Frank Greenall: Choreography of peace and harmony

Yeri, Irene, Wendy and Seulgi of girl group Red Velvet depart Seoul, heading for their peace-brokering performance in Pyongyang. Photo/Getty Images

Since the historic meeting between South Korean leader Moon Jae-in and North Korea's bogeyman Kim Jong Un, there's been preposterous scuttlebutt to the effect that Donald-the-Menace Trump should score the next Nobel Peace Prize.

It's claimed that strong-arm Trump's belligerent, scary rhetoric — cunningly engineered to freak out even the Rocket Man — has carried the day.

Along with a fistful of sanctions, ongoing naval war games off the Korean coast — not to mention a permanent US Army presence in South Korea of about 20,000 troops — it has been said it was all too much for ballistic Kim.

Finally, even he could see he had no choice but to throw in his irradiated towel.
What balderdash! Stepping up to the Oslo podium to receive the next Nobel Peace Prize should be the five very-easy-on-the-eye members of Red Velvet — one of South Korea's most popular K-Pop girl bands.

Red Velvet were part of a star-studded line-up of South Korean musicians who recently travelled to Pyongyang to feature in a ground-breaking détente concert for the benefit of Mr Kim and his wife, Ri Sol-ju.

Shortly before that, Red Velvet had headlined a rave success Tokyo concert.
The New York Times reported that the concert "attended mostly by teenage girls, was a nonstop cavalcade of overtly consumerist imagery.

"The singers enacted a pyjama party where they tossed popcorn around a bedroom and sucked on pinwheel lollipops. In another scene, they wore candy-coloured satin dressing gowns, twirling in chairs designed to look as if they were seated in a nail salon.
"Twice during the show, the women boarded carts built to look like circus animal cages and rode through the audience."

Notwithstanding the weighty symbolism of the group's name — or that of their big hit Red Flavor — from the minute Red Velvet stepped out on the Pyongyang stage in their sparkly miniskirts and midriff-baring tops, Mr Kim was a gone-burger.
He, wife Ms Ri — herself a former singer — and the enraptured audience were soon all clapping along like the converted at a southern revivalist meeting.

The riffs on offer were apparently the sort that ring Mr Kim's bell — especially if there's a "mid" attached to them.

For decades, Kim Jong Un and his forebears have been assiduously battling the pernicious influences of the decadent West, but if living works of art like Red Velvet were one of the end products of consumer capitalism, bring it on, he seems to have decided.

Next thing the Mini Michelin Man is in a bromance — à la Trump and Macron — with Moon Jae-in, and stepping over the verboten line-in-the-concrete we know as the 38th parallel. But let's not forget that showbiz is in Mr Kim's DNA. His despotic dad, Kim Jong-il, was crazy about movies to the extent he had South Korea's leading film director Shin Sang-ok (and his actress wife) kidnapped and brought to the North to produce cinematic masterpieces for the greater glory of the regime.

Said to own more than 20,000 videos and DVDs, his movie favourites included the likes of James Bond, Friday the 13th, Rambo, and Godzilla.

Frank Greenall

Some have churlishly said Kim Jung Un's only offering a deal because the mountain that houses North Korea's testing programme is on the verge of geo-physical collapse, and that sanctions have bankrupted the country. Which may be true.

But following the Pyongyang show, after pronouncing the whole performance "a gift for Pyongyang citizens", nek minute a transformed Kim is promising complete denuclearisation and Korean reunification.

Remarkably, Red Velvet's "chirpy, bubble-gum harmonies and sexy choreography" may have triumphed over 70 years of Cold War propaganda, entrenched political ideologies, and ranting Trumpery.

What this says about the future of civilisation as we know it is a moot point. But if Barack Obama can score a Nobel Peace Prize for merely getting elected, then Red Velvet's magic midriffs and chirpy credentials leave Obama's for dead.