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OK, before I start to talk about why we were in North Korea, a few clarifications need to be made. First off, no, I don’t care how cool the songs on your iPod are, plugging it into a karaoke machine does not make you a DJ. That would be the equivalent of playing a few rounds of guitar hero then calling yourself a musician or, even worse, writing a blog post and then claiming you’re a journalist. Secondly, some dude in a nightclub who puts a CD into a CD-player, hits repeat and then stands guard to make sure no one fucks with it, he’s not a DJ, either. Otherwise every frat guy or house party host could claim to be one. Sure, I usually give shit to DJs for being hacks, but it does take a little knowledge of beat matching to be one.
I mention this because a while back a journalist for the Guardian claimed he was the first DJ to play North Korea because he was allowed to plug his iPod in at a club. DJing that ain’t.
So, with that said, you can probably guess what I was doing in North Korea. I was there, documenting the first real DJ party in the DPRK with DJ B.O, who should be familiar to you all. The trip was his brainchild, but made possible and sponsored by Koryo Tours, one of the few tour companies operating in North Korea, and probably the one with the best connections… The connections needed to rent a venue and bring in the DJ equipment to make this happen.
We went with a larger group, part of a package tour that included a non-stop schedule of sights that quickly blurred into one continuous stream. I can’t really remember what we saw on which day and I don’t feel like writing a long, boring essay about the entire trip. Instead, this is just a random string of things that stick out in my mind.
1) The mass games are a breathtaking display of co-ordination and well worth seeing at least once.
2) The best part of visiting the DMZ wasn’t the actual divide, but the two-hour drive down from Pyongyang.
3) In the summer, the landscape is lush and even the fleeting glimpse of farmers toiling in fields and going about their daily lives is exciting.
4) There are a multitude of museums, libraries and carnivals that we visited, and I enjoyed the cultural aspect of all of them, learning how North Koreans want to be seen instead of how Western journalists and governments think the country should be seen.
5) Besides all the beautifully done propaganda, the only advertisement I saw was for a car produced as a joint venture between North and South Korea.
6) Pyongyang airport is a throwback to the '80s. It’s a tiny, dark building with a handful of customs officers at one end of a room and a couple of security checks at the other. I had always imagined North Korea as having one of the strictest customs of any country, routinely taking hapless tourists into private rooms for full body cavity searches for trying to smuggle in Twinkies and other contraband. The reality was the opposite. Hell, the security scanners weren’t even plugged in.
7) Despite conventional Western wisdom (I just read Freakonomics ) that the DPRK is a country of bleak, grey communist-era buildings populated by monotone, uniform-clad comrades, I was surprised by how colorful everything was. Square, squat buildings bathed in bright pinks, yellows and blues occupied by kids in bright cartoon-covered clothing and women in floral summer dresses. Being in Pyongyang felt a little like being in a county town in the middle of China, except a lot cleaner and not nearly as much staring and pointing. Huge, beautiful hand-painted propaganda murals and Dear Leaders portraits were everywhere.
As for the DJ event, well, yeah, we were giddy with excitement. Who wouldn’t be excited to be a part of the first DJ party in North Korea? But at the same time we weren’t delusional about the significance of the show. We didn’t kid ourselves that this would be a culturally important event that opened up the DPRK or even just a few North Korean minds to Western music.
So what to expect at a DJ set in Pyongyang? Well, not many North Koreans. Like most DJ parties in Shanghai or Beijing there were a lot of white faces. Most of the crowd was made up of foreign tour groups and some foreign embassy staff who had been tipped off that we were coming. There were a handful of North Korean’s in attendance, which made the party worthwhile, but their impression of the event seemed to be a mix of confusion and amusement. This might have been due to the sounds assaulting their ears.
The show happened in the KTV room of a hotel and even though DJ B.O was able to bring in his mixer and computer, we still had to rely on the venue’s PA system, which was a karaoke machine attached to a few cheap overhead speakers. When turned up even half way the sound started to become more of a muddled stew of noise than music.
At the start the vibe was similar to a junior high dance, with tour groups sticking to their packs refusing to mingle or hit the dance floor. Lucky for us, North Korea does have beer and as it started to flow, so too did the steam of people willing to dance. First it was a few, then B.O gave in to peer pressure and played a few choice tracks that are staples for any wedding DJ: Ice Ice Baby, YMCA and a couple of other unmentionable songs.
Our curfew was midnight, but around 11:30pm the power went out. It was brief, but everything had to be rebooted and 10 minutes later the power went out for a second time. We took this as our cue to end the night. We had accomplished what we came for.
