SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -
South Korean rapper PSY's "Gangnam Style"
video has 220 million YouTube views and counting, and it's easy to see
why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively
entertaining performer's crazy horse-riding dance, the song's addictive
chorus and the video's exquisitely odd series of misadventures.
Beneath the antic, funny
surface of his world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social
commentary about the country's newly rich and Gangnam, the affluent
district where many of them live. Gangnam is only a small slice of
Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and
bitterness.
Here's a look at the meaning of "Gangnam Style" - and at the man and neighborhood behind the sensation:
THE PLACE:
Gangnam is the most coveted
address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more
than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage
ditches.
The district of Gangnam,
which literally means "south of the river," is about half the size of
Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul's population lives there, but many
of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam apartment costs
about $716,000, a sum that would take an average South Korean household
18 years to earn.
The seats of business and
government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in
the neighborhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families
still live there.
Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s.
As the price of high-rise
apartments skyrocketed during a real estate investment frenzy in the
early 2000s, landowners and speculators became wealthy practically
overnight. The district's rich families got even richer.
The new wealth drew the
trendiest boutiques and clubs and a proliferation of plastic surgery
clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in
modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious
private tutoring and prep schools. Gangnam households spend nearly four
times more on education than the national average.
The notion that Gangnam
residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean
virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted
piece of geography, irks many. The neighborhood's residents are seen by
some as monopolizing the country's best education opportunities, the
best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big
on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth.
"Gangnam inspires both envy
and distaste," said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. "Gangnam
residents are South Korea's upper class, but South Koreans consider
them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige."
In a sly, entertaining way, PSY's song pushes these cultural buttons.
THE GUY:
More mainstream K-Pop
performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried
and failed to crack the American market.
So how did PSY - aka Park
Jae-sang - a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly $4,500 for
smoking marijuana after his 2001 debut, get to be the one teaching
Britney Spears how to do the horse-riding dance on American TV?
"I'm not handsome, I'm not
tall, I'm not muscular, I'm not skinny," PSY recently said on the
American "Today" TV show. "But I'm sitting here."
He attributed his success to "soul or attitude."
PSY, whose stage name stems
from the first three letters of the word psycho, has always styled
himself as a quirky outsider. But he is from a wealthy family and was
actually raised and educated south of the Han River, near Gangnam.
He's an excellent dancer, a
confident rapper and he's funny, but another reason for his
breakthrough could be that less-than-polished image, said Jae-Ha Kim, a
Chicago Tribune pop culture columnist and former music critic.
South Korean music has
scored big in Asia with bands featuring handsome, stylish,
makeup-wearing young men, including Super Junior and Boyfriend. But
seeing such singers "makes some Americans nervous," Kim said.
"People in America are
comfortable with Asian guys who look like Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who
are good-looking, but they're not the equivalent of Brad Pitt or Keanu
Reeves," Kim said.
Part of the initial
interest in "Gangnam Style," Kim said, was a kind of "freak-show
mentality, where people are like, 'This guy is funny.' But then you look
at his choreography and you realize that you really have to know how to
dance to do what he does. He's really good."
THE SONG:
PSY, at times wearing
sleeveless dress shirts with painted-on untied bowties, repeatedly
flouts South Koreans' popular notions of Gangnam in his video.
Instead of cavorting in
nightclubs, he parties with retirees on a disco-lighted tour bus.
Instead of working out in a high-end health club, he lounges in a sauna
with two tattooed gangsters. As he struts along with two beautiful
models, they're pelted in the face with massive amounts of wind-blown
trash and sticky confetti. The throne from which he delivers his hip-hop
swagger is a toilet.
The song explores South
Koreans' "love-hate relationship with Gangnam," said Baak Eun-seok, a
pop music critic. The rest of South Korea sees Gangnam residents as
everything PSY isn't, he said: good-looking because of plastic surgery,
stylish because they can splurge on luxury goods, slim thanks to yoga
and personal trainers.
"PSY looks like a country bumpkin. He's a far cry from the so-called 'Gangnam Style,'" Baak said. "He's parodying himself."
The video abounds with
ironic, "not upper-class" images that ordinary South Koreans recognize,
said Park Byoung-soo, a social commentator who runs a popular visual art
blog. Old men play a Korean board game and middle-age women wear
wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces as they walk backward -
a popular way to exercise in South Korea.
PSY's character in the
video is modeled on the clueless heroes of movies like "The Naked Gun"
and "Dumb & Dumber," he told Yonhap news agency earlier this year.
He has also said his goal is to "dress classy, but dance cheesy."
Others see more than just a goofy outsider.
"PSY does something in his
video that few other artists, Korean or otherwise, do: He parodies the
wealthiest, most powerful neighborhood in South Korea," writes Sukjong
Hong, creative nonfiction fellow at Open City, an online magazine.
Courtesy: YouTube
