It’s not officially a pop-culture sensation until it’s had a grad school-style disseration written about it. So welcome to the canon, “Gangnam Style” — because The Atlantic published an article yesterday making the case that the insane/hysterical K-Pop bath salts hallucination video “is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society.” The article is fucking fascinating. Let’s learn a few things about “Gangnam Style” and the pudgy pop crooner PSY who wrote the song, directed the video and came up with those sweet, sweet dance moves. If you’re not familiar with “Gangnam Style,” you can find a good primer here. In a nutshell, it’s a Korean pop song that has inexplicably become an overnight international sensation with 50 million YouTube views (seriously). K-pop is mostly known for being humanity’s most vapid music ever created. In general takes “plasticky” to a whole new level. But it turns out that Korean listeners have picked up on a sense of satire that isn’t normally present in K-pop. In fact, PSY’s song is mainly a parody of the conspicious consumption of Seoul’s nouveau-riche.
Gangnam, Hong said, is a symbol of that aspect of South Korean culture. The neighborhood is the home of some of South Korea’s biggest brands, as well as $84 billion of its wealth , as of 2010. That’s seven percent of the entire country’s GDP in an area of just 15 square miles. A place of the most conspicuous consumption, you might call it the embodiment of South Korea’s one percent. “The neighborhood in Gangnam is not just a nice town or nice neighborhood. The kids that he’s talking about are not Silicon Valley self-made millionaires. They’re overwhelmingly trust-fund babies and princelings,” he explained.
Another detail you probably missed? PSY brags about drinking coffee.
Psy boasts that he’s a real man who drinks a whole cup of coffee in one gulp, for example, insisting he wants a women who drinks coffee. “I think some of you may be wondering why he’s making such a big deal out of coffee, but it’s not your ordinary coffee,” U.S.-based Korean blogger Jea Kim wrote at her site, My Dear Korea . (Her English-subtitled translation of the video is at right.) “In Korea, there’s a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2) ramen for lunch and then spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee.” They’re called Doenjangnyeo, or “soybean paste women” for their propensity to crimp on essentials so they can over-spend on conspicuous luxuries, of which coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most common. “The number of coffee shops has gone up tremendously, particularly in Gangnam,” Hong said. “Coffee shops have become the place where people go to be seen and spend ridiculous amounts of money.”
The whole exercise of analyzing PSY made me like his whole persona. Not only does dude have swag but he has a message, too.
None of this commentary is particularly overt, which is actually what could make “Gangnam Style” so subversive. Social commentary is just not really done in mainstream Korean pop music, Hong explained. “The most they’ll do is poke fun at themselves a little bit. It’s really been limited.” But Psy “is really mainstreaming it, and he’s doing it in a way that maybe not everybody quite realizes.” Park Jaesang isn’t just unusual because of his age, appearance, and style; he writes his own songs and choreographs his own videos, which is unheard of in K-Pop. But it’s more than that. Maybe not coincidentally, he attended both Boston University and the Berklee College of Music, graduating from the latter. His exposure to American music’s penchant for social commentary, and the time spent abroad that may have given him a new perspective on his home country, could inform his apparently somewhat critical take on South Korean society.
For even more analysis of the song, and tons of pictures of Gangnam itself, check out this blog post written by a Korean-speaker from the U.S.
