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This essay explores song culture in North Korea, and its development from the early years of North Korean statehood to the late 2010s. Songs routinely take on great importance in totalitarian states because lyrics can project meaning with clarity, and North Korea is no exception. In North Korea, songs reinforce the class state, elevate the paramount leadership, claim authority by promoting historical facts, myths and legends, and reflect the “everyday extraordinary” that has been deemed fundamental to collective and institutional life. Songs comply with Soviet socialist realism but also North Korea’s “seed theory,” embedding ideology within standardized stylistic forms. They comply with a literary art theory developed as part of the artistic implications of the state’s all-embracing “self reliance” philosophy of juche. From “revolutionary songs” and later “revolutionary operas” that retell state foundations and underpin the authority of the state and its leaders to authorized pop songs that have become the equivalent of newspaper editorials, songs punctuate daily life. They have become a totalizing art form, both because they are endlessly broadcast across the country to fill public and private spaces, but also because they have been made participatory. Hence, in the theatre that is North Korea, people continuously hear and continuously perform songs, watching, listening, singing, dancing, and marching them. This essay identifies stylistic changes that mark the eras of the three dynastic leaders, most recently with groups such as Moranbong, but argues that the fundamentals of song culture, and the mechanics of song creation, control and promotion, remain largely unchanged.