Daily News September 20, 2012
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LOS ANGELES TIMES 'Gangnam Style' lifeguards: Mayor calls for review of firings By Amanda Covarrubias September 19, 2012 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/09/gangnam-style-lifeguards-mayor-calls-for-review-of-firings.html UVM: 7,470,000 El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero has called for an independent review into the firing of 13 lifeguards and their manager after they wore city uniforms to film a dance video in the city pool. Their spoof, "Lifeguard Style," a spinoff of "Gangnam Style," the viral hit by South Korean rapper Psy, attracted global attention to the city of nearly 114,000 people. at At a packed meeting of about 300 people, supporters pleaded with City Council members Tuesday night to give the lifeguards their jobs back. But Quintero and other city leaders said they didn't want to rush making a decision. The goal of a review, the mayor said, would be to get a "clear sense of what took place so this doesn't happen again. At the end of the day, our brand as a city has taken a big hit. We want to make sure we treat our employees with respect and dignity." On their way home, many of the lifeguards who participated in the video posted on YouTube in August said they were not surprised. "They need to review their policies and procedures because their policies are so vague," said Michael Roa, who came up with the idea for the spoof. But after "tremendous feedback" from around the world, including more than 12,000 signatures collected for an online petition to save the lifeguards' jobs, he said "the public deserves a response as soon as possible." So far, Councilman Bart Patel is the only city official to speak out in favor of the former employees. Others, such as Councilwoman Vicky Martinez, said she wasn't ready to make decision on the matter. The review, she noted, is "necessary so this council can really come to an understanding of everything that's come to past. We want to move forward with our community in a positive manner. This isn't just affecting the 14 [lifeguards], but the whole community." Jane Myring, 70, born and raised in El Monte, led the chorus of folks eager to see the college-age lifeguards regain their positions. During Tuesday's council meeting, as a bank of TV cameras zoomed in on her as the first speaker, she said, "We do dumb things and we don't think about it. ... I'm concerned for their professional life," adding she didn't want their chances of getting future employment at risk. Other supporters talked about their sons and daughters who love going to the El Monte Aquatic Center. Cashiers are now trained for three days, then sent into the water to teach kids, replacing the lifeguards, according to Gabriel Gonzalez, the former pool manager. He said he recently had a job interview, and "the first thing they asked me about was the El Monte situation. It's going to follow me wherever I go." Yvonne Tam, a UC Santa Barbara student and former lifeguard, said she and her co-workers used the video "to finish off the summer with a fun activity we all could participate in." Most of the fired lifeguards have won multiple awards from the same managers who let them go, including "Instructor of the Year" and "Rookie of the Year," she said. Xavier Hermosillo, a political consultant from Los Angeles who has worked with El Monte leaders, said that after the firings he "immediately suggested they hire them back, pending an investigation." "The city is the laughingstock of the nation," he said. "I told them, 'Be fair. Do the right thing.'" Council members would not be pushed. Quintero promised that the review would focus on social media guidelines and steps involved in hiring and terminating staff. He did not detail how much time such an investigation would take. "I have lived in El Monte my whole life, and for the first time ever, I'm ashamed of my city," said Angela Rodriguez, who along with her husband owns Flash Graphix, a printing and design firm. Civic boosters should have used the video, with nearly 1.5 million YouTube views, for promotion, and they should "be proud" of the lifeguards, "instead of condemning them," she said. "These employees were doing good, clean fun," said Sabrina Rodriguez, a senior at El Monte High School. Gonzalez, the former lifeguard manager, is her cheerleading coach, and she and the squad came out Tuesday night, rooting loudly for him. "He has devoted his whole life to us, and to fire these 14 amazing leaders is wrong," she said. "Absolutely wrong because you're leaving us youths with no one to look up to." 
