K-Pop Comes Under Attack By North Korea’s Kim Jong-un

Kim Jong-un is not down with K-Pop.

Thanks to the rising tide of cultural influence from the democratic and developed nation of South Korea, the 37-year-old dictator of it’s communist neighbor North Korea is imposing harsh penalties on any citizens caught listening to “perverse” K-Pop music.

The heavy-handed anti K-Pop campaign came to light through internal documents smuggled out of the secretive “Hermit Kingdom” by the Seoul-based news source Daily NK, the New York Times first reported. They were then made public by South Korean legislators.

Jong-un had dubbed the southern cultural imports a “vicious cancer” corrupting North Korean youths “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors” à la the dancing in the ’80s movie “Footloose” — but with a much darker bent.

In an apparent bid to launch his own brand of cancel culture, Kim introduced new laws in December stipulating that anyone caught watching or possessing South Korean content could be sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor. The previous maximum punishment for fans of popular acts such as BTS was five years.

If that wasn’t harsh enough, K-Pop smugglers could even face execution while those caught singing, speaking or writing in a “South Korean style” could be sentenced to two years at a work camp, per the smuggled documents.

This year, a North Korean citizen was killed via firing squad for hawking bootleg South Korean music and other entertainment.