A quick study of Korean rapper Psy's "Gangham Style" video, finds it has been viewed a mind boggling 10 Million times. Time to review the little sucker?
It is rare for something to go exothermic without rock nyc having offered an opinion a couple of months before the phenom hit, we wrote about "Call Me Maybe" before Justin Bieber, and this one didn't past us buy so much as,… well I am not quite sure why we first ignored K-Pop, we have yet to write about 2NE1 (girl poppers influence by MIA and Madonna, but for a tween audience). And now we have missed the opportunity to write about PSY when our opinion might mean something.
I'd heard it a couple of months ago and thought PSY was saying "open condom style" which, well, didn't seem really worth the effort. But as the song caught on I listened to it a number of other times, a pretty good remix almost made it on "Listen Up".
PSY looks both endearingly other but with a strange threat to him. He is too bouncy to play the monster in a Korean gangsta flick, but he is a Jekyll/Hyde character who interrupts himself to dance wildly.
The tipping point for me was the very funny SNL sketch where mall employees are brought out of their funk by the song, culminating in PSY, the South Korean rapper slash overnight sensation -slash Autumn Carly Rae, doing his invisible horse dance. The sang is catchy as hell. How did it get missed by us? Well, for me at least, I don't watch music unless its live, so I didn't bother catching the video and the video is a neon colored honey of an in joke. It is so weird (culture difference no doubt) yet such strange eye candy. It is like PSY keeps on exploding like some kinda anime.
And the synth hook is killer, absolutely killer. Which gives it the added plus of being really, really addictive.
So, yeah, we got to it late, just as the entire planet catches on.
Grade: A-