Dancing in the Gangnam Style

Permit me to prove to you why I need a job.

You've heard, I'm sure, of the Korean pop sensation PSY and his rap/dance hit Gangnam Style. I have made a few observations of which I would like to inform you at length.


Let's start with his name.

PSY - dancing enthusiastically to Gangnam Style.

 It seems strange to me that PSY's name is pronounced "si" like  our words pysche, psuedo etc. Assuming that the Korean language does not share the silent P given to us by the Greeks, it's odd that such a quintesstially Korean artist should take his name from an English linguistic trait.

Anyway.

I'm sure that you have heard of Gangnam Style and if you have not I strongly recommend checking it out. It's halfway to a billion views on YouTube, and if you have seen it I'm sure that youalready have your own opinion about it.

And I'm sure you'd imagine that I'd hate it.

Well, you're wrong. I like it very much. I like that it is quite clearly mocking the culture of attempting to look cool. I like that it's not only not taking itself too seriously, but that it's mocking the kind of people who are obsessed with image and looking cool.

Take as a equivalent that I strongly dislike: LMFAO's 'Party Rock Anthem', ostensibly a humorous video that doesn't take itself too seriously. BUT WAIT, notice how important looking cool is in this video and how seriously the dancers are actually taking themselves.

PSY's video appears, to my eyes, to be mocking the kind of people who take themselves very seriously and are obsessed with style and image.

Feel free to disagree with me.

I also found a rather darkly humorous news story in The Guardian in which two Thai gangs manage to pull themselves away from the noble exploits of crime and racketeering for a plunge into the always confrontational: dancing.

I especially like the use of the word "escalates" in the title of the story. To me the word 'escalates' seems to suggest a sort of natural progression (like an escalator), it feels here as if The Guardian is suggesting a fifty-odd bullet shootout is the obvious logical step after an aggressive Gangnam Style dance-off.

It is my own personal opinion that Gangnam Style had nothing to do with the shootout, and that the cause was in fact the ridiculous length and unnecessarily unpronouncability of Thai names. As a couple of examples let's take two members of the current Thailand national football team, striker Napat Thamrongsupakorn and goalkeeper Sinthaweechai Hathairattanakool.

Paradorn was briefly no.9 in the world.

It's almost as they've chosen names to be deliberately obtuse, as if learning their names should be a lifelong challenge within itself. They should take a hint from the Koreans, of whom the names, Kim, Lee and Park account for more than 40% of family names (Park Jae-sang, the person I'm supposed to be talking about, being a ready-made example). 

Bizarre naming traditions also appear to be very popular in Thailand (and not Taiwan, which an erstwhile friend once adamantly claimed was the country of origin of Thai food... I mean, seriously, THAI). The Srichaphan brothers, all of whom were professional tennis players, had the given names: Paradorn, Naratorn and Tanakorn. 

Seriously? Who came up with that...

But anyway, I digress.

I like PSY. I like Gangnam Style. 

And if it comes on and I'm out then I'm going to be dancing to it.