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This might seem kind of ridiculous, but I believe that PSY's "Gangnam Style" is one of the most culturally ahead-of-its-time moments of the 21st century. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and can glean the following ideas / trends that are relevant today, ten years later, that were arguably foreshadowed by Gangnam Style's ridiculous success.
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Viral dance moves. TikTok is all the rage at the moment, and it seems like viral dances are all over the place today. While you could argue stuff like the Macarena was already extremely mainstream before Gangnam Style, it seems like GS was the first time a dance had been primarily circulated / learned over the internet and viral video.
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K-POP explosion in the US: It's still pretty insane to me that a song completely in Korean caught on the way Gangnam Style did in the USA at the time that it did. Now, we see K-POP groups like BTS selling out stadiums in the US. However, Gangnam Style was absolutely EVERYWHERE in the year that it came out, the first K-pop song of its time to crossover into mainstream culture, radio and YouTube presence.
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Memes as pop art: While Gangnam Style obviously wasn't "the original meme", you could argue it was one of the first internet memes to crossover into a mainstream consciousness. Like I said before, this is one of the first strictly "online" things that crossed over to your parents, politicians doing the dance, etc. We all saw it as cringe at the time, and maybe still do, but overall it crossed over in a way that nothing really had at the time.
While this song is a pretty innocuous meme in 2022, I feel like it actually was a pretty influential and important moment in popular culture that is dismissed as just a meme today. What does everyone else think?
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Crank That (Soulja Boy) was the first viral hit meme song with a widely circulated a viral dance associated with the song.
That said, I think what Gangnam Style did that was different was that the song's popularity was primarily on YouTube. While Crank That was a viral hit, it's popularity was pretty evenly distributed through radio, mp3 sales, and ringtones. The view count of Gangnam Style on YouTube was so high that it basically got the charts to start including video views in their charting calculations. It showed how YouTube could be the primary source of listening to music even over traditional radio/mp3 sales. That's where I think Gangnam style was probably the most important.
As far as its impact on the current K Pop craze, it's hard to say. I remember K Pop having a fanbase prior to Gangnam Style, that was just the first one to cross over. The popularity felt like it went back down though. K Pop remained a pretty niche interest until recently where certain artists crossed over again. I'm not sure if Gangnam Style was responsible for those initial niche fanbases or not.
Maybe in the US, but Soulja Boy wasn't all that known here in Norway. I know, we're small, but I feel like that speaks to the power of Gangnam Style. Everyone knew Gangnam Style, while mostly us kids that spent all our waking moments on the internet knew Soulja Boy. It didn't break out from the internet like PSY did.
Forgot about Soulja Boy. Good call on that one.
Can't forget about Soulja. Man was so far ahead of the curve on internet music.
Soulja Boy randomly had a hit last year.
He had that viral song “Rick and Morty.”
Not even close. How about the macarena? Or if we can talk about pre-internet, Thriller?
I was thinking this phenomenon goes back well before the internet too. Even The Twist is more or less what's being described (and it likely wasn't the first song/dance combination). It's a pretty common trope among pop music in general.
I guess it depends on what you define as 'viral'. I know there's probably a few definitions, but I meant more that Crank That was the first song to have a its popularity and a popular dance associated with the song spread through a mainstream internet video service. Macarena seemed to spread by other forms of media that weren't on the internet to my knowledge.
This actually got me interested in the first big dance song, and it got me to find this Novelty and fad dances Wikipedia page that was pretty interesting.
I think we're mostly in agreement, but I don't think crank that got big primarily because of YouTube. That song came out when I was a fresher at Uni, everyone knew the dance moves and I don't think most people had seen the music video online. This was a time when most music videos were still watched on TV.
I definitely remember videos of people dancing to it on YouTube. It was a viral meme for a bit.
Since Macarena was pre-MP3 I think it's functionally pre-Internet. At least I don't believe the Internet was responsible for its spread.
Macarena wasn't pre mp3, or pre filesharing. It did come out 2 years before Napster which may be what you mean, but Napster wasn't the first place that you could get mp3s online. People were sharing mp3s over IRC and Usenet long before Napster, and the first widely available mp3 codec came out the year before the version of Macarena everyone knows.
