SEOUL— He may not look it, in a spiffy
double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the
ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he
rubs his temples: He is hung over.
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But he does not mind nursing this headache, at well
past 2pm on a Thursday in
Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to
him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.
The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, a
onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a
song, “Gangnam Style”, became the first YouTube offering to surpass 1 billion
views and had the world galloping along with him.
The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and
accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance
move in and around
Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the
breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or
K-pop, before then.
The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was
so culturally pervasive in 2012 that
Barack Obama was asked about it on
Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state
propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician.
But for several years in the aftermath of all his
viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust
overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by
paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with
Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.
“Let’s make just one more,” he said he kept telling
himself.
He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global
career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he
was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly
television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating
the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.
Psy was not alone in trying to figure out how to
reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but
government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about
the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing, or the man that had vaulted the
song to such singular levels of ubiquity.
And in the decade since the song and video first put
South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become
a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to
permeate all corners of the world.
Artists such as BTS and
Blackpink command devoted
fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact
that rivals a small nation’s gross domestic product. The fervor has spilled
over beyond music into politics, education, and even Broadway.
Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.
“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different
level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about
the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and
paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the
South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Kim said.
Now, 10 years on
from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang,
is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and
management company and is trying to re-create the magic with the next generation
of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.
For all the years he has spent thinking and talking
about “Gangnam Style”, he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.
“The songs are written by the same person, the dance
moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person.
Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said.
“I still don’t know, to this day.”
In global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the
epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a
rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from
many of his fellow performers, in that he did not count on a boost from his
physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.
He never had the chiseled look sought after in South
Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he
became notorious for his blunt, profane, and at times ribald lyrics.
Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic,
iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the
college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, bestselling albums, and
sold-out concerts.
Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to
expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where
many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated,
an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by
the neighborhood continue into the next generation.
Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family
running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife
and twin daughters and said he spends little time thinking about the place.
As for the chase of global fame that once drove him
nearly mad, he said he’s made his peace with its absence.
“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens
again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my
rightful place.”
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