Everybody now: “Oppan Gangnam style!”
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Those three words will automatically transport any pop music fan back to the summer of 2012, when Korean music star Psy went viral the world over with his inescapable earworm, “Gangnam Style.”
It’s hard to overstate the monumental impact Psy’s surprise hit had on the culture of the early 2010s. It brought K-pop to the forefront of popular music, giving millions of listeners a danceable entry point into the genre that would soon become a dominating force in English-speaking markets like America. It earned Psy a No. 1 hit all around the globe, too (although somehow it only peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, held off from the summit by Maroon 5’s nine-week hold on the top spot with “One More Night”). The song broke sales and streaming records and got Psy a new manager by the name of Scooter Braun. And it was covered rather terribly, but inevitably, on Glee.
The song’s viral music video—which became the first in YouTube history to surpass 1 billion views and currently stands at 4.95 billion views as of press time—came with an equally viral dance that had everyone from then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (who called the song “a force for world peace”) to Great Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, galloping like horses to its infectious, nonsensical chorus.
American President Barack Obama even recognized the international influence of “Gangnam Style” in a 2013 meeting at the White House with South Korean President Park Geun-hye. “Around the world, people are being swept up by Korean culture—the Korean Wave,” he said before jovially adding that his daughters Malia and Sasha had “taught [him] a pretty good ‘Gangnam Style.’”
But for all its global attention and silly dance moves, what is Psy’s “Gangnam Style” actually about? For that answer, we have to look to Korean culture and an accurate translation of the track’s lyrics in English.
Crazy-Noble
Most fans outside of South Korea may not realize that “Gangnam” isn’t just a Korean word that translates to “South of the River”: it’s more specifically an über-wealthy neighborhood in the country’s capital city, Seoul, that is indeed located on the south bank of the Han River. Think of it as Seoul’s equivalent to Beverly Hills, full of glitzy fashion, blinged-out housewives, ultra-privileged teens and twenty-somethings—it even has its own equivalent to Rodeo Drive in a street called Cheongdam.
In a 2012 interview with NPR Music that declared him the “new king” of K-pop, Psy explained what the significance of the Gangnam district was to the point he’s making in the song’s cheeky lyrics. “Gangnam is a territory in Seoul, Korea,” the rapper said at the time. “I describe it as noble at the daytime and going crazy at the night time. I compare ladies to the territory. So—noble at the daytime, going crazy at the night time—and the lyric says I am the right guy for the lady who is like that.”
Knowing more about what Gangnam represents within the larger cultural ecosystem of Seoul turns the music video from delightfully silly into a more pointed skewering as Psy dances his way through stables full of horses, a posh tennis court, rows of well-to-do women practicing yoga, and an airy equestrian arena. At other points in the visual, he invades a sauna wearing a tiny blue and pink towel, and rides a motorboat through a harbor filled with paddle boats that look like giant ducks while a number of famous Koreans, including Daesung and Seungri of boy band BIGBANG and fellow K-pop star Hyuna, make cameos.
Gangnam Through and Through
So yes, the song deftly parodies the subculture of Gangnam, and it turns out Psy was perfectly qualified to poke fun at the area considering it’s exactly the part of Seoul from which he hails.
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Born to an affluent family living in the Gangnam District, Psy’s father is the longtime executive chairman of DI Corporation, an international company listed on the Korean Stock Exchange that manufactures and supplies semiconductor test equipment and other computer chips. (According to a report published by the Associated Press in the wake of “Gangnam Style” going global, the rapper’s family owns 30 percent of the successful company.) His mother, meanwhile, owns a number of high-profile culinary hotspots in the area.
So is “Gangnam Style” a privileged rich kid’s hokey send-up to the posh world he was born into? Is it a joke that just happened to go viral? Either way, it doesn’t seem to matter much to Psy.
Ten years after “Gangnam Style” turned his into a worldwide name, the rapper sat down for an interview with CNN Style to look back on the song and the phenomenon it created. “It’s my one and only giant trophy,” he told the network in his native Korean. “I think statistically, it was such a rare case that it’d be impossible to relive it. But if I did go back in time, I think I’d just do it all over again, the same exact way.”
Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for MTV
