The "Gangnam Style" Moment

My first exposure to Korean rapper PSY's infectious "Gangnam Style" was the viral video that featured someone's mother gamely dancing along to the tune at the encouragement of her more enthusiastic son. Not really understanding what all the fuss was about, and briefly mistaken that this might have something to do with the old Japanese "Gundam" anime shows, I watched the "Gangnam Style" music video, which was amusing enough. PSY, dressed in a variety of colorful suits, cavorts his way through parts of Seoul's posh Gangnam neighborhood, doing his now famous horse-riding dance. Even without the various news articles that have pointed it out, I got that the song was supposed to be satirical, poking fun at the high class lifestyle. However, I don't think that's what most of the video's fans have gotten out of it.

Nope, the secret of the success of "Gangnam Style" is all too clear. Funny foreign guy doing a funny, highly imitable dance, to a catchy song with a couple of easy-to-repeat lines for non-Koreans to latch on to: "Oppa Gangnam Style" and "Heyyyy sexy lady!" And then there were all the other parody videos, including the one with the lifeguards with the really grouchy bosses. And then PSY went to New York and started making the rounds on television last week, stopping by Ellen DeGeneres's daytime talk show where he demonstrated for Britney Spears how to "dance cheesy," "The Today Show" to perform in their outdoor concert series, the MTV VMAs to banter on the red carpet, and finally over the weekend he popped up in the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live," where Bobby Moynihan played him in a "Gangnam Style" sketch. After catching up on all these different appearances via Youtube, I haven't been able to get the song out of my head, which I admit gets a lot catchier with repetition.

My brain started grasping for antecedents. I had a flashback to 1996 and the rise of the Macarena. I still have no idea what those two Spanish gentlemen were singing about, but I still know all the moves to the dance that went with it. Watching PSY conducting interviews with the American press in very good, but not native English, somehow brought on visions of Borat, a heightened impersonation of a foreigner rather than the real thing. Of course PSY is an entertainer and his outsized persona is an act, but could there be any doubt that his novelty has more to do with his perceived foreignness than his talent? As an Asian-American who has rarely spotted an East-Asian face among American rockers and rappers, my feelings are mixed to say the least. Halloween is coming up, and I'm not sure whether to be gratified or terrified that a flood of PSY impersonators is sure to be taking to the streets this year.

I've watched the rise of K-pop among non-Korean listeners over the past couple of years, and while I wasn't convinced any of those cute sugar-sweet girl groups would make a dent in the States, I thought it was a positive trend, signaling the further globalization of the mainstream culture. Connected to this was also the very brief American awareness of Rain, a massively popular singer and entertainer in Korea, who appeared in "Speed Racer" and "Ninja Assassin" for the Wachowski siblings, but wasn't the breakout star some were hoping for. PSY doesn't have any ties to those trends at all, so his rise to global fame is something else entirely, a totally spontaneous phenomenon driven by the power of Youtube. PSY is known, but not a big name idol in his native Korea, and certainly not someone who was expected to make a splash like this.

But why am I being such a killjoy? So what if a more ungainly, unconventional entertainer managed to steal away the spotlight from all those skinny, overly made-up K-pop kids? So what if the first major Asian singer on the American scene in ages got here with a few gimmicks, and some parts of his message got lost in translation? Incoherence is in these days, and PSY fits right in with the Lady Gagas and the Nicki Minajs. Furthermore, he has gotten a Korean language song major airplay on American radio stations, which I don't think has ever happened before. He may end up being a one-hit wonder, like the foreign singers who have come before him, but those two Spanish gentlemen made millions from "Macarena," and are undeniably part of the 90s zeitgeist. And now PSY and "Gungnam Style" are indisputably part of 2012's.

And who knows? Maybe the exposure of American ears to a few Korean lyrics will help inch open the door to more Asian language artists down the line somewhere, and more Asian faces in popular music overall.
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