But seeing such singers "makes some Americans nervous," Kim said. South Korean music has scored big in Asia with bands featuring handsome, stylish, makeup-wearing young men, including Super Junior and Boyfriend. He's an excellent dancer, a confident rapper and he's funny, but another reason for his breakthrough could be that less-than-polished image, said Jae-Ha Kim, a Chicago Tribune pop culture columnist and former music critic.
But he is from a wealthy family and was actually raised and educated south of the Han River, near Gangnam. PSY, whose stage name stems from the first three letters of the word psycho, has always styled himself as a quirky outsider. He attributed his success to "soul or attitude."
"I'm not handsome, I'm not tall, I'm not muscular, I'm not skinny," PSY recently said on the American "Today" TV show.
So how did PSY - aka Park Jae-sang - a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly $4,500 for smoking marijuana after his 2001 debut, get to be the one teaching Britney Spears how to do the horse-riding dance on American TV?
More mainstream K-Pop performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried and failed to crack the American market. In a sly, entertaining way, PSY's song pushes these cultural buttons. "Gangnam residents are South Korea's upper class, but South Koreans consider them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige." "Gangnam inspires both envy and distaste," said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. The neighborhood's residents are seen by some as monopolizing the country's best education opportunities, the best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth. The notion that Gangnam residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted piece of geography, irks many. Gangnam households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average. The new wealth drew the trendiest boutiques and clubs and a proliferation of plastic surgery clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious private tutoring and prep schools. The district's rich families got even richer. Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s.Īs the price of high-rise apartments skyrocketed during a real estate investment frenzy in the early 2000s, landowners and speculators became wealthy practically overnight. The seats of business and government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in the neighborhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families still live there. The average Gangnam apartment costs about $716,000, a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn. About 1 percent of Seoul's population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The district of Gangnam, which literally means "south of the river," is about half the size of Manhattan. Gangnam is the most coveted address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage ditches. Sadly, the video is not embeddable at this time, but it can be viewed here. Sonically, North Korea’s satire video proves to be no Excellent Horse-like Lady as it spurs Gangnam Style K-Pop sound for “Scooby-Doo”-style sound effects and 1960s big band brass. While he is credited with overseeing South Korea’s rapid economic rise, he is a controversial figure in his country because of his dictatorial rule.
Park seized power in 1961 as an unelected military general and was elected in 1963 as president, where he stayed until his assassination in 1979. The video goes on to mock Park for her support for the actions of her father, Park Jung-hee, South Korea’s former dictator.
The face of the person (which has been poorly edited on) is that of Park, presidential candidate for the governing Saenuri Party, CNN reports. Posted to the official government website Uriminzokkiri, the video starts off with a person performing the now-ubiquitous “horse dance” from the Gangnam Style video.