Fair enough, but my point remains that the internet wasn't responsible for its spread. Granted I was in like 4th grade, which was either the perfect age or a terrible age to gauge that.
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Rick Rolling actually started on March 29, 2007: the day the Grand Theft Auto IV trailer was supposed to release. The Rockstar site was so overloaded with traffic that the trailer wouldn't load beyond a few seconds. Someone cut those first few seconds into a new video, with the Rick Astley music video immediately following, and put it up on YouTube and started passing around this troll link as a "mirror" of the trailer. This was the first Rick Roll.
Source: I was there.
And yet, Mambo No. 5 is a song that current young listeners know really well, but not say Kiss from a Rose, an obviously better song. Similar to how I (millennial) know a ton of cheesy 80s songs from those Power Ballads tv ads.
Gangnam Style had me feeling like I was living in some kind of bizarro world. I was actually living in Seoul at the time it came out, and it was fucking everywhere - I would literally walk down the street and hear it blasting out of every single store. I absolutely didn't expect it to be a thing outside Korea, though, and I was stunned to see everyone doing that damn horse dance when I got back to New York.
Gangnam Style felt dated pretty quick IMO.
The Macarena, Cha Cha Slide, Cupid Shuffle, Chicken Dance, all those dumb wedding dances with directions were around and ridiculously popular before Gangnam Style. The Macarena was definitely more popular having grown up in the ‘90s.
There was plenty of popular memes prior to that as well that crossed over. Bronies happened the year before it.
I hardly ever hear Gangnam Style in public like I do with any other dance song. Idk if I’ve even heard it at a wedding
I don’t have a ton to comment on the legacy of Gangnam Style, and as the other comments pointed out Crank That(Soulja Boy) was probably the first song I can remember to do what you’re saying, but damn - Gangnam Style was one of my favorite cultural moments to have lived through in the US.
“Viral” content was starting to become a mainstream phenomenon, and you had meme songs like Thrift Shop blowing up and you had viral dances like wedding parties dancing down the aisle(which jumped the shark in The Office) and The Harlem Shake. But Gangnam Style, at least in my memory, put it all together with a catchy song, genuinely hilarious music video on YouTube, and a signature dance.
I was in my early 20’s and going out to the bars on the weekends and it’d always come on and everyone would invariably do the dance and laugh. The music video was hilarious. I don’t know, even though Crank That(Soulja Boy) achieved those benchmarks earlier, it wasn’t meant to be silly and fun the way Gangnam Style was, even if it did achieve meme status. Gangnam Style felt like an inside joke that everybody was in on all at the same time. I’m not sure we’ve had anything quite like it since. Maybe that was just the time of life and part of the world I was living in, but that was an era of internet culture we’ll never have again.
Also god, I can’t believe it’s already been 10 years.
It was wild seeing everyone online start freaking out and memeing Gangnam Style and then going out partying at bars and clubs and everyone losing their minds and rushing the dance floor when the DJ played it. Sure other viral content entered public consciousness but Gangnam Style was so dramatic and sudden, like one week it didn't exist, the next week it was all over the internet, and next week it was at every party and people would go nuts doing that dance, clubs, house parties, the middle of the street.
Humans are awesome.
its a pretty hardcore bop. It still makes me want to move more than most songs and I am not a huge dancer
I think really it was the first time Asia showed up globally in the mainstream which is much more of a harbringer of Asia's rise and NA's decline. We ignored them for my whole life and then everyone was doing the horse. This has been happening in Asia forever but it's the first time I've saw it here. It foreshadowed a LOT more than a music trend and perhaps there's way, way, way more yet to come.
I don’t really agree with anything you said but this is one of my favorite comments on Reddit.
Really? I mean, at what time before this did anyone give a shit about an Asian star? I was living there right around before/when this came out and there as like a million fad hits, their culture is filled with them, but I dont' remember anyone here giving a damn. Now they're displaying ads on the sidelines of NBA games in Chinese.
Thanks all the same tho. That's quite the compliment. ;0
Oh oh oh, my bad. I thought you meant Asian culture showing up in the mainstream in general, not specific to music or pop. I was like…that’s not true at all.
My fault. I still think the language barrier is too great to overcome any time soon but you’re right - I can’t think of any Asian person, let alone in their native language, breaking through even half of the way Psy did with Gangnam Style.
