The video for his song "Gangnam Style" , released in July, is officially the most "liked" ever on YouTube — 5m times and counting. It's the second-most watched after Justin Bieber's "Baby", with more than m views again and counting. In this story everything is forward motion. It has gone to No 1 in 28 countries.
It is entirely in Korean. The track, shamelessly mocking the pretensions of people who falsely associate themselves with the fashions and styles of the sprauncy Gangnam district of Seoul — a kind of South Korean Beverly Hills — has been called a "force for world peace" by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Not bad for a bunch of dance moves involving a wide-legged strut as if riding a horse, hands crossed at the wrists as though gripping the reins, followed by a whipping gesture.
Flash mobs 30, strong have danced Gangnam style. That's how to keep a relationship alive. As a result, Psy has been called upon to teach the dance to others.
He has taught it to Britney Spears. He has taught it to Justin Bieber. And now the poor sod has to teach it to me, a man who, when they were handing out the feet, was clearly in the queue marked "fish".
We stand in the middle of a ballroom at London's Dorchester Hotel, watched by his entourage and a photographer and video crew there to record this moment for a posterity which won't thank us for the effort. He shows me the double hop from one foot to the other, a rhythmic shuffle which must be mastered first before you can bring the crossed wrists into play.
I lift my right foot to copy him, and…. But let's leave us there for the moment, standing in the middle of an empty ballroom, me with one pigeon-toed foot raised, Psy staring at me as if afraid I'm about to fall over. I just may. It is a few hours earlier, we are at the headquarters of BBC Radio 1 and the Psy roadshow has just rolled into town.
The night before, he was addressing the students at the Oxford Union , in the English he learned during four years as a student in America. Now he has a shiny limo, a herd of lens-tumescent paparazzi and a crowd of fans waiting for him. He left South Korea a month ago, on an international tour which he confesses has taken him by surprise. He uploaded the video to YouTube on 15 July. It would secure him a management contract with Scooter Braun, who also manages Justin Bieber, and spawn countless YouTube parodies.
Among them there's a tail-coated " Eton Style " by the school's pupils, another by a bunch of Klingons , a " Jewish Style " and almost inevitably one that mashes together "Gangnam Style" with the scene of Hitler in his bunker from the film Downfall. Click here to view the video. I will hear Psy interviewed for radio and television during our time together, and unsurprisingly there will be a number of stock lines to which he will return, made no less true for repetition.
This is not made by me. It's made by people. He knows the difference. The fact is that while Psy may be new to many of us, success is not new to him.
He has been topping the charts in South Korea for a dozen years, which means that the character who has been unleashed upon the world — and it is a character — is fully formed.
What matters is understanding that character, the way he's ripping it out of people claiming to be classy in the way they are perceived to be in Gangnam, where Psy himself grew up. For all his charisma, he is unexceptional. What he does have, though, is brilliant comic timing; a way of using a caricature of Asian implacability that is simply devastating.
But if someone like me uses it, it's funny. The success of this latest song has been heralded by many as a break-out for K-Pop, a particular brand of shiny, glossy and heavily manufactured music that dominates the Asian charts. Except that K-Pop broke out a long time ago. By the same token, while Psy is Korean and his music is most definitely pop he is not mainstream K-Pop.
In a highly conservative society, most K-Pop artists are groomed through a fame-school system for stardom — dance lessons, singing lessons, how to deal with the media — before being unleashed on the public with a highly innocuous product calibrated to offend as few people as possible.
But nobody expected anyone abroad to notice. K-pop, with its controlled star-grooming system and skilled performance groups, was starting to get attention internationally and inspire an avalanche of trend pieces. It's now something on the shelf I can admire from time to time.
By accident, PSY achieved success beyond any of them. With YouTube plays integrated into the chart formula which later grew to include streaming data , suddenly a dance number soundtracking a meme could grab the top spot. Afterwards, viral hits became a constant across genres, with artists using memorable videos or you-can-do-it-too dances as a way to gain attention alongside more cynical and bizarre attempts at chart-crashing.
It all started in February when some South Korean music industries along with YG Entertainment, the agency which represents Psy, announced that they want to enter the American market.
Even before Gangnam Style went viral, YG Entertainment had millions of subscribers to its YouTube channel and its different artists had huge fan following on Twitter. Also, they must have had a large number of email subscribers, the data on which is inaccessible to us. Such numbers are necessary to kick start any marketing campaign. They knew that because of their large following they will get huge number of views right from day one.
His voice, his dance moves, his expressions of the face — they all show off his enthusiasm towards music. In order for the video to be an international hit, it first had to be a hit in South Korea. So they decided to bring in three popular personalities of the country into the video, apart from Psy himself. Then the second one was Yoo Jae-suk , a popular comedian and TV host of the country, who appears in a dark yellow suit in the video.
And the third one is No Hong-chul , the person who has been famously called the elevator guy as he appears in an elevator in the video. He too is a comedian and a show host of South Korea.
As far as my research shows, Gizmodo was the first mainstream news site to run a story on the video on 26th July, , 11 days after it was launched. Kat Hannaford of Gizmodo wrote just a few lines about it, embedding the video in the article, and linking to the English translation of the lyrics.
Then on the 30th of that month Gawker wrote a small article on it. This article got 18 thousand Facebook likes! This was followed by Billboard who published a story on Gangnam on July 31st. Billboard said:. This caused some controversy in the blogosphere. Controversy causes discussions and thus gives more visibility to the object in question.
I believe the Billboard article was one of the prominent reasons which drove traffic to the video. Then the video was featured in a lot of other big media publications. However Psy and YG had a trump card up their sleeve which they played out on 3rd September. Braun is a talent manager based in America who had represented the singing sensation Justin Bieber.
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