Music Video Task 1 - Video Five

PSY - GANGNAM STYLE

 

 

I have my Mum to blame for this as she suggested this video for my assignment and myself to let myself watch it and I can’t stop watching it, it fun and funny and it’s addictive especially the dance routine.

 

BACKGROUND

 

Gangnam Style is a single by South Korean rapper PSY (real name Park Jae-sang) who is best known for his quick-witted sense of humour and comical dance moves. The song was released on July 15, 2012, as the lead single of his sixth studio album PSY's Best 6th Part 1. It went to number one in a lot of countries including, South Korea, USA, Canada, U.K and so on and as of October 9, 2012 (2012 -10-09)^[update], the music video has been viewed over 414 million times on YouTube  and is the site's most watched and most liked K-pop video. This video was shot over 48 hours in July.

 

The video has been mentioned by numerous celebrities including T-Pain, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, even Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. The song was even covered by music artists Nelly Furtado and Maroon 5. The video was featured in international media outlets such as CNN International, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the global politics magazine Foreign Policy.


Flash mobs about this dance routine have appeared in cities around the world becoming a source of parodies and reaction videos by many different groups including The Oregon Duck, midshipmen from the United States Naval Academy, the cellmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center and the North Korean government.



PSY has brought the "Gangnam Style" dance to a lot of locations including The Today Show, Saturday Night Live, Dodger Stadium, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Samsung commercials.


On September 17 2012, it was nominated for Best Video at the upcoming 2012 MTV Europe Music Awards to be held in Frankfurt, Germany. Then a few day later on September 20, 2012, "Gangnam Style" was recognised by Guinness World Records as the most "liked" video in YouTube history.

 

 

PROMOTIONAL TOOL

 

As the research goes, there are also an amount of celebrities guests featured in the video and apparently when it comes K-pop, it sort of like a routine to have cameos appearances from well-known stars. The stars are also a great way to promote the videos so people might want to watch certain stars in the music videos. The celebrity stars that are in the video are:

• Korean girl group 4Minute member Kim Hyun-a played the love interest and appeared in the final two dance sequences
• South Korean band Big Bang members Lee Seung-hyun and Kang Dae-sung appeared two old men playing a board game in the park and flying in the background after the explosion
• Hwang Min-woo, a 5-year-old boy who is seen dancing at the beginning of the video. He had been on Korea’s Got Talent.
• Comedian/television personality, Korea's Nation emcee Yoo Jae-Suk, in a dance duel with PSY
• Comedian/television personality, No Hongchul, dancing in an elevator with his trademark pelvis-thrusting with PSY rapping underneath him.

 

 

 

SYNERGY

 

This dance routine is certainly join the ranks or all the other dance routines that has come before: the Cha Cha Slide by DJ Casper, The Ketchup Song by Las Ketchup, Macarena by Los del Río and all others that I haven’t mentioned. “Gangnam Style” will certainly not be the last of them and these dance routines are the sort that brings everyone together in discos, clubs, festivals and family holiday resorts.

 

The cowboy/horse-riding dance is the main theme of the song and therefore in the beginning scenes of the music video, there are a quite a few horses and their riders that show people who are learning the dance an idea and how to do the dance.

 

The music video also shows the location which is the Gangnam district of Seoul and the unexpected locations all around it including an outdoor yoga session and a hot tub. PSY also wears several distinctive suits and black sunglasses with a mindset of "dress classy and dance cheesy" and in some ways the fashion sense that are shown in the video are in style at the moment.

 

According to research “Gangnam Style” actually refers to the lifestyle within the Gangnam district of Seoul where apparently people there are trendy, hip and exude a certain supposed "class". The term was listed in Time's weekly vocabulary list as a manner associated with lavish lifestyles in Seoul's Gangnam district.

Here is a quote of what PSY said in a interview: “People who are actually from Gangnam never proclaim that they are—it's only the posers and wannabes that put on these airs and say that they are "Gangnam Style" — so this song is actually poking fun at those kinds of people who are trying so hard to be something that they're not.”

 

 

 

FAN REACTION/CRITICS RECEPTION

 

The music video has been highly praised for its catchy beat and PSY's humorous dance moves in the music video and live performances, catching the attention of media around the world.

Maura Judkis of The Washington Post wrote: “Gangnam Style' has made an extraordinarily stupid-looking dance move suddenly cool”.

Mesfin Fekadu of the Associated Press wrote that PSY is "currently having a pop culture moment."  and that the dance moves are "somewhat bizarre" but the music video is full of "colorful, lively outfits."

Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times called it "one of the greatest videos ever to be uploaded to YouTube."

Matt Miller, a host from the business and financial news broadcaster Bloomberg Television, played "Gangnam Style" during his show, because "it's just a super hot video that has gone astronomically viral." He also said that PSY mentioned on CNN that he wants to make people laugh even in the midst of all these global economic slowdowns, "so that's the Wall Street tie-in" he needed.  ". UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has hailed the song as a "force for world peace"

However even though "Gangnam Style" has received largely positive reactions, some people have found the music video wacky or bad-mannered. For example Matt Buchanan and Scott Ellis of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the video "makes no sense at all to most Western eyes makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else's medication."

Paul Lester of The Guardian labelled it as "generic ravey Euro dance with guitars" while Robert Myers of The Village Voice called it "an inspired piece of silliness"

 

 

AVAILABILITY
 

 
 

The video was made famous on YouTube so there a chance to see there and apparently there a down link download from one of the video.

 

There’s also a chance to get the video from iTunes if you research for it on Google.

 

 

 

Here is a Parody video of the music video and because I like this one better than the original (and the guy is cute), I thought I show it, please watch it: