The first time I heard a PSY song was probably sometime in middle school, during a family gathering where my cousins and I were lounging around the couch. The oldest, two months my senior, pulled out his phone, and, as we waited for YouTube to finish buffering, promised us that it would be crazy—the kind of video we shared with our friends via email, the subject line “OMG” in all capital letters because all of us were 13 once.
The song didn’t disappoint. But “Right Now” was also plain good, a monument of a pop song that only PSY could pull off: everything from the chunky guitar riff to those massive drums screamed with a formidable attitude. More than anything, though, it was his voice: brimming with a punkish devil-may-care attitude but never slipping into apathy or irony. He was biting, sarcastic, but there was a vitality pulsing beneath; in the pre-chorus’s cries to shout, shout, shout until your neck has burnt to a crisp; in his booze-soaked oh-oh-ohs in the chorus, off-kilter yet so on the mark; in that delicious emphasis on the title, the hunger in his snarled right now.
My suggestion would be to watch the video. Observe his picture of a typical morning in Seoul, where everybody is as tired as the banter on the radio. Roll your eyes as the radio hosts spin traffic banter into a constipation joke (or giggle, nobody’s judging), before we pan in on our hero, steaming in the driver’s seat of his car. Once the blather dies down and the music begins, though, something new happens, something PSY’s always done very well—tearing conventions apart, sure, but bringing people together in the process. Years before anybody knew what a “Gangnam Style” was, PSY was inspiring commuters dancing together in traffic; office workers knocking tables over, pulling tiles off of the ceiling; suburban stragglers wreaking havoc in grocery store lines. It’s a rebellion, one not without a cause, that’s been brewing for years whether listeners know it or not.
Culturally, I often feel like a foreigner in both of the countries I call home. Friends from California compare favorite K-pop groups while I resist the urge to ask who these people are. The only experience I have with Korean drama is asking Mom to turn that shouting down just a little, please. I take no side in the great EXO shipping war. I can’t even remember the names of the nine girls in Girls Generation. My experience with Korean pop culture takes me back to swim classes at the YMCA: memories of dipping my toes into the shallow end, wading in only to find my head submerged, breathing staggered.
But from the beginning, PSY felt like he was on my side. Like me, he had spent considerable time in the States (to be fair, so have many other Koreans), spoke fluent English, and rapped and danced as if he had designated himself the cool uncle of the K-pop family. Unfortunately, not all the similarities were good: like many Korean celebrities, he was an alleged draft dodger, which only made it easier for conservative critics to dismiss him as a cultural outsider. The day I transferred to a Korean middle school, my dad warned me about kids who would not see me as one of them; boys that would reject my masculinity based on my citizenship. I wanted to ask him why but bit my tongue.
“Right Now” was PSY’s first song following his two years of service in the Korean military: although he never alludes to this, it offers some good context for what the song is about. Like me, PSY had to grapple with what it meant to be both Korean yet not Korean enough when being Korean itself is so loaded, when it demands so much more of you than a bloodline. “Right Now” is not a direct response to this problem, but it is a song about finding the willpower to define yourself in ways you like. It’s about how conventions can hurt you in small but not meaningless ways, whether it is the heels crushing your feet from the inside out or the necktie slowly strangling you; about dismantling those conventions, and more importantly choosing to dismantle them; about how sometimes the best way to free other people is to first free yourself; about finding solidarity not in exclusion, but in breaking down in-groups and out-groups, in celebrating everybody for their differences and experiences.
Looking back, I had learned Pop Philosophy 101, but I hadn’t realized it at the time. It’s funny how much a pop song can become a part of you without you even knowing. Sometimes you hear a melody you didn’t know you needed, and when you do, you grasp at it, a slippery thing falling apart in your hands before you stuff it into the wound in your chest, let it pulse in your veins, hear yourself breathing to the beat, stronger than you ever thought you could.
Coming Into Gangnam Style
You’ve probably heard the song, seen the video, and read enough pieces and arguments about both to last a lifetime. Indulge me as I talk about them one more time.
It’s July 2012 and I’m in my parents’ bedroom with the doors and windows shut, my netbook plugged in, my backpack shoved into the opposite corner of the room, and the AC on full blast. I tap my fingers on the screen, waiting for the video to buffer until it does—the first seven seconds, at least. A plane flying through the air; a woman clad in short shorts wielding a comically-oversized fan; then pitch-black sunglasses reflecting all of this back at me as the camera pans out to reveal a familiar face.
This scene has now been viewed over two billion times worldwide.
“Gangnam Style” is written as a satire of consumerism and elitism in South Korea, both of which are prominent in a certain district of Seoul. While the message is well-crafted, it is not why the song took off like it did. In the wake of its success, it’s easy to forget that “Gangnam Style”—not to mention its star—was never meant to be a worldwide smash. It was a quiet domestic hit at first, snagging a #1 on M! Countdown (for non-Korean readers: think MTV before The Real World). Then came a few tweets from fringe celebrities, then a listicle on Buzzfeed, then everybody on my News Feed—all sharing the most ridiculous music video they’d ever seen: the one with the crazy Korean guy breaking into horse stables and screaming at butts. Now it’s the most-watched video in the history of YouTube, something I hope we’ll all go back to 20 years from now as we laugh about how ridiculous 2012 was.
Things, however, have changed for PSY after “Gangnam Style.” He had the eyes of a world audience on him, many beaming but not all. The Macarena’s shadow loomed over him: who was this swanky, loud, sunglass-slinging man at the center of everything? The reaction back home was even more intense. That video was all my classmates talked about in the cafeteria; all I saw on the subway screens; all that played in the 7-Eleven stores sprinkled around my neighborhood. His history as a Korean turncoat was wiped. We had our hometown star, and we embraced him.
I watched the fascination unfold with a cocktail of pride and reservation brewing in my gut: K-pop’s recognition outside national borders had previously been limited to enthusiasm from some of the friendlier corners of the Internet and “music is dead” fatalism from about everybody else. People talk about the Hallyu wave, but the reality is that nothing before or since “Gangnam Style” has washed over an international audience like it, and I wanted to see how far it could go. PSY’s victory was, in some part, ours—maybe even mine.
Even so, my joy was tempered. It wasn’t so much the song, really: even beneath those party-streamer synths and that booming beat, PSY’s voice was as distinct as ever. What I feared was the uneasy feeling that maybe everybody was laughing at him, not with him. “Gangnam Style” was innocuous enough when it was just a funny foreign novelty, but as the video smashed record after record, the consensus of favor curdled into disgust: the same people who had annotated in excruciating detail every one of the video’s ridiculous moments were now calling it overrated, undeserving.
Summer ended. The leaves changed color; I redirected attention to my plummeting grades. We all moved on, and “Gangnam Style” faded, only resurfacing briefly as a capstone to a tumultuous year. Maybe that was for the best, I decided. Maybe that was a blessing.
Not Your Average Gentlema
The thing about basing a career on audacity is that it inevitably leads to diminishing returns, and after “Gangnam Style,” PSY’s next hit, “Gentleman,” felt like a regression. If my subjective feelings aren’t enough, it was also a regression commercially, the kind of setback any one-hit wonder would face. On paper, the song’s music video featured everything that had made its predecessor so beloved: celebrity cameos for Korean fans, goofy antics, even the attractive femme fatale—”Gangnam Style” had 4Minute’s HyunA cavorting in the subway; “Gentleman,” Brown Eyed Girls’ Ga-In knocking PSY off his cheap plastic stool—but everything felt more tempered. Even the beat was tired.