BUSINESS INSIDER Even North Korea Is Making 'Gangnam Style' Videos By Joshua Berlinger September 20, 2012 http://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-gangnam-style-video-parody-2012-9 UVM: 11,620,000 North Korea apparently just payed homage to its cultural and political rival south of the 38th parallel, releasing a "Gangnam fever" style video on the official government website Uriminzokkiri. "Gangnam Style" is a highly successful pop video by the South Korean rapper PSY. It's become a huge international hit, even though it was designed to mock the stylings of residents of Gangnam, a wealthy district of Seoul. North Korea's parody of "Gangnam Style" appears to have a different target, however, aiming at South Korean politician rather than Seoul street style. For those of you who don't speak Korean, here's how CNN's K.J. Kwon and Jethro Mullen describe the video: The North Korean video starts with a picture showing a person apparently in the midst of performing the world famous horse dance from "Gangnam Style." The face stuck on the dancing figure is that of Park Geun-hye, the candidate for the governing Saenuri Party in the upcoming South Korean presidential election. The video goes on to mockingly evoke Park's support for the past actions of her father, Park Jung-hee, South Korea's former dictator whose legacy still divides the nation. While the video is (strangely) not available on North Korea's official YouTube account yet, we found another rip of the video which is embedded below. 
THE ATLANTIC Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea's Music Video Sensation By Max Fisher August 23, 2012 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/gangnam-style-dissected-the-subversive-message-within-south-koreas-music-video-sensation/261462/ UVM: 3,030,000 Beneath the catchy dance beat and hilarious scenes of Seoul's poshest neighborhood, there might be a subtle message about wealth, class, and value in South Korean society. Park Jaesang is an unlikely poster boy for South Korea's youth-obsessed, highly lucrative, and famously vacuous pop music. Park, who performs as Psy (short for psycho), is a relatively ancient 34, has been busted for marijuana and for avoiding the country's mandatory military service, and is not particularly good-looking. His first album got him fined for "inappropriate content" and the second was banned. He's mainstream in the way that South Korea's monolithically corporate media demands of its stars, who typically appear regularly on TV variety and even game shows, but as a harlequin, a performer known for his parodies, outrageous costumes, and jokey concerts. Still, there's a long history of fools and court jesters as society's most cutting social critics, and he might be one of them. Now, Park has succeeded where the K-Pop entertainment-industrial-complex and its superstars have failed so many times before: he's made it in America. The opening track on his sixth album, "Gangnam Style" (watch it at right), has earned 49 million hits on YouTube since its mid-July release, but the viral spread was just the start. The American rapper T-Pain was retweeted 2,400 times when he wrote "Words cannot even describe how amazing this video is." Pop stars expressed admiration. Billboard is extolling his commercial viability; Justin Bieber's manager is allegedly interested. The Wall Street Journal posted "5 Must-See" response videos. On Monday, a worker at L.A.'s Dodger stadium noticed Park in the stands and played "Gangnam Style" over the stadium P.A. system as excited baseball fans spontaneously reproduced Park's distinct dance in the video. "I have to admit I've watched it about 15 times," said a CNN anchor. "Of course, no one here in the U.S. has any idea what Psy is rapping about." I certainly didn't, beyond the basics: Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and Park's "Gangnam Style" video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish caricature of a Gangnam man. That alone makes it practically operatic compared to most K-Pop. But I spoke with two regular observers of Korean culture to find out what I was missing, and it turns out that the video is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society. That message would be awfully mild by American standards -- this is no "Born in the U.S.A." -- but South Korea is a very different place, and it's a big deal that even this gentle social satire is breaking records on Korean pop charts long dominated by cotton candy. "Korea has not had a long history of nuanced satire," Adrian Hong, a Korean-American consultant whose wide travels make him an oft-quoted observer of Korean issues, said of South Korea's pop culture. "In fact, when you asked me about the satire element, I was super skeptical. I don't expect much from K-Pop to begin with, so the first 50 times I heard this, I was just like, 'Allright, whatever.' I sat down to look at it and thought, 'Actually, there's some nuance here.'" One of the first things Hong pointed to in explaining the video's subtext was, believe it or not, South Korea's