In July 2012, Korean pop music phenomenon Psy released his sixth studio album, led by the single ‘Gangnam Style’.
Psy was already a popular performer in South Korea long before that song took the world by storm. He had been writing songs for over a decade, and also appeared on TV shows, stared in a movie and participated in music videos for other ‘K-Pop’ groups.
But ‘Gangnam Style’ made him an international star, even if Koreans themselves were slow to pick up on it. His global blockbuster parody of life in the wealthy district of Gangnam became the first – and so far only – video to reach and exceed 1 billion views on YouTube. The song currently has 1.5 billion views and is also the most ‘liked’ video in YouTube history, according to the Guinness Book of Records.
When Psy announced he was working on a follow-up single over Christmas, the world waited with great anticipation for what he would come up with. The horse-riding dance from ‘Gangnam Style’ was copied all over the world as sporting athletes celebrated scoring a goal or a try, or winning a race. Even world leaders like Barack Obama, David Cameron and Ban Ki-moon all jumped on the bandwagon, hailing it as “a force for world peace”.
The big question was whether Psy could come close to matching the success of ‘Gangnam Style’, or would he experience an epic fail, as many of his detractors hoped.
‘Gentleman’ was released on 12 April and got its first public viewing the following day, when 50,000 watched Psy perform the song – and its unique dance – at Seoul’s World Cup stadium. At time of writing, the song has already attracted 250 million hits on YouTube, and looks set to be the second biggest song of all time, following ‘Gangnam Style’.
But ‘Gentleman’ has received enormous national criticism, even if it went straight to number 1 on the Goan Singles Chart. The video features Psy performing a variety of un-gentlemanly pranks and lurid acts. From the opening scene where he kicks over a traffic cone in front of a group of elderly men, to groping the breasts of a mannequin, to scratching at his backside and making women in a library smell his fingers, the video has not been well received at home. The state-funded broadcaster KBS has even banned the song from its stations because of what it believes are a series of public order offences.
Seoul city councilman Jung Sae-hwan expressed his anger to the nation’s media, claiming Psy’s library dancing might inspire visitors from abroad to do the same. “When foreigners see this music video there is no guarantee that they won’t be compelled to go to the Seoul Metropolitan Library and dance and take pictures with their smartphones,” he said, before adding that “through this video, the public may get the idea that running around in the library is okay.”
Meanwhile, the origin of the song’s dance is well known to Koreans and international K-Pop enthusiasts. Psy’s female co-star in the video is Ga-in, from the band Brown Eyed Girls. Their number one hit in 2009, Abracadabra, featured the same dance: a simple but addictive pelvis-swinging move. According to the Korean Times, the dance has been “dubbed the ‘sigeonbang choom’ in Korean, otherwise known as the “arrogant dance”.
While many aspects of the video are likely to shock or offend some people, to me it all just seems like a bit of fun.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
