Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom
Looking over the list of tracks for Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom, I stop myself at “Numbers Games” listing. Given the reviews I’ve read, I assume this is a track devoted to transmissions of “number stations”, which typically presents voices (eerie voices, I might add) reciting code numbers — broadcasting, I assume, for an audience of one James Bond-dude in another part of the globe. Whether North Korean number stations are any different from any other nation’s number stations, I do not know. I don’t know that it makes any difference to the average lay-person listening in. (Then again, any person listening in on a short-wave radio is not an “average lay-person”.)
I once had an “Introduction to Asian Studies” course. Our group from the class were sitting in the study room, pondering North Korea. Someone asked “Can’t we transmit ‘Radio Free Korea’ or something?” A Korean student shook his head, in a manner suggesting just how absurd the question was.
Actually, Kim Jong Il’s government blocks the entire radio band on all radios in his nation so that all radios are turned to… Radio Pyong-yang. So thwat that.
The American Prospect’s review of this cd suggests that the way to listen to the cd is to watch where various culture’s influences sneak through, the cracks of a Japanese “Hello Kitty” telling us where it sneaks into North Korea’s closed totalitarian state at large. (Hence the name “Commie Funk”, in reference to the question mark at the end of track #7.)
It’s not the sort of thing you might throw on for casual listening…
I don’t know. I have a tape consisting of recordings of Marshal Applewhite speeches and Jim Jones preachings (thank you, Clyde Lewis). I’ve… occasionally tossed it in, and had it on as… background noise. Or to drone on in falling asleep with. I don’t remember what’s on the other side of the tape, but I think it may be an REM album.
[additional edit: Actually, the tape with Marshal Applewhite and Jim Jones is interspersed with the long-ish Queen song “The Prophet’s Song”, the David Byrne song from The Forest with the kid singing, and Stephen Hawking musing, oddly enough considering how he made an about-face a year back, on how scientists oughta be able to make an about-face if it comes to that. Which makes it not such an odd thing to listen to casually.
“New Model Army” sounds like a Devo track, but it probably is. Mark Mothersbaugh had something in mind for a future dystopia.