Rockin’ in the unfree world: North Korea’s Moranbong Band and the celebrity dictator

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the North Korean regime incorporated various aspects of foreign pop music into its own state-created pop band in order to re-direct desire back towards Kim Jong-un. Using Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle, this article argues that North Korea has successfully created a celebrity dictator who is able to negotiate the increasing presence of a potentially destabilizing foreign popular culture due to globalization.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• pop music
• celebrity dictator
• cultural globalization
• spectacle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Zeglen

David Zeglen is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University, Virginia. His dissertation explores representations of the Kim Jong-un regime on social media, and how this has impacted the ideological legitimacy of North Korea within the country. He has recently published a chapter on North Korea’s only celebrity couple in the edited collection First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (2015, Bloomsbury).