Getting Gangnam Style

Burger King, Seoul, South Korea. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is an analysis of Gangnam Style drawing on familiarity with the language and culture.

 "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. 

This type of analysis suggests several points:

1) In your reviews, I want you to do as little research as possible. (That's why I run all your reviews through Turnitin.) I want a fresh personal take in which you draw on what you already know - though if it happens you already know a great deal about the genre or the specific situations in the object reviewed, of course you draw on it. Some publications might want you to do research beforehand and create a combined review/cultural analysis. What I want is your "hot take." Personally, though I wanted at some point to do research and to track down the kind of analysis of the video contained in the Atlantic that I link to above, I wanted to take time to register my own reactions and my own reading of the video before seeking out informed interpretation.

2) I assume a natural inhibition in reviewing something like Gangnam Style because it is our wish - I hope your wish - not to seem culturally ignorant or racially insensitive. With all that in mind, my first take on the video was:

     * The music was catchy, what some would call an earworm, memorable to the point of irritation.

     * The music alone did not explain the video's appeal. Without the images and/or narrative, the music would quickly have faded from memory.

     * I was amused and impressed by Psy's comic physicality, by which I mean his posture and actions were awkwardly graceful - or gracefully awkward. I was comfortable judging that part of the video by what I considered to be widespread ideas concerning which styles of physical action are funny and which aren't - at least by Western standards - and the makers of the video seemed to understand the conventions of the music video as developed in the United States.

     * I appreciated the general technical mastery - the multiple cuts, the careful framing of shots, the choreography of dance and motion.

     * It did have a narrative through line. Psy falls in love, or at least in "like." Are we invited to judge the nature of that attraction? The young woman's blond hair seemed to invite judgment.

     * But I still felt at a loss in terms of getting all the themes and implications. I was not surprised to learn it was probably satire, but if I had learned that its creator thought it was a celebration of sexual freedom and material possessions, well, I would have been somewhat surprised - but not completely. Not to get too English Major-ish, there's a famous comment by the poet John Keats. “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I like to interpret this from a critic’s point of view to mean that a sense of fully getting a work of art is not desirable. A true work of art - the pundit said - is a mystery that we never quite solve.

      * The video made we want to initiate conversations with those whom I assumed were its target audience, you guys maybe? That is, I saw it as a kind of measuring stick against which I could evaluate differences in taste as determined by different class and age.

      * And, of course, when in doubt when it comes to music videos, we can fall back on the surreal by which I simply mean regarding image or images as dream-like and irrational. Why ask what it means when I can ask what does it mean to me? Was it not Freud - it was; I looked it up - who said, “What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.”

      * The fact the video was for about two years the most watched video on Youtube has to mean something about the universality of ... something.

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