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outlook-hater · 10 hours ago

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erasing meaning from gangnam style

Since we’re an Asian-interest magazine, I’m going to assume that you know what K-pop is, if you aren’t vaguely familiar with it. Living through the 2000s has been a very exciting time for Korean identities in the mainstream. One could sense the time dependence of my identity in the US; in elementary school, I mostly interfaced with the American joke wondering if I had come from the North or South, which failed to consider that all of my grandparents had come from the North, and would never see their family or friends again due to US intervention. But by high school, my fortunes had turned around! At this point, we were being accosted in Marshalls by well-meaning parents who wanted to ask us about BTS because their daughter looooved K-pop, which raised another question: how did they know we were Korean in a primarily Chinese community?

But regardless of my personal bitterness, it’s important (to me) to consider how this happened. And it was a gradual change, to some extent, but really a large paradigm shift happened to change the visibility of the Korean identity in the US, around when I was in 6th grade. K-pop at this point had been what my other Korean friend and I watched on old YouTube during playdates for her to fangirl over, and for me to vaguely stare off into. It’s not like K-pop hadn’t had any international success, but it felt limited to the Korean-American diaspora and niche internet communities. “Gee” by Girls Generation is a song I would like to argue really first crossed the border into mainstream success, but I think that’s wishful thinking for an iconic song I happen to like (seriously, go watch it).

I don’t think it would be a controversial statement to say that “Gangnam Style'' was a really big deal. Statistically speaking, it topped iTunes charts in 31 different countries, it was the first video with a billion views, and it’s still the 11th most watched video on YouTube. But I’m sure just mentioning it brought you back to whatever you were doing while I was arguing about how stupid Harry Styles and Call of Duty were (I wasn’t a particularly critical-thinking middle schooler). Gangnam style was all over the radio, blessing my 7 a.m. rides to school in my mom’s Corolla, and I’d climb back onto my main after-school activity of the desktop computer to see the thumbnail on YouTube before clicking away and watching two very large buff men put together a mega burger made out of bacon instead.

Not that I had a global perspective of things at the time, but what was interesting about the virality of “Gangnam Style” is that it seemed to originate from completely different reasons across the US and its original target audience in Korea. I sensed this as one does through the American cultural hegemony, another middle schooler friend, who confided to me that it was great that Korea would be seen in such a positive light thanks to “Gangnam Style”. I wasn’t sure. I felt a little uneasy knowing that my cultural diplomat was PSY freaking out over a lady’s ass.

“It’s awesome,” the guy who oversaw our after-school pick-up told me.

“Did you know,” I said, pausing my round of Touhou 7 that I would bring in on a USB, “that it’s actually about capitalist critique?” I had learned this after Googling the lyrics because it felt a little rude to not know what a song in my own language meant. I wasn’t 100% sure what that meant, either, but they were words I knew went together according to Tumblr.

The entire video, really, made me a little nervous. Who was I in the eyes of others at school? PSY? Who even was he?

I didn’t really want to be associated with this goofy Korean man who wasn’t very handsome. I wanted to be taken seriously.

We can chalk this up to the nervous identity crisis and desire for acceptance of any middle schooler, but this difference in understanding “Gangnam Style” wasn’t just personal, but a symptom of cultural differences. Not just cultural differences, but a refusal to translate or understand the spectacle of Korean messaging in the US. We can look at this with post-feminist theory as well as the pervasive use of ironic justification in the 2000s-2010s.

Background history

In Korea, PSY was already known for being a runaway success, starting as an underground artist who began to produce hit after hit, starting in 2001 with the success of his first full-length album because of his non-traditional styling (compared to the extremely polished and conventionally attractive looks of K-pop groups), use of comedic lyrics, as well as vulgar lyrics criticizing Korean society. So “Gangnam Style” wasn’t a far departure from that.

The lyrics of “Gangnam Style” feature a guy who describes himself as “macho” and wants a girl who “looks quiet but parties hard when she goes to party,” or is “sexier covered up than a girl who is scantily dressed.” This narrator’s thoughts lean into the post-feminist sexism of the idea of a “girl who isn’t like other girls,” but PSY openly mocks the narrator’s preferences through the narrator’s parallel ideas on his own looks and perceived attractive features. This narrator brags that he also “can get crazy passionate” and “has bulging brains instead of bulging muscles.” While not necessarily as applicable in the Korean feminist scene during this time period, in the US this can be understood as the attempt to validate “alternative masculinities” that are not based on the traditions of physical power, but instead “intelligence” that became popular in the 2000s and 2010s.

The hook, “Oppa Gangnam style,” can be understood as the narrator calling himself a cool guy from the Gangnam district, which can be thought of as posturing that you’re from a rich, high-culture district. The classical comparison is to Beverly Hills, but you can also think of people who brag about going to Harvard, being snotty about New York City, or so on. It mocks the idea of constructed masculinity through materialistic attempts at class mobility with commercial goods (the Mercedes car) and images of lifestyle (lounging at a “beach,” going to high-end spas) by showing these as tasteless, corny, and crass. “Gangnam Style” critiques the materialistic culture of Korean youths, who aspire to come off as rich and upper class through elegance and “taste.” But PSY lampoons this through an overtly corny music video that claims that he is portraying these “elegant” people who ultimately are chasing after masculine ideals of being considered attractive and meeting women who are feminine ideals in aesthetics. These men treat women like objects because they believe that they can achieve their masculinity through materialism and class.

