Having attracted more than 220 million views on YouTube, the music video for Korean rapper Psy’s latest single ‘Gangnam Style’ has become a genuinely global pop-cultural phenomenon and catapulted its creator to international stardom.
slightly portly 34 year old with a side parting and a fetching line in dinner jackets may seem an unlikely candidate for global superstardom, especially when his rise to fame is predicated upon a pop song performed entirely in his native Korean. Nevertheless, the ‘Gangnam Style’ video has reached an audience previously unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, K-pop, and Park Jaesang, better known as Psy, is currently enjoying the limelight as one of pop music’s most recognisable faces.
With the song’s dance routine centred on the action of riding an invisible horse, the wilful silliness on display in the video is undeniably the factor which has allowed for this explosion in popularity. What is far more interesting than the over the top clowning and the artist’s obvious joy in the absurd, however, is that beneath the buffoonish façade, Park seems to be presenting a genuine, if gentle, critique of South Korea’s newly rich, and the nature of wealth, class, and aspiration in the country.
[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0[/youtube]
The lyric of the song details the protagonist’s boasts to embody the titular ‘Gangnam Style’. The Gangnam of the title refers to a district in the Capital of Seoul. An area of forlorn farmland as recently as two decades ago, the neighbourhood is now one of the most desirable in the country, with the average price of an apartment running at eighteen time the annual income of the average South Korean household. An area of fifteen square miles home to many of the country’s highest profile brands and accounting for as much as 7% of total GDP, Gangnam is often referred to as the Korean Beverly Hills, dominated as it is by high end boutiques and plastic surgery clinics.
For many young Koreans, the area has become emblematic of a materialistic conception of success which has arrived in the country on the back of extraordinary economic growth over the past two generations, transforming South Korea from a comparatively impoverished agrarian nation to a global economic heavy-hitter. This pursuit of materialism sits ill at ease with many Korean’s who see the apparently unrestrained desire for money at the expense of other aims as at odds with more traditional values. As such, the area provokes a peculiar mixture of desire and distaste – it is these feelings which Park’s video expertly taps.
A behind the scenes video also posted on YouTube consists primarily of footage of Park having fun on set. At one point however, the clownish mask slips and, seemingly deadly serious, he appears to reveal darker feelings behind the song stating that; ‘Human society is so hollow, and even while filming I felt pathetic. Each frame by frame was hollow. The video mocks the over-consumption and self-importance which the area typifies for many Koreans, and suggests a disconnect between the image which the neighbourhood’s denizens seek to project, and the reality of how they are seen by others.
When the character Park plays in the video appears to be reclining at an up-scale beach resort, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is actually sitting in a sand-covered children’s playground. Rather than luxuriating in a high-end health club, he finds himself in a sauna with two tattooed gangsters, rather than partying in nightclubs, he rides a disco-lit tour bus filled with pensioners, he rides the subway rather than a limousine, and the video’s climactic dance routine takes place in the rather unglamorous surroundings of an underground car park.
In this way, the video implies that the ostentatious lifestyle typified by the Gangnam neighbourhood is essentially empty, and that people aspire to the ‘spending-for-spending’s-sake’ lifestyle typified by the area without giving any real thought as to what it might represent. Gangnam style wealth and opulence, Park seems to suggest, might not be as fabulous as it seems.
Striking a blow against the perceived pomposity of Seoul’s newly rich, it might be argued, hardly constitutes biting satire, but given that the criticism occurs in the form of a K-pop song makes it more interesting. In an industry whose products often appear vacuous by design, for an artist to achieve major international success with a departure from the cookie-cutter image could lead to a reassessment of values.
