Forbidden K pop to centre stage North Koreans set for music debut

SEOUL – Growing up in North Korea, Hyuk’s childhood was about survival. He never listened to banned K-pop music, but after defecting to the South, he is now about to debut as an idol.

Hyuk is one of two young North Koreans in a new K-pop band called 1Verse – the first time that performers originally from the nuclear-armed North have been trained for stardom in South Korea’s global K-pop industry.

Before he was 10, Hyuk – who, like many K-pop idols, now goes by one name – was skipping school to work on the streets in his native North Hamgyong province, and admits he “had to steal quite a bit just to survive”.

“I had never really listened to K-pop music,” he told AFP, explaining that “watching music videos felt like a luxury to me”.

“My life was all about survival,” he said, adding that he did everything from farm work to hauling shipments of cement to earn money to buy food for his family.

When he was 13, his mother, who had escaped from North Korea and made it to the South, urged him to join her.

He realised this could be his chance to escape starvation and hardship, but said he knew nothing about the other half of the Korean peninsula.

“To me, the world was just North Korea – nothing beyond that,” he said.

His bandmate, Seok, also grew up in the North – but in contrast to Hyuk’s hardscrabble upbringing, he was raised in a relatively affluent family, living close to the border.

As a result, even though K-pop and other South Korean content like K-dramas are banned in the North