ìNorth Korean Performers Adapt to Life on a New Stage,î by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 16 May, p. 3.
Strange article on the appeal of North Korean singers who defect and then try to keep their careers going in the South, where tastes are very differentóor are they?
One way that North Korean artists, with their stilted ways and their horribly proletarian content (imagine a pop song about spreading fertilizer or mixing cement!), somehow manage to eek out careers in the modern South is that they remind older audiences of simpler times.
Hereís the perfect paragraph that sums up the piece:
ìëIt reminds me of old days, as if Iíve come home again,í said Woo Shi Yong, a 52-year-old South Korean civil servant, standing toward the back of the audience. ëI can feel how North Koreans are living, whereas I donít understand what young people are singing these days in South Korea.íîThere is the agony and ecstasy of globalization in a nutshell: the pull of the old versus the pull of the new.