Song of General Kim Il Sung

The story

The "Song of General Kim Il Sung" is a North Korean marching song composed by Kim Won-gyun in 1946, with words by Ri Chan; Kim Chaek, North Korea's first Minister of Industry and Minister of National Defence, as a composer alongside Kim Won-gyun, the composer of the anthem "Aegukka". It is the earliest known work of art to mention Kim Il Sung, and so can be said to mark the beginning of the personality cult built around him. Musically it is a four-square march in A-B-A form, of paired two-bar phrases with dotted rhythms, its percussion and brass meant to heighten its revolutionary tone.

In the early 1980s Kim Jong Il began promoting the song, and it has since displaced "Aegukka", the national anthem, as the most important song in the country and the de facto anthem played at public gatherings, and it has been sung more than the official anthem since it first appeared. It belongs to the cult of the country's dead leaders: Kim Il Sung, styled the "Eternal President", died in 1994, and the song is still widely played. North Koreans have typically known its words by heart, though this seems to have changed under his grandson, Kim Jong Un.

Its first two bars are the interval signal of North Korean radio and television, and state television and the Voice of Korea open each day's broadcasts with it. North Korean sources say that the satellites Kwangmyŏngsŏng-1, launched in 1998, and Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2, said to have been launched in a test on 5 April 2009, broadcast the song among other data. In imitation of the Buddhist practice of carving sutras, its words are carved in stone, among other places on the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang. Around 2025 the third verse was altered to drop the country's name in favour of a general reference to the homeland.

What it says

A march in praise of Kim Il Sung as the country's general and leader; martial and celebratory.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.