PSY’s Gangnam Style’s U.S. Popularity Has Koreans Puzzled, Gratified

By Jeff Yang
Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2012

Once upon a time, if you’d asked a Korean (go on Ask a Korean) which of their uncountable legions of musical luminaries was most likely to crack the blast-hardened firewall of the American market, they’d have offered up curvaceous crooners like Lee Hyori or BoA, floppy-haired dreamboats like Rain or Kim Hyun Joong, or mega-girl groups and boy bands like Girls Generation and Super Junior.

And why not? These finely tuned, precision-machined performers represent the pinnacle of technology in a market that has transformed the crafting of bubblegum idols into a wildly lucrative multimedia industry. So the unlikely emergence of Park Jae-Song, the chubby, 34-year-old rapper known as PSY, as the face of K-pop, after the explosive success of his rollicking video for “Gangnam Style,” has been greeted by Koreans with a blinking neon “WTF.”

“People are surprised — bewildered, really — at his popularity abroad,” says Susan Kang, chief evangelist for Soompi.com, the mammoth online site dedicated to Korean pop music. “You have people saying, ‘We have all these beautiful guys and girls that have tried to break through to the U.S. market with little success. So why PSY?’ But of course they are embracing it to the fullest, and it’s causing a renewed interest in and respect for his music.”

There are plenty of artists who share his vibe in Korea, however. PSY belongs to an established genre of entertainers that pop pundits there have dubbed “gwang-dae,” after a caste of performers traditionally attached to royal households.

“Gwang-dae are more clown or jester-like,” says Kang. “They don’t have to be sexy idols to be popular. Their songs are either very humorous, or can sound serious, but with silly lyrics.”

The closest Western comparison that Kang can think of is Andy Samberg’s sketch troupe Lonely Island — but she notes, while they have big viral hits, they don’t actually sell a lot of records, and are seen as musical comedians rather than an actual pop act: “In Korea, gwang-dae actually top the music charts, perform on big music shows, and so on.”

The original gwang-dae were given a certain amount of license to critique the aristocracy, offering up satirical commentary on society through their dance, music and repartee. Modern gwang-dae performers are mostly distinguished by a tendency toward oddball costumes and outlandish pratfalls, but as others have pointed out — most thoughtfully Sukjong Hong on the blog Open City — “Gangnam Style” and its hilarious video are actually a subversive set of rips at Korea’s hypermaterialistic and increasingly inequitable society, in a time when the corruption of the nation’s elite is being placed in sharp relief.

Two weeks ago, Kim Seung-Yoon, the chairman of the $71 billion Hanwha Group industrial conglomerate, was fined $4.5 million and sentenced to four years in jail for embezzlement and tax avoidance. (The offenses were Kim’s second recent brush with the law; he was officially pardoned in 2008 by President Lee Myung-Bak after being convicted of beating a club bouncer with a steel pipe.)

Meanwhile, Chey Tae-Woo, the chairman of Korea’s third largest chaebol, SK Group, is currently awaiting judgment on charges that he embezzled $89 million in corporate funds.

Incidents like these have inflamed opinion away from the nation’s traditionally laissez-faire attitude toward misconduct by the superwealthy. A poll conducted recently by reformists in the ruling Saenuri has shown that three-quarters of Koreans believe that the chaebol are “immoral.”

So it’s hardly surprising that pop culture works are rising to the bait of the anti-tycoon wave. In May, cinematic provocateur Im Sang-Soo rode the wave of this discontent with his latest hit film, “The Taste of Money,” which takes a salacious look at a powerful chaebol family’s venality. Two months later, PSY unleashed “Gangnam Style,” and watched it debut at number one on the local charts as its video exploded on YouTube.

As Hong writes, “PSY does something in his video that few other artists, Korean or otherwise, do: He parodies the wealthiest, most powerful neighborhood in South Korea. Sure, he uses physical humor to make it seemingly about him, a man who wants to project glamour but keeps falling short. All of his mannerisms, from the curled upper lip to a sinister neck-stretching move, come from the repertoire of a rich playboy, and in his hands, they become a little laughable. But ultimately,  by declaring ‘Oppa [essentially, ‘big brother’] is Gangnam Style,’ he turns the lens on Gangnam, getting specific about power and privilege in a country where a single district has long dominated in almost every arena.”

