At New Year’s Eve parties, according to Spotify, a perennial streaming favourite is...“Gangnam Style”. And five years ago this month it became the first video to achieve more than 1bn views on YouTube. Released in July 2012, the song spread around the world so rapidly that it “broke” YouTube’s play counter, forcing the company to rewrite its code. Today the lead single from the sixth release by Korean artist Psy is still the third most watched video on the platform. A remarkable feat for a zany pop parody, sung almost entirely in Koreanby a chubby business school drop-out in his mid-thirties whose name was largely unknown to audiences outside his native South Korea.
“I still don’t know why it was so special,” Psy told Billboard this summer. “It was like a nonverbal movie. It was sort of like why people like EDM [electronic dance music]. EDM doesn’t have any lyrics, so that means it’s simple. And simple is the strongest... But as a singer and a songwriter, of course I want to communicate more details through the lyrics.”
Psy’s lyrics took a comic swipe at the aspirational absurdities of South Korean culture. “Gangnam” — meaning “south of the river” — is an upmarket district of Seoul. The child of wealthy and successful parents, Psy was born there, as Park Jae-sang, in 1977. In a strict, authoritarian culture, his mum says she “gave up on” the revellious “Psycho”, as he was known, when he walked on grass where it was forbidden, at the age of seven. At 15, he saw a Queen video and planned to pursue a career in music which he would write and choreograph himself.
He was in America (failing to finish degrees at both Boston University and that city’s Berklee College of Music) during the Asian financial crisis, but returned in 2000 to witness the Korean government encouraging citizens to spend their way out of recession. In the song, Psy boasts about drinking a coffee in one gulp, at a time when young Koreans would skimp on essentials in order to be seen out at Starbucks.
Although non-Korean speakers may miss these in-jokes, the video clearly skewers this fantasy lifestyle in scene after silly scene. It looks like he’s at the beach, but he’s really in a children’s playground. We see him in a private garage with a sports car, but he takes the subway. In the age of the self-aggrandising selfie, the joke is international. The dance he developed for the song — pretending to participate in the posh sport of horse-riding — boils the concept down to preschool level.
The video’s viral spread began from a strong Korean base (guaranteed by cameos from three regional celebrities) through the diaspora to the west, where a few tweets from A-listers (including Britney Spears, Robbie Williams and Tom Cruise) and management by Scooter Braun (who represents Justin Bieber) ensured massive exposure.
And the music? A driving, repetitive chunk of the electronica that the Korean “K-pop” scene has been perfecting since the 1990s, when the South Korean government invested heavily in exporting sweet and addictive music, art and soap operas around the world, thereby profiting from both the original product, and the Korean fridges, computers, televisions and cars promoted through them.
Ironic, then, that Korea’s biggest hit came not from one of the pretty, polished K-poppers who are drilled for years before they’re considered marketable, but from a rebellious clown sending the whole thing up. Doubly ironic that Boris Johnson boasted in 2012 of dancing to “Gangnam Style” with fellow old Etonian David Cameron.
Satirists were quick to mock up and upload a video of the Tory politicians, and you can now find the heads of most world leaders — from Angela Merkel to Donald Trump — digitally transplanted on to horsey-dancing bodies. There’s no easier way to make a person appear comically disengaged from reality.
Today the Gangnam suburb celebrates the song that lampoons it. Take Exit 5 from Gangnam subway station and you’ll find the song being played on a loop from speakers around a stage where tourists can film themselves doing the horsey dance. Or, to keep in the spirit of the thing, you could just build yourself a fake stage at home, film yourself there and tag yourself in Seoul.
‘Gagnam Style’: do you love it or loathe it? Will you be dancing to it on New Year’s Eve? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credit: Universal-Island Records Ltd.
Picture: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images