Did you mean MTV?
Maybe Shagnasty has been watching too much MIT Gangnam Style
Yes, I have no idea how that happened.
I love the parody video with the music stripped out and just the background sounds. Klingon Style is good too.
I didn’t like it either. I watched it to see what the hell everyone was referring to.
It wasn’t what I was expecting. It had obviously high production value when compared to other viral music videos like Chocolate Rain or Numa Numa. I had to check to make sure I was on the right video. The song is nothing special or memorable nor is the “dance” and the only other thing I got from it was that the fat guy was being “ironic” about . . . something.
I understood why Chocolate Rain whet viral. It was so bizarre and worthy of parody. Gangam (sp?) style is a parody to begin with, so it’s not as worthy of being parodied. “Leave Brittany Alone!” - now that’s worthy of parody.
I understand that the fat guy is an established recording artist in Korea. So it’s really not the same as the Numa Numa guy or Tay Zonday, is it? To me it’s like saying a Lady Gaga video went viral because it has millions of views. It was packaged and sold by a production company which makes it somewhat less . . . I don’t know . . . accidental I guess.
You Tube has got to do a better job this year or its fired from the internet.
It’s in a long line of fun virals for me. My favorite might be Tabbouleh Song, since even if you don’t like it you learn how to make a tasty dish, but Hooked on a Feeling is right up there for delightfulness.
I haven’t seen a Gangnam style parody that I actually liked (although NASA style was okay, I guess), but the original video is fun. I can’t imagine watching it more than a few times.
It’s okay to not like things.
I think a significant part of Gangnam Style’s virulence lies in the fact that it lends itself so easily to parody: the rhythm and meter are easy to adapt, it uses fairly common and recognizable types of backgrounds, and it’s intrinsically silly. The resulting parodies themselves drove views to the original, which then spawned further parodies.
My personal favorite is Lo Pan Style. The cameo really puts it over the top.
I’m glad to see William Hung is finally enjoying some success! 
I concur. Nothing special; Korean macarena, and the people I’ve seen latch onto it IRL are every bit as lame as my high school teachers who danced the macarena at an assembly in the 90s. And I’m pretty sure that same thing has already happened with Gangnam.
I’ll be the snobby douche.
I’ve never seen the video, but for very brief snippets on the TeeVee. I don’t plan on watching it. Something tells me not seeing it won’t ruin my life. I didn’t plan on being the “If it’s that popular on YouTube, I ain’t watching it,” guy … but then again, I haven’t seen any of Beiber’s videos on YouTube either, so maybe it just comes naturally to me.
my thoughts upon watching it several times: asian pop culture is weird, what’s the big deal? i’ve seen much weirder stuff come out of korea and japan.
Dance crazes will never die. “The Watusi. The Twist.” I remember in the JFK administration when everything had to be the Twist and there is one account of JFK putting on a Chubby Checker record in the White House and bustin some moves. I’ve seen them come and go for half a century now. The Hustle. The Bump (that was my favorite at the time… I was like 15…) Disco Duck. Walking like an Egyptian. The Lambada. The Macarena, etc. Before I was born, my young parents were doing the conga line. It’s all about starting a trend that’s simple and easy to pick up for any number of people to mass participate in, giving people in parties and clubs something coherent and fun to do.
Nobody is actually saying it’s viral, or if they are they’re wrong. It’s merely popular.
Haven’t seen it. What’s it about?
I don’t like the song and I don’t like the dance. I don’t get it at all. But I know I’m still cool, 'cuz I do like “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That!”
You have no idea how wrong you are! Gangnam Style is my favorite song and likely will be for quite a few years, it should be your favorite too!
Let me tell you about Gangnam Style: It is absurdist art done on a level unseen by modern human eyes. It is purposeful, it is calculated, but yes, Psy hit upon some silly soft membrane of our collective brains and stimulated the nerves inside probably by accident. Yet there is more thought than luck, more purpose than accident, and mere faddism cannot explain how in 6 months a sixth of humanity has seen a music video where billions still live daily without basic necessities and has embraced a song from a country more known for its belligerent neighbor’s apocalyptic proclamations.
