Seoul music
South Korean singer PSY jumped to the top of the British pop charts on Sunday with the quirky dance track Gangnam Style, an internet phenomenon that has clocked up more than 300 million views on YouTube.
The 34-year-old became the first Korean artist to top the weekly UK chart, helped by the success of a video shot in locations around Gangnam, an upmarket neighbourhood in the South Korean capital, Seoul. It topped the US digital songs chart earlier this week.
The US Naval Academy and the Thai navy have adopted it and made their own video version of it.
It’s taken over a Philippine prison, with more than 1 000 inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre in Cebu, Philippines, re-creating the dance in a massive prison courtyard.
This is the same prison that rose to internet fame in 2007 when its inmates danced to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, racking up more than 50 million YouTube views to date.
At the China Open, Novak Djokovic, pictured, said he would be willing to put on a performance of the dance, with Germany’s Andrea Petkovic, who has been known in the past for her on-court dancing.
At the T20 World Cup, West Indies star Chris Gayle has celebrated on the field with an outbreak of the dance, joined by Darren Sammy and several other players.
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PSY’s Gangnam Style video has 300 million YouTube views and counting, and it’s easy to see why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively entertaining performer’s crazy horse-riding dance, the song’s addictive chorus and the video’s exquisitely odd series of misadventures.
Beneath the antic, funny surface of his world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social commentary about the country’s newly rich and Gangnam, the affluent district where many of them live. Gangnam is only a small slice of Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and bitterness.
Here’s a look at the meaning of Gangnam Style – and at the man and neighbourhood behind the sensation:
THE PLACE:
Gangnam is the most coveted address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage ditches.
The district of Gangnam, which literally means “south of the river”, is about half the size of Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul’s population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam flat costs about $716 000 (R6 million), a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn.
The seats of business and government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in the neighbourhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families still live there.
Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s. As the price of high-rise flats skyrocketed during a real estate investment frenzy in the early 2000s, landowners and speculators became wealthy practically overnight. The district’s rich families got even richer.
The new wealth drew the trendiest boutiques and clubs and a proliferation of plastic surgery clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious private tutoring and prep schools. Gangnam households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average.
The notion that Gangnam residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted piece of geography, irks many. The neighbourhood’s residents are seen by some as monopolising the country’s best education opportunities, the best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth.
“Gangnam inspires both envy and distaste,” said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. “Gangnam residents are South Korea’s upper class, but South Koreans consider them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige.”
In a sly, entertaining way, PSY’s song pushes these cultural buttons.
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THE GUY:
More mainstream K-Pop performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried and failed to crack the American market.
So how did PSY – aka Park Jae-sang – a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly $4 500 for smoking marijuana after his 2001 debut, get to be the one teaching Britney Spears how to do the horse-riding dance on American TV?
“I’m not handsome, I’m not tall, I’m not muscular, I’m not skinny,” PSY recently said on the American Today TV show. “But I’m sitting here.”
He attributed his success to “soul or attitude”.
PSY, whose stage name stems from the first three letters of the word psycho, has always styled himself as a quirky outsider. But he is from a wealthy family and was raised and educated south of the Han River, near Gangnam.
He’s an excellent dancer, a confident rapper and he’s funny, but another reason for his breakthrough could be that less-than-polished image, said Jae-Ha Kim, a Chicago Tribune pop culture columnist and former music critic.
South Korean music has scored big in Asia with bands featuring handsome, stylish, make-up-wearing young men, including Super Junior and Boyfriend. But seeing such singers “makes some Americans nervous”, Kim said.
“People in America are comfortable with Asian guys who look like Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who are good-looking, but they’re not the equivalent of Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves.”
Part of the initial interest in Gangnam Style, Kim said, was a kind of “freak-show mentality, where people are like, ‘This guy is funny’. But then you look at his choreography and you realise you really have to know how to dance to do what he does. He’s really good.”
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THE SONG:
PSY, at times wearing sleeveless dress shirts with painted-on untied bowties, repeatedly flouts South Koreans’ popular notions of Gangnam in his video.
Instead of cavorting in nightclubs, he parties with retirees on a disco-lighted tour bus. Instead of working out in a high-end health club, he lounges in a sauna with two tattooed gangsters. As he struts along with two models, they’re pelted in the face with massive amounts of wind-blown trash and sticky confetti. The throne from which he delivers his hip-hop swagger is a toilet.
The song explores South Koreans’ “love-hate relationship with Gangnam”, said Baak Eun-seok, a pop music critic. The rest of South Korea sees Gangnam residents as everything PSY isn’t, he said: good-looking because of plastic surgery, stylish because they can splurge on luxury goods, slim thanks to yoga and personal trainers.
“PSY looks like a country bumpkin. He’s a far cry from the so-called Gangnam Style,” Baak said. “He’s parodying himself.”
The video abounds with ironic, “not upper-class” images that ordinary South Koreans recognise, said Park Byoung-soo, a social commentator who runs a popular visual art blog. Old men play a Korean board game and middle-age women wear wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces as they walk backward – a popular way to exercise in South Korea.
PSY’s character in the video was modelled on the clueless heroes of movies like The Naked Gun, he said. He has also said his goal is to “dress classy, but dance cheesy”.
Others see more than just a goofy outsider. “PSY does something in his video that few other artists do: He parodies the wealthiest, most powerful neighbourhood in South Korea,” writes Sukjong Hong, creative non-fiction fellow at Open City, an online magazine. – Sapa AP
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English Translation:
Oppa* is Gangnam style
Gangnam style
A girl who is warm and humane during the day
A classy girl who knows how to enjoy the freedom of a cup of coffee
A girl whose heart gets hotter when night comes
A girl with that kind of twist
I’m a guy
A guy who is as warm as you during the day
A guy who one-shots his coffee before it even cools down
A guy whose heart bursts when night comes
That kind of guy
Beautiful, lovable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Beautiful, lovable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Now let’s go until the end
Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style
Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style
Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh
A girl who looks quiet but plays when she plays
A girl who puts her hair down when the right time comes
A girl who covers herself but is more sexy than a girl who bares it all
A sensible girl like that
I’m a guy
A guy who seems calm but plays when he plays
A guy who goes completely cra zy when the right time comes
A guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles
That kind of guy
Beautiful, lovable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Beautiful, lovable
Yes you, hey, yes you, hey
Now let’s go until the end
Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style
Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style
Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh
On top of the running man is the flying man, baby baby
I’m a man who knows a thing or two
On top of the running man is the flying man, baby baby
I’m a man who knows a thing or two
You know what I’m saying
Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style
Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh
* Oppa is essentially “big brother”
http://www.kpoplyrics.net