sky-high credit card debt rate. In 2010, the average household carried credit card debt worth a staggering 155 percent of their disposable income (for comparison, the U.S. average just before the sub-prime crisis was 138 percent). There are nearly five credit cards for every adult. South Koreans have been living on credit since the mid-1990s, first because their country's amazing growth made borrowing seem safe, and then in the late 1990s when the government encouraged private spending to climb out of the Asian financial crisis. The emphasis on heavy spending, coupled with the country's truly astounding, two-generation growth from agrarian poverty to economic powerhouse, have engendered the country with an emphasis on hard work and on aspirationalism, as well as the materialism that can sometimes follow. Gangnam, Hong said, is a symbol of that aspect of South Korean culture. The neighborhood is the home of some of South Korea's biggest brands, as well as $84 billion of its wealth, as of 2010. That's seven percent of the entire country's GDP in an area of just 15 square miles. A place of the most conspicuous consumption, you might call it the embodiment of South Korea's one percent. "The neighborhood in Gangnam is not just a nice town or nice neighborhood. The kids that he's talking about are not Silicon Valley self-made millionaires. They're overwhelmingly trust-fund babies and princelings," he explained. This skewering of the Gangnam life can be easy to miss for non-Korean. Psy boasts that he's a real man who drinks a whole cup of coffee in one gulp, for example, insisting he wants a women who drinks coffee. "I think some of you may be wondering why he's making such a big deal out of coffee, but it's not your ordinary coffee," U.S.-based Korean blogger Jea Kim wrote at her site, My Dear Korea. (Her English-subtitled translation of the video is at right.) "In Korea, there's a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2) ramen for lunch and then spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee." They're called Doenjangnyeo, or "soybean paste women" for their propensity to crimp on essentials so they can over-spend on conspicuous luxuries, of which coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most common. "The number of coffee shops has gone up tremendously, particularly in Gangnam," Hong said. "Coffee shops have become the place where people go to be seen and spend ridiculous amounts of money." The video is "a satire about Gangnam itself but also it's about how people outside Gangnam pursue their dream to be one of those Gangnam residents without even realizing what it really means," Kim explained to me when I got in touch with her. Koreans "really wanted to be one of them," but she says that feeling is changing, and "Gangnam Style" captures people's ambivalence. "Koreans have been kind of caught up in this spending to look wealthy, and Gangnam has really been the leading edge of that," Hong said. "I think a lot of what [Psy] is pointing out is how silly that is. The whole video is about him thinking he's a hotshot but then realizing he's just, you know, at a children's playground, or thinking he's playing polo or something and realizes he's on a merry-go-round." "Human society is so hollow, and even while filming I felt pathetic." Psy hits all the symbols of Gangnam opulence, but each turns out to be something much more modest, as if suggesting that Gangnam-style wealth is not as fabulous as it might seem. We think he's at a beach in the opening shot, but it turns out to be a sandy playground. He visits a sauna not with big-shot businessmen but with mobsters, Kim points out, and dances not in a nightclub but on a bus of middle-aged tourists. He meets his love interest in the subway. Kim thinks that Psy's strut though a parking garage, two models at his side as trash and snow fly at them, is meant as a nod to the common rap-video trope of the star walking down a red carpet covered in confetti. "I think he's pointing out the ridiculousness of the materialism," Hong said. (If you're wondering about the bizarre episodes in the elevator and with the red sports car, as I was, it turns out that those are probably just excuses for a couple of cameos by TV personalities, which is apparently common in South Korean music videos.) None of this commentary is particularly overt, which is actually what could make "Gangnam Style" so subversive. Social commentary is just not really done in mainstream Korean pop music, Hong explained. "The most they'll do is poke fun at themselves a little bit. It's really been limited." But Psy "is really mainstreaming it, and he's doing it in a way that maybe not everybody quite realizes." Park Jaesang isn't just unusual because of his age, appearance, and style; he writes his own songs and choreographs his own videos, which is unheard of in K-Pop. But it's more than that. Maybe not coincidentally, he attended both Boston University and the Berklee College of Music, graduating from the latter. His exposure to American music's penchant for social commentary, and the time spent abroad that may have given him a new perspective on his home country, could inform his apparently somewhat critical take on South Korean society. Of course, it's just a music video, and a silly one at that. Does it really have to be about anything more complicated? "If I hadn't seen that behind-the-scenes, I would have said he's just poking fun at himself," Hong said of the official making-of video, which is embedded at right. It's mostly of Park or Psy having fun on set, but at one point he pauses in filming. "Human society is so hollow, and even while filming I felt pathetic. Each frame by frame was hollow," he sighs, apparently deadly serious. It's a jarring moment to see the musician drop his clownish demeanor and reveal the darker feelings behind this lighthearted-seeming song. Although, Hong noted, "hollow" doesn't capture it: "It's a word that's a mixture or shallow or hollow or vain," he explained. Kim seemed to feel the same way about the video, though it's so cheery on the surface. "He was satirizing more than just this one neighborhood," she told me. On her blog, she suggested the video portrayed the Gangnam area, a symbol of South Korea's national aspirations for prosperity and status, as "nothing but materialistic and about people who are chasing rainbows." Pretty heavy for a viral pop hit. "I think it all ties back to the same thing: the pursuit of materialism, the pursuit of form over function," Hong said. "Koreans made extraordinary gains as a country, in terms of GDP and everything else, but that growth has not been equitable. I think the young people are finally realizing that. There's a genuine backlash. ... You're seeing a huge amount of resentment from youth about their economic circumstances." Even if Psy wasn't specifically nodding to this when he wrote the song and shot the video, it's part of the contemporary South Korean society that he inhabits. "The context is all of these tensions going on where Koreans are realizing where they're at, how they got there, what they need to do to move forward." It's difficult to imagine that much of this could be apparent to non-Koreans, which Kim told me is why she decided to write it up on her blog. "I thought people outside Korea might take it just as another funny music video. So I wanted to explain what's behind [it] and the song." Still, is it possible that the video could have caught on for reasons beyond just its admittedly catchy beat and hilarious visuals? After all, Korean pop really does not seem to typically do well in the U.S., and this has gotten enormous. "It's kind of the first genuine pop-culture crossover from Korea," Hong said, noting it's "more in the American style." Maybe it's possible that, even if the specific nods to the quirks of this Seoul neighborhood couldn't possibly cross over, and even if the lyrics are nonsense to non-Korean speakers, there's something about obviously skewering the ostentatiously rich that just might resonate in today's America. Whatever the case, Koreans seem to be proud of their first big musical export to the U.S., Hong said, noting that the Korean media has meticulously covered the video's tremendous reception here. "Koreans are definitely talking about it and pointing to it as a source of national pride." Maybe there's something relatable about Gangnam style. 
POPCRUSH Psy Performs ‘Gangnam Style’ on ‘Ellen,’ Has No Idea Who Drake Is By Scott Shetler September 20, 2012 http://popcrush.com/psy-gangnam-style-ellen-drake/ UVM: 210,000 Korean pop star Psy continues to take over the world with his ‘Gangnam Style’ smash. This week, as he visited ‘Ellen’ to perform the song live, it was revealed that he didn’t recognize Drake when the Canadian rapper approached him at the MTV Video Music Awards. XXL quotes Psy describing his encounter with Drizzy at the award show: “I was at the VMA and I was sitting down at the chair, and someone asked me, ‘Hey, how much your music video cost? Hey, who wrote the track?’ I said, ‘I wrote the track,’ and he said, ‘Oh, yeah? Wow.’ But I didn’t recognize who he was. And then suddenly when they announced, ‘The winner is Drake,’ and then he stands up, and he walks away. I was like, ‘Oh! Is that Drake?’ So Drake asked me something and I was like, ‘Who is he?’ Am I nuts? So after he came back, I said, ‘Oh, Drake, I’m so sorry.’” The Korean star lived up to his “Dress classy and dance cheesy” mantra by showing up to ‘Ellen’ to perform the full song, just one week after he stopped by the show to teach Britney Spears how to do the ‘Gangnam’ dance. He danced with about a dozen backup dancers and rode his invisible horse into the audience, where the entire crowd bounced along. After his previous performance on the ‘Today’ show, ‘Gangnam Style’ shot up this week from No. 64 to No. 11 on the singles chart and shows no signs of slowing down. While the track seems like a novelty hit, industry insiders believe Psy is no flash in the pan. He has been a K-Pop star for more than a decade, and Justin Bieber‘s manager, Scooter Braun, recently signed Psy to an American record deal. 
FORBES Will Justin Bieber Turn Korea's Gangnam Style Into The Next Viral Call Me Maybe? August 30, 2012 http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/08/30/will-justin-bieber-turn-koreas-gangnam-style-into-the-next-viral-call-me-maybe/ UVM: 16,330,000 
Think Samsung is the only big internet story from South Korea right now? How about a hilarious hip hop star who can claim T-Pain, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Nelly Furtado and Justin Bieber as fans? Meet Psy (aka Jae-Sang Park), the 34-year-old Korean-born, BU and Berklee educated, empresario behind the recent pop mega-hit “Gangnam Style.” The song, kind of a Korean version of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem, is a masterful pop confection. The title refers to the ritziest neighborhood in Seoul, the American version would be Beverly Hills, perhaps? The YouTube video has been viewed more than 77 million times as of this post, fueled both by its own propulsive, and convulsive, jocularity—and by a series of high-profile celebrity tweets: Even though the whole point of the song is to skewer the consumerist materialism of Korea’s 1% (see this ponderous piece in the Atlantic, if you want to over think the “subversive” nature of this good-natured critique), the entire Apple-traumatized nation seems to be enjoying the international attention. It is a rare bit of Western pop embracing Asian pop. Fans in Manila were clearly juiced when Nelly Furtado covered Gangnam Style in a recent concert there: The biggest rumors around the song concern a meeting with Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun on a recent trip by Psy to the States. Latinos Post cites a Korea Herald report that, “Although no details have been made public regarding what went on in that meeting, the Korean press has offered much speculation as of late regarding the possible outcome, with rumors including collaboration between Psy and Justin Bieber to Braun purchasing the rights to produce a remake of ‘Gangnam Style’.” The significance with Bieber is huge considering that his tweet about “Call Me Maybe,” (“possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard lol”) led to the complete explosion of Carly Rae Jepsen’s career (she’s now opening for Bieber on tour.) The Boston Globe interviewed Psy on that trip. Although a big star in Korea, this is his first exposure here. ‘‘The thing is, I have special visuals. I’m not like [a] normal entertainer [when it comes to visuals],’’ Psy told the Globe. ‘‘That’s why when I dance it looks different. I have a different body, different shape, different visuals.” He clearly revels in his individuality even as his character plays at affluent conformity. “A guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles,” as he says in the song. “In Korea they’re celebrating me because I didn’t try anything. I didn’t promote, I didn’t target anything about going overseas,’’ he said. ‘‘It just happened like this with YouTube and Twitter. I think those two feed me.’’ YouTube and Twitter have fed him, indeed, and “Gangnam Style” is a great argument for the efficiency of that combination for viral promotion. Although just a fraction of Facebook‘s size, Twitter has disproportionate currency for opinion makers, especially entertainers. And the coded density of hip hop lyrics has prepared pop fans for a hit song whose words they can’t understand (Rap Genius is a useful decoder ring). Oh, wait, there are three English words in the song, ‘‘Hey, sexy lady.’’ What more do you need? OK, OK, here are the full lyrics, courtesy of Rap Genius (no annotations yet, so jump in and earn Rap IQ): Explain Oppa is Gangnam style Gangnam style A girl who is warm and humane during the day A classy girl who know how to enjoy the freedom of a cup of coffee A girl whose heart gets hotter when night comes A girl with that kind of twist I’m a guy A guy who is as warm as you during the day A guy who one-shots his coffee before it even cools down A guy whose heart bursts when night comes That kind of guy Beautiful, loveable Yes you, hey, yes you, hey Beautiful, loveable Yes you, hey, yes you, hey Now let’s go until the end Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh A girl who looks quiet but plays when she plays A girl who puts her hair down when the right time comes A girl who covers herself but is more sexy than a girl who bares it all A sensible girl like that I’m a guy A guy who seems calm but plays when he plays A guy who goes completely crazy when the right time comes A guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles That kind of guy Beautiful, loveable Yes you, hey, yes you, hey Beautiful, loveable Yes you, hey, yes you, hey Now let’s go until the end Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style Oppa is Gangnam style, Gangnam style Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh On top of the running man is the flying man, baby baby I’m a man who knows a thing or two On top of the running man is the flying man, baby baby I’m a man who knows a thing or two You know what I’m saying Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady, Oppa is Gangnam style Eh- Sexy Lady oh oh oh oh Bonus Round: Here are a bunch of the best mashups and parodies, none as good, though, as the original, plus a couple of shareable graphics. Off-key but really funny “Nerdy Style”: Nikki Minaj “Starships”/”Gangnam Style” mashup: Break It Down With Gangnam Style Tuts: Gordon Mack Baseball parody: Chicago parody: University of Oregon Ducks parody: Directory: documents -> samples documents -> Concept stage documents -> The great global switch-off documents -> Nonprofit grant application documents -> The Truth about the Rwandan Genocide documents -> Annual InStructional unit plan documents -> Chaos equipment included samples -> Memorandum of understanding long beach city college- long beach unified school district Download 0.84 Mb. Share with your friends:
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