, and famously vacuous pop music. Park, who performs as Psy (short for psycho), is a relatively ancient 34, has been
for marijuana and for avoiding the country's mandatory military
service, and is not particularly good-looking. His first album got him
for "inappropriate content" and the second was banned. He's mainstream
in the way that South Korea's monolithically corporate media demands of
its stars, who typically appear regularly on TV variety and even game
shows, but as a harlequin, a performer known for his parodies,
outrageous costumes, and
. Still, there's a
of fools and court jesters as society's most cutting social critics, and he might be one of them.
Now, Park has succeeded where the K-Pop entertainment-industrial-complex and its superstars
so
many times before: he's made it in America. The opening track on his
sixth album, "Gangnam Style" (watch it at right), has earned 49 million
hits on YouTube since its mid-July release, but the viral spread was
just the start.
The American rapper T-Pain was retweeted 2,400 times when he
wrote "Words cannot even describe how amazing this video is." Pop stars
expressed admiration.
Billboard is
extolling his commercial viability; Justin Bieber's manager is allegedly interested. The
Wall Street Journal posted
"5 Must-See" response videos. On Monday, a worker at L.A.'s Dodger
stadium noticed Park in the stands and played "Gangnam Style" over the
stadium P.A. system as excited baseball fans
spontaneously reproduced Park's distinct dance in the video. "I have to admit I've watched it about 15 times,"
said a CNN anchor. "Of course, no one here in the U.S. has any idea what Psy is rapping about."
I certainly didn't, beyond the basics: Gangnam is a tony Seoul
neighborhood, and Park's "Gangnam Style" video lampoons its
self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish
caricature of a Gangnam man. That alone makes it practically operatic
compared to most K-Pop. But I spoke with two regular observers of Korean
culture to find out what I was missing, and it turns out that the video
is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself,
suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and
wealth in contemporary South Korean society. That message would be
awfully mild by American standards -- this is no "Born in the U.S.A." --
but South Korea is a very different place, and it's a big deal that
even this gentle social satire is
breaking records on Korean pop charts long dominated by cotton candy."Korea
has not had a long history of nuanced satire," Adrian Hong, a
Korean-American consultant whose wide travels make him an oft-quoted
observer of Korean issues, said of South Korea's pop culture. "In fact,
when you asked me about the satire element, I was super skeptical. I
don't expect much from K-Pop to begin with, so the first 50 times I
heard this, I was just like, 'Allright, whatever.' I sat down to look at
it and thought, 'Actually, there's some nuance here.'"
One of
the first things Hong pointed to in explaining the video's subtext was,
believe it or not, South Korea's sky-high credit card debt rate. In
2010, the average household carried credit card debt worth a
staggering 155 percent
of their disposable income (for comparison, the U.S. average just
before the sub-prime crisis was 138 percent). There are nearly five
credit cards for every adult. South Koreans have been
living on credit
since the mid-1990s, first because their country's amazing growth made
borrowing seem safe, and then in the late 1990s when the government
encouraged private spending to climb out of the Asian financial crisis.
The emphasis on heavy spending, coupled with the country's truly
astounding, two-generation growth from agrarian poverty to economic
powerhouse, have engendered the country with an emphasis on hard work
and on aspirationalism, as well as the materialism that can sometimes
follow.
Gangnam, Hong said, is a symbol of that aspect of South
Korean culture. The neighborhood is the home of some of South Korea's
biggest brands, as well as
$84 billion of its wealth,
as of 2010. That's seven percent of the entire country's GDP in an area
of just 15 square miles. A place of the most conspicuous consumption,
you might call it the embodiment of South Korea's one percent. "The
neighborhood in Gangnam is not just a nice town or nice neighborhood.
The kids that he's talking about are not Silicon Valley self-made
millionaires. They're overwhelmingly trust-fund babies and princelings,"
he explained.
This skewering of the Gangnam life can be easy to miss for non-Korean.
Psy boasts that he's a real man who drinks a whole cup of coffee in one
gulp, for example, insisting he wants a women who drinks coffee. "I
think some of you may be wondering why he's making such a big deal out
of coffee, but it's not your ordinary coffee," U.S.-based Korean blogger
Jea Kim
wrote at her site, My Dear Korea.
(Her English-subtitled translation of the video is at right.) "In
Korea, there's a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2)
ramen for lunch and then spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee." They're
called Doenjangnyeo, or "soybean paste women" for their propensity to
crimp on essentials so they can over-spend on conspicuous luxuries, of
which coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most common. "The number
of coffee shops has gone up tremendously, particularly in Gangnam," Hong
said. "Coffee shops have become the place where people go to be seen
and spend ridiculous amounts of money."The video is "a satire
about Gangnam itself but also it's about how people outside Gangnam
pursue their dream to be one of those Gangnam residents without even
realizing what it really means," Kim explained to me when I got in touch
with her. Koreans "really wanted to be one of them," but she says that
feeling is changing, and "Gangnam Style" captures people's ambivalence.
