I confess [I don't like 'Gangnam Style'].

[willthekittensurvive]

@Throatwarbler_Mangrove

Name some good Korean films that might have some appeal outside of Korea?

Maybe I’m strange, but the Korean movie Bin Jip or 3 iron is one of my favourite movies

It’s art house and from 2004,so maybe it doesn’t count

[wonky]

I think once a person says they know nothing about a culture, they should probably stop talking about that culture as if they have anything of import to say.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@jsgoddess

I think once a person says they know nothing about a culture, they should probably stop talking about that culture as if they have anything of import to say.

And this is why we need a “Like” button.

[The_Dord]

at least it isn’t £1 Fish Man …

[chappachula]

@YogSosoth

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

WOW…just, well…WOW .

If this post was an assignment for freshman English comp, it would get a grade of “A”— for wonderful use of language, and who cares about the content?

If this post was part of a Phd thesis in Contemporary Pop Culture, it would get an “A” --because professors who think that a university can legitimately keep a faculty of Pop Culture (equal to Engineering and Law) wouldn’t try to understand the content.

And if the post is intended as a parody, I hereby give you a grade of “A” --and salute you for showing once again that the Dope is simply the best site on the entire web.

[DKW]

I used to be a huge fan of Pump It Up, and I later looked up a lot of those songs on YouTube, so I have some familiarity with Korean music videos. And one fact soon became unavoidable: Korea has lots of really screwy music videos. (Funky Tonight added a minute and a half drum solo to put in a scene of a helicopter crashing through the roof of a nightclub. MTV only wishes it were this awesome.)

Needless to say, this one really didn’t do anything for me. Funny dance, lots of bystanders getting into the act, bright splashes of color, special effects…been there, seen it, snarked about it on PlayAsia. I guess it has some irony factor, but by now we all know that “ironic” is just another word for “weird”*. Or “poorly thought out”.

I have no idea what made this the “right video” at the “right time”. We didn’t want a pudgy Korean shaking his groove thang in 2010 or 2011, but by 2012 we were clamoring for it? Yes, I grew up on MTV (and VH1). Didn’t have any great urge to see fatsos in shades doing simplistic dance routines then and don’t now (and honestly didn’t care that much even when I was a fan of Pump It Up).

Who can say? I mean, if we can use Justin Bieber as an example, the most bizarre thing about his mega-success (other than his songs could put Jello Biafra in a coma) is that he doesn’t have anything close to a rival. Remember Backstreet Boys and NSync? That rivalry was legendary. And as I recall, The New Kids On The Block never lacked for upstarts wanting to knock them off. Right now, there simply isn’t any other boy singer who’s soaring into the stratosphere despite having roughly two albums’ worth of material and getting slightly more radio play than Sinead O’Connor. And at this point, I don’t think I even need to mention William Hung or Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Fame is a weird, screwy thing. And it’s become a thousand times screwier with sites like YouTube gaining so much power. I mean, whaddya gonna do. Personally, I’d be stunned if this didn’t go the way of Macarena. It’s just that thanks to the Internet…and how cheap parody, and the overwhelming desire to do same, can extend things halfway to Armageddon…it’s going to take a while.

• Leslie David Baker’s 2 Be Simple is also on YouTube, and it most definitely qualifies.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Throatwarbler_Mangrove

Nothing remotely interesting culturally has ever come out of Korea (North or South)…

Man, I wish I could have thoughts and opinions as simple as that. To just dismiss whole nations as culturally worthless. You’re lucky. I bet you never get a headache.

[Oedipus]

Just to throw my hat in here.

I was visiting South Korea and I think Gangam Style started to REALLY blow up there the second I arrived. Hell, when I was hanging with Korean students, we went down to the Gangam section of Seoul and it was every 5th song on the TV. We were walking down the street and all the sudden we heard the song being played and surprise, it was Psy doing a rendition of it on stage. I enjoyed it all and had a good time.

The second my plane touched down back in America, it blew up here. I was able to be the hipster I was born to be and regale my Korean adventures and tell them the actual meaning of the lyrics, everything.

So…I guess its my fault its popular in America. I brought it back on the plane with me.

Sorry guys.

[Floater]

I can’t say if I like it or not as I have never heard it or seen the video.

[Drunky_Smurf]

Well you’re in luck. Here you go.

PSY - GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일) M/V

[Shagnasty]

@Drunky_Smurf

Well you’re in luck. Here you go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

Here comes 1,000,000,001.

[Alexathegirl]

Don’t feel alone. I feel the same! After everyone was like, “oppa gangnam star!” I got bored and stuff, and i started to hate it a little I can’t even dance!

[dnooman]

I think it’s the best song of the decade! Maybe we should have the surviving members of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and The Who do covers of it. I bet Rush and Yes would do awesome covers of Gangnam Style! YOLO!
[sub]waits quietly in the bushes, hand on the trap line[/sub]

[marshmallow]

Hating Gangnam is pretty common, not exactly going out on a limb. It’s generally agreed it’s better than having Bieber be the #1 youtube video though, so it has that going for it.

Popular things being considered critically dubious is probably more common than the opposite, unless you try really hard not to be considered a hipster or something. Just look at the highest selling video games, movies, books, fast food restaurants, or music.

[the_diego]

@Indian

I just didn’t find any thing great about the Gangnam style video, even after watching it many times.

It crossed a billion hits on you tube.

There must be something wrong with me.

Why would you think you’re the only one on earth who doesn’t like a stupid song/dance combo like that?

[Namkcalb]

I’ve just realised something… as it still stands, the majority of the world’s population have never seen that video.

[epbrown01]

@DJ_Motorbike

I understood why Chocolate Rain went 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.

One of the funniest things I saw on Youtube was Tay Zonday saying Gangnam style was Dadaist. (Youtubers React).

I’ve seen a bit of K-pop (mostly 2NE1) and most of it isn’t like Gangnam Style except for their similar 80s production feel. What makes it funny to me is the randomness (the guy in the elevator - wth? the guy in the yellow suit - wth?), the cheesiness (the two guys playing chess who fall well after the explosion behind them), the incredibly loud clothes, and the distinct impression that they just showed up places a shot it, with a lot of the people in it simply being bystanders who said “Eh, go ahead.” It’s nowhere near as polished as most K-pop, which is as close to assembly-line produced music as you can find.

And seriously - there are no Korean words equalling “Hey sexy lady?”

[GuanoLad]

@Namkcalb

I’ve just realised something… as it still stands, the majority of the world’s population have never seen that video.

Depends. Does that 1 billion represent people or households?

[Boyo_Jim]

@epbrown01

… the guy in the yellow suit - wth?)…

I thought that was a woman. Do we know who he/she is? Somehow I got the impression it was a kind of “guest star” appearance.

Also, a Mazda in the video? Couldn’t they at least Buy Korean and use a Kia or Hyundai? -

[Boyo_Jim]

@GuanoLad

Depends. Does that 1 billion represent people or households?

Neither. It represents one billion views. I’m sure there are plenty of people with too much time on their hands who’ve seen it thousands of times each.