Gangnam Style: How a quirky South Korean hip-hop artist conquered the world

Gangnam Style, a peculiar South Korean hip-hop video that lampoons a trendy district in Seoul, has become an unlikely global hit.

By Foster Klug,?Associated Press, Youkyung Lee,?Associated Press / September 21, 2012

South Korean rapper PSY performs his massive K-pop hit 'Gangnam Style' live on NBC's 'Today' show in New York, earlier this month.

Jason DeCrow/Invision via AP Images/AP

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South Korean rapper PSY's "Gangnam?Style" video has 220 million YouTube views and counting, and it's easy to see why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively entertaining performer's crazy horse-riding dance, the song's addictive chorus and the video's exquisitely odd series of misadventures.

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Beneath the antic, funny surface of his world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social commentary about the country's newly rich and?Gangnam, the affluent district where many of them live.?Gangnam?is only a small slice of Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and bitterness.

Here's a look at the meaning of "Gangnam?Style" ? and at the man and neighborhood behind the sensation:

THE PLACE:

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.

The district of?Gangnam, which literally means "south of the river," is about half the size of Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul's population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average?Gangnam?apartment costs about $716,000, a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn.

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.

Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s.

As 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 district's rich families got even richer.

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.?Gangnam?households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average.

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. 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.

"Gangnam?inspires both envy and distaste," said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. "Gangnam?residents are South Korea's upper class, but South Koreans consider them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige."

In a sly, entertaining way, PSY's song pushes these cultural buttons.

THE GUY:

More mainstream K-Pop performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried and failed to crack the American market.

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?

"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. "But I'm sitting here."

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