« Pitchfork : PSY’s “Gangnam Style” Changed Pop Music, Whether You Like It Or Not »

Earlier this week, “Gangnam Style” was knocked off its perch as the most viewed video on YouTube. Korean pop star PSY had held the title since November 2012, when he became the first person to reach 1 billion views, then 2 billion, breaking YouTube’s view counter in the process. Alas, Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s plodding Fast & Furious ballad “See You Again” finally leap-frogged over “Gangnam Style”—a changing of the guard that arrives just as PSY’s hit celebrates its fifth anniversary.

Released July 15, 2012, “Gangnam Style” immediately reached the top of South Korea’s music charts, as one would expect from PSY (real name Park Jae-sang), a rapper boasting nationwide success over the previous decade. But nobody expected anyone abroad to notice. K-pop, with its controlled star-grooming system and skilled performance groups, was starting to get attention internationally and inspire an avalanche of trendpieces. “Gangnam Style,” however, looked and sounded nothing like the K-pop norm, its big EDM chorus poking fun at the upper-class Seoul neighborhood of Gangnam.

Nudged along by the likes of Britney Spears and T-Pain, the song’s visually overwhelming video proved a winner on YouTube. PSY’s goofy “horse dance” would become 2012’s most inescapable pop culture touchstone, one so ubiquitous that it reached the NFL and country music award shows.

Today, “Gangnam Style” is mostly remembered in the English-language realm as a novelty. PSY himself seems content to move on, telling Reuters earlier this year, “It was probably the biggest trophy the world could have given me. It's now something on the shelf I can admire from time to time.” Yet five years on, it’s also one of the most influential songs of this decade, altering the pop landscapes of both the United States and Asia.

“Gangnam Style” is the most successful song from Asia, ever. Save for the unexpected 1963 Hot 100 chart-topping success of Kyo Sakamoto’s “Ue O Muite Arukou” (a wistful tune about the failure of youth protest movements, renamed “Sukiyaki” by a British DJ and sold as exotica), actual efforts at crossing over to the American market have failed. Prior to “Gangnam Style,” K-pop groups Girls’ Generation and Wonder Girls attempted U.S. crossovers, with English-language songs and Nickelodeon specials. By accident, PSY achieved success beyond any of them. “He proved that a Korean artist didn't have to be young, pretty, and skinny to become a global K-Pop star,” Bernie Cho, president of Korean digital music export agency DFSB Kollective, tells Pitchfork. “He also proved that a contagious worldwide hit wasn't contingent on singing a song entirely in English.”

Yet for all of its accomplishments, “Gangnam Style” lacks one critical milestone: It never actually topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, peaking at No. 2 behind the bottom-tier Maroon 5 cut “One More Night.” “Gangnam Style” garnered solid radio airplay for a song sung primarily in Korean, but it existed primarily online as something to watch. It certainly wasn’t the first huge hit to gain traction this way—earlier that year, Carly Rae Jepsen had used YouTube-born buzz generated by artists like Justin Bieber lip-synching “Call Me Maybe” to top the charts—but PSY’s success with this strategy was in some ways without precedent. “Gangnam Style” was K-pop’s big crossover moment in America and around the world, really, but it never got the one trophy that would have cemented this in many people’s minds. And that’s because Billboard didn’t count YouTube plays towards chart placement in 2012.

This policy changed early in 2013 because of “Gangnam Style,” as implied in interviews with Billboard officials. With YouTube plays integrated into the chart formula (which later grew to include streaming data), suddenly a dance number soundtracking a meme could grab the top spot. This change almost certainly would have come about eventually, but PSY’s spotlight-grabbing breakthrough accelerated the process. Afterwards, viral hits became a constant across genres, with artists using memorable videos or you-can-do-it-too dances as a way to gain attention (alongside more cynical and bizarre attempts at chart-crashing). Thanks to its surprise success, “Gangnam Style” helped usher in the streaming age in the West.

In Korea, “Gangnam Style” was treated as a point of pride, highlighted by a massive PSY concert that attracted over 80,000 fans. Today, you can visit a giant bronze sculpture in Seoul that's modeled after PSY’s hands, mid-pony move in the “Gangnam Style” video. “That song was strongly interpreted as a heroic achievement by nationalists, with K-pop ‘conquering the world,’” says Mimyo, K-pop critic and founder of the site Idology. “There were tons of useless articles like, ‘The dance moves are from our ancestors being horse riders.’”

Elsewhere, views of Korean artists’ videos tripled following “Gangnam Style,” according to YouTube data. “Korea finally acknowledged that an international K-pop market was possible,” Mimyo says. Though the West was more aware of Korean music than ever before, America wasn’t the primary target. “Asia has always been the target,” Mimyo adds, noting the inroads Korean music had made across the region the decade before.

PSY proved especially popular around the continent, topping charts across Southeast Asia and in China, even appearing on Chinese New Year TV specials—a valuable inroad to a burgeoning market. Anecdotally, I’ve seen “Gangnam Style” chicken restaurants in Indonesia and multiple street vendors selling PSY-shaped balloons in Singapore, four years after the song’s success. Whereas he was a popular, funny meme in America, PSY ended up a popular, funny performer in Asia: He continues to release albums and videos that do well commercially across the region.

“Gangnam Style” served as a dividing line in K-pop, intentionally or coincidentally. Before, the “Korean wave” was an emerging industry using the internet to reach as many people globally as possible. With the potential revealed by PSY clear, K-pop agencies started tailoring new and rising groups towards Asian markets, featuring members from Asian countries beyond Korea in an effort to connect with those nations. And it’s working.

“Traditionally, international ‘pop’ music in Asia has been synonymous with popular Western music acts,” Cho says. “However, over the past decade, more and more songs on international ‘pop’ music charts in Asia are not sung in English but in Korean because K-Pop artists are now outselling, outperforming, and outranking Western superstars.” Korean acts have become so big that it has sparked various kickbacks, ranging from Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou calling on compatriots to stop doing the “Gangnam Style” dance, while Japanese broadcasters have at times refused to let popular Korean outfits appear on their airwaves. Real-world politics have also reached K-pop, highlighted by China’s decision to “ban” entertainment from South Korea last year over the country’s decision to install the U.S. THAAD missile defense system. China is reportedly lightening up on the policy, but Korea’s entertainment industry has been affected significantly so far.

Despite politicized backlash, K-pop has become the standard sound in Asia. As for America, K-pop heavyweights like G-Dragon and CL have failed to connect widely here, and PSY himself never reached anything near the same level of success (unless you count a Super Bowl commercial for pistachios), but still, the genre has achieved an impressive level of stateside success. Acts like SHINee, EXO, and Seventeen sell out several-thousand-capacity venues around the country, while KCon gatherings in New Jersey and Los Angeles attract tens of thousands of fans alongside top-level acts. Recently, BTS—another boy band pulling off successful treks around America—attracted attention after beating the likes of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez to win Billboard’s fan-driven Top Social Artist Award. Like PSY, they never planned to expand outside Korea, but have become the country’s biggest pop act and are now starting to collaborate with Western pop acts. For them, at least, there's a blueprint.

“PSY proved to critics and pundits alike that just being a 100 percent Korean version of himself was the real secret sauce to international success,” Cho says. “He wasn't Korea's Usher, Britney Spears, or Justin Timberlake. He was just Korea's PSY.”

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch
By Patrick St. Michel (Pitchfork)

Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]