Can you believe Psy's "Gangnam Style" song and video are one year old today? Yeah, I thought it was hella longer than that, too.
And the "one-hit wonder (?)" is still racking up the hits (YouTube hits, that is): "Gangnam Style" up to 1,743,138,214 at the time of this writing.
And in honor of this momentous occasion, let's listen to the video one more time...
There. Now that's going to be stuck in your head until the two-year anniversary. China would make appropriate gift (the plateware, not the country).
*Tolchanch'i or tol (doljanchi or dol in the atrocious Revised Romanization system pushed on us by the NAKL) is the one-year celebration. Quite a party, actually. Perhaps they should make a new Gangnam Style video that features nothing but one-year-olds. Note: That's a copyrighted idea.
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2 days ago
I guess the F5 bots that "watch" the video havent been deactivated yet.
ReplyDeleteG4S
I'm not buying that idea, which was once a popular go-to explanation. When the song came out, I was in Seoul and everyone was playing it and raving about it.
DeleteI, too, thought it might be hype. But then I went back to the States (specifically, Hawaii, California, and Nevada) and the song was all over the place. People at my uni were making their own videos, practicing the dances, and playing the song at football games. The song itself was silly fun, and the video more so. Loads of people played it over and over again.
It is the Macarena of the 2010s, and that Spanish song could have given GS a run for its money had YouTube been a thing back then.
GS's popularity is a planned-luck confluence of several things. First, it is the fruit of the government-supported Korean Wave, which got a bunch of people throughout Asia interested in Korea songs, television programs, movies, and shopping. Psy needed that foundation in order to work. And the Korean Wave had finally started setting up beachheads in the United States and Europe, which was a second round of popularity for this song and the video. Korean food has become a thing in the US, as have Korean pop culture offerings, and that laid the groundwork for people to give Psy a serious chance.
Finally, the video itself came through a single channel instead of being available from multiple accounts, and that helped the numbers soar. Initially it also helped that GS was available in the right-hand column for those already searching for Korean songs.
And the song is just plain goofy fun. It's something that compels you to watch it (several times) and show it to others.
Even if the bots were responsible for, say, 200 million (a stratospherically unlikely number), there's still another 1.25 billion to account for.