But how many Americans know that “Gangnam Style” is a satirical critique of Korean materialism?

At the risk of being unfair, my two examples certainly didn’t know. Most other K-pop music videos have English captions, including the videos that were released before “Gangnam Style” caused a huge growth in interest in the genre. But “Gangnam Style,” 10 years after it’s been released, still has no translations on the video itself. Which seems strange since so much of the music video is guided by the lyrics. If the lyrics are lost on the American audience, where does the international appeal come from?

International Appeal

The answer is that the themes behind the lyrics were never part of the appeal. Most of the appeal comes from the music video. T-Pain tweeted, “words cannot even describe how amazing this video is...”, which is directly linked to the skyrocketing popularity of the video as news sites began to cover it. So the virality of “Gangnam Style” in the US must be studied through the lens of pleasure removed almost completely from the lyrics. Taking the music video at face value, then, we can get a different reading using post-feminist themes of irony, the choice of objectification, masculinities, as well as the construction of the consumer through advertising and sexuality.

The positive response to “Gangnam Style” has generally been attributed to the absurdist nature of the scenes in the video, as well as the dance itself. The Washington Post claimed that “'Gangnam Style' has made an extraordinarily stupid-looking dance move suddenly cool,” ignoring the fact that the dance was chosen to look stupid in the first place.

The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that the video “makes no sense at all to most Western eyes" and it "makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else's medication."

The deliberate removal of meaning from the video is reminiscent of Adorno’s concept of the culture industry. The video loses the power of “psychology” over the “structure” of the music video. The Western viewers thus avoid the confrontation of culture in the music video by brushing the visual themes aside as “meaningless.” So it becomes “uncritical fun” and viewers can thus transcend the need to even know the lyrics. There is a racial aspect to this as well—the Korean-focused message is brushed aside since it “makes no sense at all” to a Westerner. So the minority Korean message is subjugated and destroyed, made invisible by mocking the silly Asian man doing his silly dance. In this way it becomes pleasurable to an audience that may otherwise be alienated by its themes.

Another way “Gangnam Style'' is understood in the US is through sexuality, as advertisements and other video forms have already created this sexualized “set of images.” It is likened to LMFAO, probably in reference to “Sexy and I Know It” for their satire of the grandstanding of masculinity. But LMFAO creates satire through the focus on male genitalia and body humor. The comparison of “Sexy and I Know It” can be understood by “Gangnam Style'' being seen as a video about a satire on male sexuality instead of consumerism, with American viewers focusing on the nudity and Noh Hongchul’s pelvic-thrusting dance. The latter dance is actually a trademark of Noh Hongchul’s comedy acts, but the American audience doesn’t know this, and thus interprets it in the language of images they are familiar with. As Sut Jhally puts it in “Advertising, Gender and Sex: What’s Wrong with a Little Objectification?”, the viewers are informed through the “system of images'' that are present in American society, and also happen to be obsessed with “gender and sexuality.” The one English lyric in the song is “Hey, sexy lady”—which adds to this perception and leads to a later ironic reading of other scenes where women are sexualized.

So of course there is no closed captioning—PSY understands the appeal for American audiences includes taking the lyrics as nonsensical and meaningless.

Another distinctly American reading occurs for the objectification of women, notably the yoga lady image that became the icon of “Gangnam Style.” With the context of the lyrics, it’s clear that this is a direct critique of the sleazy nature that comes from commodifying women. The women present in the music video are also traditionally beautiful, with the woman who seems to be interested in PSY in the music video being an idol herself. Without the context of the lyrics that deconstruct the delusion of a romantic, classy lifestyle where women only have value from being traditionally beautiful, however, this scene is transformed into the post-feminist “irony” that Rosalind Gill talks about in her paper “Postfeminist Media Culture.” American viewers thus participate in the sexualization of these women by the constructed “silliness” of the music video. By making “Gangnam Style” absurdist and bereft of meaning, PSY’s yoga lady scene is seen as “funny” and “subversive” towards sexism, even though the original critique is on materialism and commodification.

The real absurdity is the American response to “Gangnam Style” as a force to “understand Korea” in the US by Obama, and even as a way to hail world peace by the UN.

Even Noam Chomsky was part of an MIT parody of “Gangnam Style,” partaking in “mindless fun.” I felt a little disturbed at the time that this might be the image of Korea constructed for the American mind as actual interest in the culture was swept away by the exaltation of the video as nonsensical and meaningless. As a 6th grader, this wasn’t how I framed it to myself, but the way the Western viewpoint became dominant over the original meanings of the video signaled to me that my Korean experience would become destroyed and overwritten by the white, American viewpoint. The post-feminist mindset also created a post-racial mindset where irony was used to mock other cultures, setting a white gaze in media much like the male gaze asserted by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” That’s why so many TV shows were able to partake in blackface (like The Office and 30 Rock, just to name a few) and take pleasure in unashamed racial violence—to the white gaze, it is funny, because the original meaning of racial violence can be stripped away.

References

Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Sexual Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Media & Gender, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203066911.ch54.

Horkheimer, Max, et al. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2020.

Jhally, Sut. “Advertising, Gender and Sex: What's Wrong with a Little Objectification?” (1989).

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1999.

#interesting #to read #hallyu

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