"Koreans have been kind of caught up in this spending to look wealthy,
and Gangnam has really been the leading edge of that," Hong said. "I
think a lot of what [Psy] is pointing out is how silly that is. The
whole video is about him thinking he's a hotshot but then realizing he's
just, you know, at a children's playground, or thinking he's playing
polo or something and realizes he's on a merry-go-round."
"Human society is so hollow, and even while filming I felt pathetic."
Psy hits all the symbols of Gangnam opulence, but each turns out to be
something much more modest, as if suggesting that Gangnam-style wealth
is not as fabulous as it might seem. We think he's at a beach in the
opening shot, but it turns out to be a sandy playground. He visits a
sauna not with big-shot businessmen but with mobsters, Kim points out,
and dances not in a nightclub but on a bus of middle-aged tourists. He
meets his love interest in the subway. Kim thinks that Psy's strut
though a parking garage, two models at his side as trash and snow fly at
them, is meant as a nod to the common rap-video trope of the star
walking down a red carpet covered in confetti. "I think he's pointing
out the ridiculousness of the materialism," Hong said.(If you're wondering about the bizarre episodes in the
elevator
and with the red sports car, as I was, it turns out that those are
probably just excuses for a couple of cameos by TV personalities, which
is apparently common in South Korean music videos.)
None of this commentary is particularly overt, which is actually what
could make "Gangnam Style" so subversive. Social commentary is just not
really done in mainstream Korean pop music, Hong explained. "The most
they'll do is poke fun at themselves a little bit. It's really been
limited." But Psy "is really mainstreaming it, and he's doing it in a
way that maybe not everybody quite realizes." Park Jaesang isn't just
unusual because of his age, appearance, and style; he writes his own
songs and choreographs his own videos, which is unheard of in K-Pop. But
it's more than that. Maybe not coincidentally, he
attended
both Boston University and the Berklee College of Music, graduating
from the latter. His exposure to American music's penchant for social
commentary, and the time spent abroad that may have given him a new
perspective on his home country, could inform his apparently somewhat
critical take on South Korean society.
Of course, it's just a music video, and a silly one at that. Does it
really have to be about anything more complicated? "If I hadn't seen
that behind-the-scenes, I would have said he's just poking fun at
himself," Hong said of the official making-of video, which is embedded
at right. It's mostly of Park or Psy having fun on set, but at one point
he pauses in filming. "Human society is so hollow, and even while
filming I felt pathetic. Each frame by frame was hollow," he sighs,
apparently deadly serious. It's a jarring moment to see the musician
drop his clownish demeanor and reveal the darker feelings behind this
lighthearted-seeming song. Although, Hong noted, "hollow" doesn't
capture it: "It's a word that's a mixture or shallow or hollow or vain,"
he explained.Kim seemed to feel the same way about the video,
though it's so cheery on the surface. "He was satirizing more than just
this one neighborhood," she told me. On her blog, she
suggested
the video portrayed the Gangnam area, a symbol of South Korea's
national aspirations for prosperity and status, as "nothing but
materialistic and about people who are chasing rainbows." Pretty heavy
for a viral pop hit.
"I think it all ties back to the same thing:
the pursuit of materialism, the pursuit of form over function," Hong
said. "Koreans made extraordinary gains as a country, in terms of GDP
and everything else, but that growth has not been equitable. I think the
young people are finally realizing that. There's a genuine backlash.
... You're seeing a huge amount of resentment from youth about their
economic circumstances." Even if Psy wasn't specifically nodding to this
when he wrote the song and shot the video, it's part of the
contemporary South Korean society that he inhabits. "The context is all
of these tensions going on where Koreans are realizing where they're at,
how they got there, what they need to do to move forward."
It's
difficult to imagine that much of this could be apparent to non-Koreans,
which Kim told me is why she decided to write it up on her blog. "I
thought people outside Korea might take it just as another funny music
video. So I wanted to explain what's behind [it] and the song." Still,
is it possible that the video could have caught on for reasons beyond
just its admittedly catchy beat and hilarious visuals? After all, Korean
pop really does not seem to typically do well in the U.S., and this has
gotten enormous. "It's kind of the first genuine pop-culture crossover
from Korea," Hong said, noting it's "more in the American style." Maybe
it's possible that, even if the specific nods to the quirks of this
Seoul neighborhood couldn't possibly cross over, and even if the lyrics
are nonsense to non-Korean speakers, there's something about obviously
skewering the ostentatiously rich that just might resonate in today's
America.
Whatever the case, Koreans seem to be proud of their
first big musical export to the U.S., Hong said, noting that the Korean
media has meticulously covered the video's tremendous reception here.
"Koreans are definitely talking about it and pointing to it as a source
of national pride." Maybe there's something relatable about Gangnam
style.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
;
