How can you not love the song, the video, and the guy?
While it’s a completely different style, there’s a similarity between the “Gangnam Style” video and videos like “Hey Ya!” or any number of Beastie Boys videos, or for that matter even something we “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” - a sense that it’s just fun. Music takes itself really seriously a lot of the time, and sometimes a video that emphasizes the idea of “let’s have a lot of fun and dance and laugh” can really hit the mark.
LOL! The stupid, it burns! This Mozart, he is tapping into the fact that the most popular music apparently is that without intelligible words…
:smack:
If Bill O’Reilly loathes the video… he’s taking it too seriously. At worst it’s this year’sMacarena. Silly but harmless fun. It makes kids dance and grownups laugh. I don’t really like it but how can you HATE it?
IIRC, there were members of this board who treated “Hey Ya!” as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. I didn’t hear it until much later but I was immediately smitten. It’s loud, stupid, and you can dance to it, the essence of rock and roll. What’s to hate, or even dislike?
There’s an interesting and somewhat touching (without getting sappy) documentary about the Psy phenomenon here on YouTube. It helps if you understand Korean, but I think you’ll get the gist even if you don’t.
The guy is definitely not a one-hit wonder.
Note that the documentary is 43 minutes long.
Japanese men do speak in a lower register. I think of the old Sylvania commercial:
Japanese Man: “Huh. Kunundehshah. Huhnundushah. Sylvania beat Sony again?”
I had a couple Japanese roommates in college. Same deal. That’s about the extent of my Japanese exposure.
However, Chinese and Vietnamese are accused of being “sing-song”, and sound like
“pong ning ying yong hi nyong nyahaaah.”
To say it right, you have to go higher pitch.
I don’t know about Korean.
Or as Rush Limbaugh does it.
I don’t doubt he’ll have another successful song. But the problem is, GNstyle was so successful, it would be difficult to surpass and anything short of it would invite criticism.
Oh my, I never thought of that…it’s just normally not the music they go for. They are more Ricky Martin (seriously…I know, no country connection there either, but oh well, I don’t understand men.)
It’s something like his 7th hit single, and it’s from his 6th album.
Suddenly hitting it big outside of home is certainly cool for him, but I doubt he’s going to be weeping on the big piles of money it got him when his next one goes back to only charting in South Korea.
Wow. The music video on Psy’s official YouTube channel has almost 879,000,000 views!
Thank you, Rumpelstiltskin.
But my problem with that assumption is that Bill O has clearly not done any research whatsoever nor has his “expert”. I would have totally agreed with the point you so graciously put upon him, but I don’t think it is earned.
As far as overanalyzing goes, however, I think that even our dear Cecil has similarly analyzed “Hotel California” and “American Pie” so overanalyzing songs is something done very happily around here 
Uh-oh: PSY apologizes for viral anti-American lyrics eight years ago.
Would be funnier if he apologized for saying “I’m bigger than Buddha.”
And in what can only be described as a slow news day, the Bangkok Post has unearthed a male beautician near the Burmese border who is a Psy look-alike.
I’d better be careful here, but, umm there’s really little variation anyway in oriental men. It’s not like one is six feet 2, blond, and has blue eyes.
Looking at the picture, don’t they ALL look essentially like that?
Well, apparently his fellow townsmen thought he was more so.
But I know what you mean. My Thai wife of ethnic-Chinese heritage has been mistaken by her fellow Thai citizens at various times for Japanese and Filipina. Not sure about Korean. But I did know a Korean lady in Bangkok who worked as a translator, and she passed for Thai easily.
You’re kidding me right?
After seeing her photos, I can pretty much guarantee HazelNutCoffee does not look like that. Although I can’t promise that was not the result of Photoshopping.