{"id":5715,"date":"2022-08-15T06:32:03","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T13:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5715"},"modified":"2022-08-15T06:33:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T13:33:37","slug":"new-yorker-the-door-opened-by-gangnam-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5715","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: the door opened by “Gangnam Style”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The capital of South Korea makes a good first impression, not least with its infrastructure. This May, Seoul\u2019s ever-expanding subway system opened another addition, an extension of the Shinbundang Line that connects four existing stations. The northernmost, Sinsa, lies in an area popularly associated with South Korea\u2019s world-renowned cosmetic-surgery industry. (In search of coffee there one morning, I passed up the three or four closest caf\u00e9s, intimidated by their location inside the clinics themselves.) The southernmost, Gangnam, needs no introduction. On one platform wall, a large and somewhat amateurish mural pays homage to the pop star Park Jae-sang, better known as Psy, whose viral hit \u201cGangnam Style\u201d introduced the eponymous section of Seoul to the world ten years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psy was not an obvious pop-cultural ambassador. At the time of the release of \u201cGangnam Style,\u201d he was a thirty-four-year-old Berklee College of Music dropout unknown outside Korea and censured more than once in Korea for both his musical content and personal conduct. The singer-rapper-jokester seemed to exist in a reality apart from K-pop, with its impeccably turned-out young performers, organized into boy bands and girl groups precision-engineered for international appeal. Yet it was he\u2014not 2NE1, not SHINee, not Wonder Girls, not Big Bang\u2014who finally cracked the West. (The global phenomenon that is BTS wouldn\u2019t officially d\u00e9but until the following year.) Even more surprisingly, Psy did it with what amounted to a Korean inside joke: his big hit lampoons the garish and culturally incongruous pretensions of Seoul\u2019s nouveau riche, a class in evidence nowhere more so than Gangnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psy once likened Gangnam to \u201cthe Beverly Hills of Korea,\u201d which conveys the area\u2019s associations with wealth and fame but downplays its size. In the most literal sense, Gangnam constitutes half of Seoul: the word means \u201csouth of the river\u201d\u2014that is, the Han River that runs through the city in the manner of the Seine or the Thames. Below the Han is a ward of the city, called Gangnam, which is nearly three times the size of Beverly Hills. Korean television dramas make near-perpetual use of its high-society signifiers: skyscrapers, luxury boutiques, night clubs, streets full of imported cars. But, as recently as the early nineteen-seventies, the place was nothing but farmland. Gangnam\u2019s urbanization rushed down lines laid out by South Korea\u2019s military government in the late nineteen-sixties, a process that enriched the owners of the former agricultural expanse. \u201cGangnam Style\u201d shows a keen awareness of the chonsereoum<\/em> (a rustic dowdiness, literally \u201cvillage likeness\u201d) beneath the quasi-cosmopolitan flash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The capital of South Korea makes a good first impression, not least with its infrastructure. This May, Seoul\u2019s ever-expanding subway system opened another addition, an extension of the Shinbundang Line that connects four existing stations. The northernmost, Sinsa, lies in an area popularly associated with South Korea\u2019s world-renowned cosmetic-surgery industry. (In search of coffee there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,103,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-music","category-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5715"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5720,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715\/revisions\/5720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}