Essentially, it's a comic dance in which the participants ride an invisible horse and twirl an invisible lasso. The music is the worst kind of electro-synth pop. The singer is a chubby little geezer in 1950s sunglasses. The hook-line is meaningless to anyone outside Korea. The collective dancing it encourages is a naff mixture of "The Birdie Song" and "The Macarena".
But none of these potential drawbacks stopped the South Korean rapper Psy's "Gangnam Style" from becoming the global music, dance and video phenomenon of the year.Everyone watched it – at the time of writing, the video had been viewed 940 million times on YouTube – and everyone wanted to dance it.
Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the UN, not a man given to busting moves on the dance floor, had a go, as did Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; a bunch of Etonians did a parody called "Eton Style" through the school quadrangles, after which Boris Johnson told the Tory Party conference that he and David Cameron had danced it together at Chequers.
The song is, in fact, a social satire: "Gangnam" means "south of the river" and the style under attack is that of nouveau-riche burghers living south of Seoul's Han river. They're the cool, wealthy set with their gym-bunny looks, designer threads and love of hanging out in exclusive bars and clubs (three of which are owned by Psy's mother). Psy's persona is the wannabe from the wrong end of town who longs to be part of the hip wor
Read more: 'Gangnam Style' to Obamamania: 12 reasons to be cheerful about 2012 - Features - Music - The Independent
No comments:
Post a Comment