Yea I mean you get the odd movie etc. Ang Lee has an amazing career in the West. But it's about more than just music. Asian cultures 'really' get into fads. Wonder Girls played in Asia everywhere. It wasn't just on TV or the radio. It was in every store. On everyone's cell phone. I heard that song 15-20 times a day at least. When Happy Harvest, the FarmVille clone, was released 'everyone' played it. It was like Pokemon Go except kids to grandmothers were playing it. Someone has their cookies featured on the news in some town and there's lineups of 1000 people to get them. Everyone is freaking obsessed with the same things at the same time.
It's not so much that someone broke through but one of those cultural waves didn't stop at their borders and kept going to America in a form of media that was just so utterly dominated by US artists. Psy was on par with LMAFO but less pretentious. Anyway I'm just blabbing now. ;)
Are you talking about in music only?
Pretty much... There's plenty of Asian things that have crossed over but I think it was kind of an indicator of the times when Psy broke through and was taken seriously. It wasn't just a novelty it was a damn good pop song with a freaking hilarious video. I don't remember anyone thinking of a famous asian as effortlessly bumpin and hilarious. Again, maybe there have been but I don't remember when. It wasn't long after that you started seeing the cultural walls starting to come down. Again the Chinese ads at sporting events in the USA is kind of a big deal IMHO. The world has changed so much in the last 20 years. So much.
LOL I agree but have since read the rest of the thread and can see what happened. When I tell you my jaw was on the ground...
Idk if we agree exactly, but I feel like I get the sentiment. Kpop was already a phenomenon in Asia and it was ubiquitous in South Korea. By the time Psy made the song, there was already massive idol culture, fan culture, and internet culture around Kpop and around social media.
I feel like people tend to think of these thinks in terms of "size", like the song just got so big that it overflowed into other cultures. But the reality is that South Koreans and Kpop fans had a sophisticated social networking culture that was still a bit new in places like the US.
With Kpop, you had fanbases constantly competing for views and memes, and for a long time.
Oh for sure it was growing and huge but in a Western centric POV I don't think it had really broken through yet. Going on pure memory alone but I think it was the first time since like the 80s a song not in English topped the charts in Murica. And that (99 luft balloons) even had an English version. I think of it more than K-Pop being big and really Asia, which has really been the center of the world for decades, breaking through the glass ceiling and becoming global culturally.
It was competing with Rhianna and Maroon 5 and all the crap that labels push for huge views/sales. Like I said I lived in Asia for a while. I can't remember Wonder Girls or any of the faddy bands in Asia ever breaking through at home. People were screaming their balls off for Psy when he made a cameo on SNL and it was being played at every wedding you can name. He had that level of Wonder Girls fad but it was here and that felt really strange to me. May have been someone else to do it first but I don't recall anyone. You?
I don't disagree with your take, but you missed a few foreign language hits after that ("Rock Me Amadeus", "La Bamba", and "Macarena"-which is partly English of course but I'd count it) and 99 Luftballons was a rare case where the foreign language version was actually the popular one in America.
Also 99 Luftballons only made #1 on Cashbox, got blocked by "Jump" on Billboard, but that's splitting hairs it was a huge hit.To my knowledge, the only Asian musical acts to have US hits before Psy were Kyu Sakamoto (waaaay back in the sixties) and Pink Lady (who just *barely* made the top 40 with an English languages song...then promptly got roped into a terrible tv show that killed their careers.)
That's a goodpoint. Yup. But that's also in Spanish which bazillion of people study in the states. And Ritchie Vallins sang in English for most all his other songs. 'n when it made it even bigger in the 80s it was behind a huge movie with Lou Diamond Philips. Forgot about that one tho.
Yep. I don't think anyone thinks of Asia as modern and contemporary till you actually go there and realize it's way more modern than many Western countries. Language barrier is very tough though cuz the language is so damn different and so effing hard. Basically the world can kind of be divided into tone based languages and uh, non-tone-based ones? It's way easier for people to pick up a little Chinese if they know Vietnamese and vice versa but that's in the way here.
Also it's kind of proto-hyperpop since the aim of the song was to create the most cliché pop song.
It was always the dance move, the music was good, but dance move took it all