Why South Korean pop culture rocks and North Korea’s does not
Godzilla-style monster flick. Kim Jong Un, the current ruler, demands “masterpieces pulsating with the sentiment of the times", by which he means praise for himself. The president of South Korea probably has views on the arts, too.
But because it is a democracy, its artists do not have to care what he thinks. Which helps explain why South Korean pop culture has spread joy across the world, whereas North Korean “people’s culture" has not. On YouTube “Gangnam Style", a South Korean rap video, has been viewed 5bn times—nearly 60 times as often as “Kiss", a popular children’s song from the North.
On IMDb, an online film database, the top South Korean films have hundreds of thousands of ratings; the top northern ones, hardly any. The gulf is so vast that only a logarithmic scale can illustrate it (see charts). Cultural success translates into cash.
Half of the top ten bestselling albums in the world last year were South Korean, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group. The country’s pop-culture exports were a whopping $13bn in 2022, up from just under $5bn in 2013. This sum dwarfs North Korea’s official exports of all goods and services combined.
The two Koreas share 5,000 years of history and were separated only after the second world war. So a comparison of their modern pop culture offers a useful insight into the effect of politics on creativity. The first difference is freedom.
In the South, artists are allowed to criticise, satirise and expose uncomfortable truths. “Parasite", the first foreign film to win Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020, presents a bleak picture of inequality in South Korea (which is not especially bad by rich-country standards). “Squid Game", a television
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