"Human society is so hollow, and even while filming I felt pathetic." Psy hits all the symbols of Gangnam opulence, but each turns out to be something much more modest, as if suggesting that Gangnam-style wealth is not as fabulous as it might seem.
The whole video is about him thinking he's a hotshot but then realizing he's just, you know, at a children's playground, or thinking he's playing polo or something and realizes he's on a merry-go-round." "I think a lot of what is pointing out is how silly that is. "Koreans have been kind of caught up in this spending to look wealthy, and Gangnam has really been the leading edge of that," Hong said. Koreans "really wanted to be one of them," but she says that feeling is changing, and "Gangnam Style" captures people's ambivalence. The video is "a satire about Gangnam itself but also it's about how people outside Gangnam pursue their dream to be one of those Gangnam residents without even realizing what it really means," Kim explained to me when I got in touch with her. "Coffee shops have become the place where people go to be seen and spend ridiculous amounts of money." "The number of coffee shops has gone up tremendously, particularly in Gangnam," Hong said. (Her English-subtitled translation of the video is at right.) "In Korea, there's a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2) ramen for lunch and then spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee." They're called Doenjangnyeo, or "soybean paste women" for their propensity to crimp on essentials so they can over-spend on conspicuous luxuries, of which coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most common. "I think some of you may be wondering why he's making such a big deal out of coffee, but it's not your ordinary coffee," U.S.-based Korean blogger Jea Kim wrote at her site, My Dear Korea. Psy boasts that he's a real man who drinks a whole cup of coffee in one gulp, for example, insisting he wants a women who drinks coffee. This skewering of the Gangnam life can be easy to miss for non-Korean. They're overwhelmingly trust-fund babies and princelings," he explained. The kids that he's talking about are not Silicon Valley self-made millionaires. "The neighborhood in Gangnam is not just a nice town or nice neighborhood. A place of the most conspicuous consumption, you might call it the embodiment of South Korea's one percent. That's seven percent of the entire country's GDP in an area of just 15 square miles. The neighborhood is the home of some of South Korea's biggest brands, as well as $84 billion of its wealth, as of 2010. Gangnam, Hong said, is a symbol of that aspect of South Korean culture. The emphasis on heavy spending, coupled with the country's truly astounding, two-generation growth from agrarian poverty to economic powerhouse, have engendered the country with an emphasis on hard work and on aspirationalism, as well as the materialism that can sometimes follow. South Koreans have been living on credit since the mid-1990s, first because their country's amazing growth made borrowing seem safe, and then in the late 1990s when the government encouraged private spending to climb out of the Asian financial crisis. There are nearly five credit cards for every adult. Average just before the sub-prime crisis was 138 percent). In 2010, the average household carried credit card debt worth a staggering 155 percent of their disposable income (for comparison, the U.S. One of the first things Hong pointed to in explaining the video's subtext was, believe it or not, South Korea's sky-high credit card debt rate. I don't expect much from K-Pop to begin with, so the first 50 times I heard this, I was just like, 'Allright, whatever.' I sat down to look at it and thought, 'Actually, there's some nuance here.'" "In fact, when you asked me about the satire element, I was super skeptical. "Korea has not had a long history of nuanced satire," Adrian Hong, a Korean-American consultant whose wide travels make him an oft-quoted observer of Korean issues, said of South Korea's pop culture. That message would be awfully mild by American standards - this is no "Born in the U.S.A." - but South Korea is a very different place, and it's a big deal that even this gentle social satire is breaking records on Korean pop charts long dominated by cotton candy. But I spoke with two regular observers of Korean culture to find out what I was missing, and it turns out that the video is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society. That alone makes it practically operatic compared to most K-Pop. I certainly didn't, beyond the basics: Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and Park's "Gangnam Style" video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish caricature of a Gangnam man.
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