Gangnam Style

First there was Rebecca Black’s Friday. Then there was Call Me Maybe. Somewhere in the middle of that Joseph Kony killed some children. Viral internet videos become part of the collective social consciousness, not least given to the fact that they spread quicker than an STD in a brothel. “Hey have you seen this?” one friend says to the other, and before you know it, everyone has herpes. I think I’m mixing analogies.

Both Black and Jepsen (or Rae Jepsen, I never worked that out) went viral due to being catchy but ultimately awful. People would watch once to see what all the fuss was about, twice to check if what they’d just seen was as bad as they thought, and a third because they had become addicted to it and were getting withdrawal symptoms. No one was watching them due to their quality, music or video. If anyone could combine the catchiness with an awesome song, surely the internet would explode? Enter, Gangnam Style.

Gangnam Style is a song by flamboyant tune-blazer and Korean mega-star Psy. Presumably this stands for “Psychologically damaged due to a lack of love and attention as a child”, or simply “Psycho”. From what I can deduct from the video, when Psy was a child his father promised to get him a wooden rocking horse for Christmas. His father then went away, fighting and dying heroically in the Korean War in the 70s. This left Psy traumatised, and to this day he still runs around pretending to ride that invisible wooden horse he was promised all those years ago. Watch the video again with this in mind and I promise you this tragic back story will become obvious.

Gangnam Style can be accredited to a genre of music I had previously never heard called K.Pop, which stands for Korean Pop. However, my fleeting research into the career of Psy lead be to discovering that he in fact describes himself as a rapper. We can only assume that its genre placing is due to the fact that they didn’t want anyone saying that his music is “Complete and utter K.rap”.