Other writers have compared Seoul’s Gangnam district to Beverly Hills or the Upper West Side, but Hong clarifies that this is a weak parallel. “Gangnam has no real equivalent in the United States,” she writes. “The closest approximation would be Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Beverly Hills, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Miami Beach all rolled into one.”

It’s a 15-square-mile neighborhood whose astronomically pricy real estate makes it more valuable than all of Busan, Korea’s second-largest city, put together. All of Seoul’s major transportation lines converge there. All of Korea’s biggest and most influential companies are headquartered there. All of the wealthiest scions of Korea’s superclans — the families that run the egregiously powerful conglomerates known as chaebol, which include global brands like Samsung and Hyundai — live there. And, as Hong points out, 41 percent of attendees to prestigious Seoul University come from Gangnam: “Imagine if 41 percent of Harvard University undergrads came from a single neighborhood,” she says. This, in a country with the third-highest level of income disparity among industrialized nations, according to the OECD.

Of course, most of this isn’t apparent to the 60 million-and-counting U.S. viewers of the “Gangnam Style” video, who largely seem to interpret as a satirical take on wannabeism — essentially, as PSY’s cocky-dorky attempt to represent a scrub trying to act like a player.

Which on one level, it is. But leaving it there makes PSY the joke rather than the joker, and overlooks the video’s subversive bite, made all the more ironic because PSY, the black-sheep son of a very wealthy Korean family, has seen real “Gangnam Style” from the inside.

“My motto is ‘be funny but not stupid,’” PSY told Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. “I think the humor targeted for social outsiders reflected throughout the song, dance and music video really hit the bull’s eye.”

Not all social outsiders — at least not initially. “I didn’t make this for foreign countries,” he said. “This was always for local fans.”

But that may actually be a part of “Gangnam Style”‘s transnational allure. Susan Kang of Soompi recently spoke to former K-pop idol Danny Im (of the boy band 1TYM) about PSY’s out-of-the-blue success, and says that his take on was quite insightful. “He said all the K-pop groups trying to enter the U.S. market are singing songs they think Americans will like, which at the end of the day, makes them foreigners trying to sing Western-style songs,” says Kang. “What sets Psy apart is that his song and video are completely catered to the Korean audience, in terms of style and humor. He wasn’t trying to make it in the U.S., so what we saw was something completely novel and unexpected.”

“Gangnam Style”‘s many celebrity admirers, from T-Pain to Josh Groban to Katy Perry and Nelly Furtado (who recently performed an English-language cover of “Gangnam Style” in concert, complete with invisible-horse dance), have certainly keyed in on the “novel” and “unexpected” aspects of the work, but in doing so, have intensified the subtext of exoticism and inscrutability that frequently accompanies the viral spread of Asian-related content.

That’s made some Korean Americans concerned about viewers who don’t get the gag and don’t appreciate the music, and simply tune in to see crazy Asians doing crazy Asian stuff. “I have some mixed feelings about the  video,” says Jae-Ha Kim. “It does present PSY as a figure to laugh at, and the casual viewer wouldn’t necessarily get that he was a real musician as well as an entertainer.”

Unaware of PSY’s background as an accomplished songwriter who speaks English fluently and attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in the U.S., some blogs and commenters have even unflatteringly compared PSY to the likes of William Hung, the “American Idol” contestant whose painfully bad rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” made him an ironic icon.

But Susan Kang believes that these stereotypical perceptions are in the minority.

“It can’t be denied that there’s some ‘look at those wacky Asians’ going on here,” she says. “But at the same time, the song has this irresistible pull that would be appreciated no matter what language it was in. The video is so off the wall, but so perfect. I think most people are appreciating it for its cleverness and execution” — that is to say, laughing with PSY, not just at him.

And ultimately, as Open City editor Kai Ma points out, the reasons for the Gangnam Phenom are fairly obvious.

“You guys wrote that ‘It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how or why PSY’s video took off among America’s online hipsters,” she says. “But I don’t see how it’s that confusing. Its popularity is the result of a perfect storm: The global intrigue around K-pop and Asian party culture. Tack on the propensity for Americans to consume videos saturated with spectacle, slapstick, and women in tight-fitting shorts, and I think it’s understandable why Oppa went viral.”

Jeff Yang writes the WSJ.com’s weekly Tao Jones column on Asian and Asian-American pop culture.