Song of General Kim Jong Il

The story

The "Song of General Kim Jong Il" is a North Korean marching song composed by Sol Myong-sun (1936-2012) to words by Sin Un-ho (1941-2020) in 1997. It praises Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 to 2011 and is styled the "Eternal General Secretary", as part of his personality cult; under his father Kim Il Sung he had himself helped to run the cult of the elder Kim. According to North Korean media, the song was first performed on 15 February 1997, the eve of Kim Jong Il's birthday, by the Merited State Choir of the Korean People's Army, and the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun published it on 9 April 1997, the fourth anniversary of his appointment as Chairman of the National Defence Commission.

Many songs about Kim Jong Il were written, from one of 1971 to one of 2011, and this became the best known. It appeared during the "Arduous March", when North Korea, after Kim Il Sung's death, faced international economic isolation, the fall of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and food shortages caused by severe natural disasters. It has been argued that it was no accident that a song glorifying the leader appeared then, and describes the spreading of such songs in the hardest years, to secure the regime, as a form of musical politics; Rodong Sinmun named it, with the "Song of General Kim Il Sung", one of the two national songs of the country. In Kim Jong Il's time it was played at home and abroad more widely than the anthem "Aegukka", though it never matched the popularity of his father's song.

State television opens each day's broadcasts with it, and Pyongyang FM Broadcasting uses a chime version of its first two lines as its interval signal. It was played after the broadcast of Kim Jong Il's memorial service on 29 December 2011. North Korean sources claim that the satellites Kwangmyŏngsŏng-1 (1998) and Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2, launched from Musudan-ri on 5 April 2009, transmitted it to Earth with the "Song of General Kim Il Sung", and that Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 did so in December 2012; British media reported that amateur radio operators picked up no signal from the latter.

The song became a symbol of state propaganda. The logo of the Moranbong Band, first shown on 10 October 2012, is a stave wound around an electric violin bearing two bars of music, identified as the song's opening; the members wore it on their costumes. In October 2015 a photograph of Kim Jong Un and Ri Sol-ju with the band at the People's Theatre in Pyongyang showed the opening and closing bars of the song carved in relief on the lobby wall. The musicologist Min Eun-gi of Seoul National University criticised such music, turned from art into a means of rule, in his book on the songs of dictators. An English version was recorded by Ritta Dimek. In 2025 a phrase of the first verse was altered.

What it says

A march in praise of Kim Jong Il as leader and protector of the country, 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.