Whereas the aforementioned Snooki or William Hung can get “popular” in a sense for accidentally stumbling into a cultural zeitgeist, they will not and do not last long, and their fame is more of a novelty of our shortened attention span and quickly fading popular fads. Yes, I realize that its been four years running for Snooki and gang, but no one can dispute the insipid vapidness of her parvenu clan, sucking and fucking their 15 minutes until it produces unholy spawn eager to lap up the remaining seconds of fame and stretch it out, like butter scraped over too much bread.
Psy has been a famous recording artist in Korea for a decade. He is not a one-shot wonder. His relative infamy lends credence to that argument only outside South Korea, because most of us don’t speak Korean or partake of Korean music. In his underwater music lab filled with bubbling test tubes of acoustic experimentation and severed ears kept alive only by the power of his love, Psy deconstructs, reconstructs, and reanimates Korean music by the nanosecond, painfully parsing out the micron-length beats to fuel his music volcano. It is here that Gangnam Style was given birth, created, or rather it HAD to have formed because the world demanded it to be so, and thus it created itself.
Gangnam Style is unique in the pop music world. It is not just a “catchy” song, it is a tidal way of cultural repression meeting the wall of xenophobic isolationism. Crashing into and loosening the bricks, it broke free from the borders of South Korea, unleashed upon the world like a plague, but a happy one of song and dance and energy. Psy’s music label, YG Entertainment, did little but post a few teasers on its Youtube channel. There was no widespread fawning about some expected messianic tune ready to save an unsteady world. Just a few short clips of the final song, infectious beat and all, on a channel that probably had barely a few million hits prior for all of its videos.
The rapidity in which was spread Gangnam Style is proof of Carl Jung’s theory that in all mankind lies a genetic component, a race memory if you will, that permeates within our very DNA and hit something so basic as the desire for food and love. If you don’t feel that pull, GET YOURSELF TO A DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY! There is something wrong with you! Have you human chromosomes? Then you will feel that pull!
This is not the release of Cthulhu, who was foretold to be unleashed once more “when the stars are right” yet a band of sailors managed to do on accident what eons of cultists failed to do on purpose. Gangnam Style, the great musical legacy of our time, is in every single fiber on purpose, calculated, and tuned in to mankind’s very soul as a well-calibrated machine. This is Imagine, Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody all rolled into one. If tomorrow the world ends and in the subsequent explosion of the earth a single, lone surviving track of Gangnam Style floats off into the ether, to be picked up in untold vigintillions of years by aliens, and it is played and examined and prodded with their 7 multi-jointed fingers and listened with their glowing nerve bundles that disseminate and convert sound waves to recognizable patterns of light and dark in their radioactive brains beneath their translucent skulls, and then a monument is built, atop which Psy, in all his bespectacled glory is perched upon the apex as an example of the extinct species known as “Hu-nams”, if that happens then I will have to say that this great experiment in humanity has been worth it. Gangnam Style is mankind’s contribution to galactic lore and we have given more than enough for our child-like ape-race deserves
He looks ridiculous to me and the music isn’t to my taste. I got through about half the video. Maybe it gets better, but I doubt it.
You make a compelling academic case but I have watched the video a few times at the insistence of daughters and I am still not buying it. I watched too many music videos in the 80’s to be impressed with that one in particular. Gangnam Style is just a new iteration of an old art form that only seems new because kids today don’t have the background to compare it to everything else. It is like they went into music video starvation mode and will ravenously eat up anything now even if it isn’t that great.
Baby Got Back by Sir Mixalot from 1992 has a similar style but it is a superior song and dance.
Thriller by Michael Jackson from 1983 is a much superior video to either of them.
I don’t know much about Korean culture but it isn’t as innovative in this regard as you try to portray it.
Or not.
Nothing remotely interesting culturally has ever come out of Korea (North or South). I don’t understand how South Korea is apparently the heart of culture in East Asia.