Gangnam Style

It's taken me a while to blog about the song and music video, 'Gangnam Style,' partly because I didn't find the phenomenon very interesting, even in the light of this article, 'Gangnam Style, Dissected,' by Max Fisher. 

"When I realized that some top stars like have imagined or tweeted about me, I thought, 'That’s joking. That’s not gonna happen...' I never expect things like this, not because they are top stars, but because this is the biggest market in the universe for pop music, right, so everybody’s dreaming about having appearance in the U.S. so I’m still saying, 'What going on here? This is beautiful.'" 

-Psy

Who is Psy? A South Korean rapper. Who catapulted to zenith of American press attention with the above video.

Psy was on the Today show, and I saw a vision of an America dancing to a song that is lighthearted but also serious.

My biases: I was born in Korea, spent a semester there in their 4th grade elementary school system, and visit relatives there every other year.

As Korean as I am, I am skeptical of Korean culture. As a Korean-American, I see how my younger cousins have literally been sucked in by Korean pop music and culture. I see the shallowness of certain music groups, from SISTAR to SNSD or even the fact that twelve hours but little else separates 2AM and 2PM in terms of star quality.

Last year, I took a year off of school. In that year, I held three jobs and discovered my love for teaching children. But, also, in that year, I engaged heavily with Korean culture through listening to an incredible amount of K-pop, watching every episode of Running Man to episode 72 (watched most of them 2-3 times), and visiting Korea for two weeks.

This is the context in which I analyze Gangnam Style. My critique is serious, and it should be taken as such.

It's so easy to slam what Gangnam style implies about the surfaceness of relations in Seoul. At a church gathering, I even put forth a social critique of why some Koreans might not understand materialism at its worst: empty solipsism. But Psy's performance in New York changed my mind: his vision is wider than one would think. Yeah, the song is fairly silly, but it was also written in the context of other Korean pop videos. I mean, watch this Girls' Day video and witness what I am saying:

K-pop music videos in general seem ridiculous and silly to many American sensibilities. But what might it be, about Psy's dance and singing, that prompts white television reporters like David Gregory to dance to it? There's an element of melodrama. The colors are distinctively featured, from clothing to set. There's laughter and joy and a self-reflexive passion in what the artists are doing. And boy, in this light, Korean dramas start to make a lot more sense in their viewership. Asian audiences want drama and Romeo-and-Juliet-type love stories; they want and love the gratuitous enjoyment that Korean culture promises to bring; their yearnings for a future filled with a different kind of entertainment manifests itself in the entertainment that brings people together, from the Chinese-American lady in the States to the wealthy in Hong Kong to the studious teenager in Malaysia.

And perhaps this is exactly what America needs. We have psychological and political and philosophical ideas of how to live a good life. But perhaps, another culture has the answer to the people we could become. Psy is no self-made man, but he is an artist who puts the greatest of energies into each performance and is humble about his success. Yes, Psy, this is beautiful—it is beautiful that you and your song is bringing people together. He realizes the special and particular importance of his widespread achievements with regard to Korean-American communities in the United States. As Americans, as artists, as businesspeople, and as human beings, we could learn from Psy's complex attitude of critiquing society through a humorous dance. Psy never 'expected' things to come to him this way, but listen to any of his interviews (on Ellen, for example), and we realize that he is quite soft-spoken and self-effacing: an attitude worthy of study and appreciation.

Was it not Dostoyevsky who wrote, 

"The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month."

We are fools, we are fools, Psy is saying, and he's saying it is fine to say that. For there is cleverness in that statement and there's cleverness in Gangnam style. It's up to us to dance to it.