer zone to the south still provides protection against illegal imports from South Korea, the real action is to the north. North Korean defectors say DVDs of foreign music and movies have accompanied the increase in trade and traffic with China over the last few years, leaking across the 850-mile border.

From South Korean television dramas to Chinese martial arts movies and a smattering of Hollywood hits, they are giving North Koreans a break from the relentless pro-regime, anti-U.S. propaganda and a peek into how the much-wealthier outside world lives.

"For decades, this country was second only to Albania, or even second to none, for keeping out all information about foreign countries," says Andrei Lankov, a Russian academic based in Seoul who lived in Pyongyang in the 1980s. "But the old state supervision, where the police would do random checks looking for things like radios, collapsed over the last decade. It was too expensive to run."