I like “Gentleman” more now than I did one year ago: at the time I wasn’t ready to appreciate it. Granted, he does not make it easy, because he goes full ham in the music video, pushing women off of chairs and kicking children’s balls away. To me, the act felt somewhat mean-spirited in a way “Gangnam Style” wasn’t—calculated, even. The song’s release also coincided with the beginning of my senior year, when I was having a crisis of identity between cramming for finals at the library and scribbling bad poetry in a notebook meant for college essays. I couldn’t even pick up chopsticks without thinking of my interrupted heritage. I feared that if I allowed myself to laugh, I’d be laughing at PSY as the weird Korean guy, the outsider. The “mother father gentleman.” Myself.
But here’s the thing I wished I had picked up then: PSY knows we’re looking at him. He’s not unaware of the fact that there will be viewers who frame him as a foreigner, who will laugh at him as he gets red-faced drunk, but what matters is that he does not buy into this conception of himself. The chorus’s cry of “Mother father gentleman” plays into the hands of viewers looking to mock a foreigner’s Engrish. It’s also a wink at the kind of judgmental person who would do that, and it’s his delivery that defines it: bold, without a hint of hesitation or shame.
If there is a takeaway from this, it is that empowerment is not always about dignity. Sometimes empowerment is about relinquishing dignity. Sometimes empowerment is about acting like a buffoon and owning it without regard for what anybody else thinks. Empowerment is about the confidence and strength of mind to refuse putting yourself in boxes, to be your own mess: honest and relatable and human.
Which leads us into “Hangover.”
Life Perpetually Hungover
The sad part of having a breakout hit is that it looms over the rest of your career: even if you’ve had five—five!— albums before, you will always be held to a different standard. Everything you release afterwards will be held up in comparison; whether you try to recapture a Top 40 hit in a bottle or to break away, you’ll probably inspire eye-rolls. What’s a rebel decked out in pop-star goods to do?
Answer: collaborate with Snoop Dogg and confuse everybody.
“Hangover” is a song about drinking, which is both a big topic in South Korea and a risky one for PSY to tackle without completely risking or compromising his image. If the theme is expected, however, the music is not. It’s weird, weirder than any of the post-Gangnam singles and probably most of what came before: a mishmash of trap rhythms, abrasive jazz sounds, and hip-hop conventions that would sound even more unstable were it not for the chutzpah of PSY and Snoop Dogg: the former as bold as ever, the latter delivering a relaxed performance that lets everything around it settle some. What’s most surprising to me is how “Hangover” integrates Korean sounds in a way that none of PSY’s mainstream singles have ever really done before—how closely that saxophone riff resembles a traditional Korean flute; how the thundering drum rhythms and metallic clangs filling out the background take me back to watching my high school’s folk music club, a tapestry of harsh but warm sounds overpowering the August heat.
Even so, it sounds uneasy, and maybe that’s the point, because drinking is not as simple as the movies make it look. Neither is identity or living or being. I turned 19 last year, legally allowing me to drink in South Korea. Last year, I harbored fantasies of what that meant: hazy adventures stumbling around midnight streets. I was going to be bold, fearless, invulnerable. As it turns out, it does not quite work that way, not only because alcohol actually kind of sucks but also because even sober, I live a life that’s constantly shifting; an identity that is layered and nuanced and evolving. You do not have to be drunk to feel hungover. I do that well enough on my own. And for the first time, I am learning to be comfortable with that. I am and will always be drunk on life.
As with every PSY single, “Hangover” has stirred up a new round of the Internet’s favorite pastime: is this the end of the world? Time has lauded the video as delightful, while others have lamented the downfall of the goofy Korean with the beer gut and the song that, for one brief moment in time, took over the world. But maybe they’re not listening hard enough, because through the thick of it all, he’s still there, sounding more like himself than he has in a long time: slipping in and out of English and Korean with the masterful ease of a party host; making a mockery of his own slurred speech before sobering right back up; at one point literally becoming a record scratch effect, fading out only to jump right back into the action. He sounds like somebody who has found himself in an unexpected place. He sounds like somebody who has survived.
Update (11/25/15): This article has been updated from an earlier version to reflect changes in the HPR print edition.
Image Source: Wikimedia, Eva Rinaldi
