PSY. He’s done pretty fuckin’ well for himself hasn’t he? August 2012 – he was a nobody. September 2012 – over 300,000,000 people know his name. Imagine how much money he’s got for it. He must be absolutely minted. Fair play, I’ve got no hard feelings, because as corny and crass and unoriginal as Gangnam Style is, it’s not even that bad a track. And the dance is joke. He’s joke. I like him. I’d party with him, I bet he’s a right laugh. If you haven’t seen/heard the tune I’m not gonna bother showing it you, you should be more concerned with finding a home because the undersides of rocks don’t make the best places to live.
Today, or last night, or tomorrow night, or whatever the time was in Korea (I suck at time zone directions), he took his shirt off mid-show ‘cos he said he would if he got to #1 on the Billboard’s Hot 100. And it’s not like Harry Styles taking his top off or some physically attractive (apparently) and homosexual (certainly) person like that. PSY is fat. Not kind of chubby or lacking in a little fitness, he’s just plain ol’ fat. Actually, he could easily also be gay but I only mentioned that before to rip on Harry Styles. But, yeah, LAD.
Belly at 2:30:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVi2iimv8J8′]
I’d suggest just leaving it playing as you read this, it’ll set the scene better.
On August 11 at 7pm KST (there you go, a real time, despite it being 2 months ago and completely irrelevent), his stage burst into flames. The curtain at the top caught fire and starting raining fireballs down on him and his dancers. The music stops and he just looks up and goes, “The fire must have started because we were partying too hard.” Boss. He went on to say “I put the white curtain up there to look like snow, but I guess I shouldn’t have.” Need I say more?
But as crazy as he is, take a step back and look at what he really represents.
Buckle up ‘cos I’m gonna go all Cracked.com on your ass and throw some facts and stats at you.
The original video for the track, at 21:42 04/10/2012, has 359,713,166 views. If I remember I’ll check them when I’ve finished this and see how much they increased. The one I showed you before has a mere 362 views, but that’s because it was only put up 5 hours ago and YouTube is a retard. It actually probably has a few thousand already, but it’s not going to get close to the original. It probably won’t reach 1 million, never mind 300 million. It’s a video of PSY performing live at Seoul Plaza, his hometown. If you skipped to 2:30 before you might not have noticed but there’s 70,000 people there (you can clearly see the one white guy at 0:25). A measly 50,000 people reluctantly dragged their asses out of their tents to see Beyoncé at Glastonbury last year. Remember how huge that was? And deservedly so, she’s arguably the most successful female music artist in recent history. Her career spans 15 years, she’s sold 11.2 million albums, she’s been in films, she’s performed for Obama. And not to mention the fact that she’s gorgeous. And still is at 31 after a miscarriage and a daughter. She’s a demi-goddess and deserves to be worshipped by the hundreds of millions that do. Everyone loves Beyoncé.
15 year career, 2 pregnancies. Look at her.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okz-YEKgruc’]
Now look at PSY.
Two months ago, this guy was one of 49,999,999 South Koreans that you didn’t know the name of. The 1 you did being Ji-Sung Park. The drastically differently named Park Jae-sang (not sure where he got PSY from?) was sitting around, not doing any exercise, probably living pretty normally and having fun. He is 34. Not 17, like Beyonce when her career probably started to take off. He was sat on his fat ass for 34 years. Then, according to Wikipedia, his mate called Yoo Gun-hyung wrote him a very simple track that sounds almost exactly the same as all other club music and PSY wrote some very simple lyrics that sound like every other club song over the top (as if the lyrics are ever actually important – we just go ahead and sing the fvcking Korean). He added a funny dance. Somehow, they miraculously got everything spot on. It all came together perfectly and now I’m sat in my flat in Bristol trying to analyse exactly how this guy took over the world.
Maybe it’s solely due to the fact that Facebook just reached a billion members. Maybe their brilliant advert was staring them in the face all along. It feels like we’re moving closer and closer to global communication and community.
Which makes the next possibility more interesting. Maybe it’s because there are a shitload of people over there in East Asia and unless something massive like this happens, we simply don’t have a fvcking clue what they’re all doing. Why don’t we know what they’re doing? Not purely from a security point of view. I still just about trust my fellow human enough to keep me from expecting a spontaneous group invasion, led by China but backed up crucially by all the rest because they decide that they can work with each other for a short period of time as long as they each get a continent to themselves at the end of it. Hopefully the fight to not get Africa will halt their plans. But I mean as much from a social and cultural point of view. Are we not interested? Are they all so different to us that despite having the technology to develop a truly global community, uniting everyone in the world, we just don’t really wanna talk to them?
Imagine a high school disco. The Western world is the jocky clique standing pretty central but slightly to the side of the room that are throwing banter and being lads and tossing private jokes left, right and centre and talking about Jersey Shore because we’ve been hanging out with America too much and he’s a dick and always get’s control of the TV remote. We’re all having a great time because we know our friends and they’re like us. There’s one or two black guys in the group as well to make us feel cooler. We break off sometimes to catch up with an Indian mate – there’s loads of Indians but they’re safe and a bit hilarious so we get on with them, or an Aussie if they could make the long trip. The South Americans are doing coke in the toilet. The Russians are doing Krokodil back home. The Muslims couldn’t come because the school didn’t know that they’d booked the disco on the first night of Eid and they’re all at the Mosque. There’s a group of East Asians to the side of the room. They’re quite reserved and are talking between themselves, they’re not as willing to start drinking and partying as hard. This is where the stereotypes end and the insight begins.
Imagine now at this point that gradually more and more East Asians start arriving. Their group is actually getting pretty big, but we Westerners don’t pay any attention because we’re having too much fun amongst ourselves. We keep glancing over at them and making jokes about how they all look the same and they’re all plotting against us, but deep down we believe it. A few of the more dominant Asians in the group are making derogatory comments about the Westerners, making up stories about us to make the others hate us and the others just go along with it. Most of the Asians would actually love to come over and join us, or for us to speak to them, but it’s just not happening – there’s no common ground, no conversation starter. Imagine, somehow the Asians have no club music to listen to, but we do. In the same room. Just go with it.
I can’t think of a way to incorporate this believably into this elaborate metaphor, but basically, the West throws the East internetz and Facebook. Ok? So suddenly all those Asians that wanted to party with the West now have Facebook. And they learn, in the next maybe 10 minutes exactly the kind of shit music that the West likes to dance to and talk about and get drunk to. And they realise they like it, too.
Out of the blue, some random Asian jumps on the stage and starts blasting this absolute banger. Just out of thin air, this music starts blasting. And he’s got a hilarious dance to go with it and everyone loves him. The Asians start jumping wildly to this track, and doing this cray dance. The West looks over and pricks its ears up and hears this tune. The West starts going slightly more nuts than before to said tune. Only slightly more, for a brief period of time, but now suddenly everyone is at the same level, and doing this fvcking dance.
This is the state of the world right now.
The next step is getting everyone in the centre of the dancefloor, mixing together.
Oh and the loud, bossy East Asians that were chatting shit about the West? They weren’t feeling the music and sat down at the tables to bitch some more. Only now there’s only a few of them, and they can’t do shit.
And that is how we will prevent a global Asian invasion. We invite them.
If that all got a bit too heavy for you, here’s a video of a hippo with diarrhoea. Play Gangnam Style up to about 0:23 and then hit play on the hippo vid for added explosion.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Flr7JhPow’]
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0′]
