PSY – Gangnam Style
Gangnam style!
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An over-the-top, satirical music video, “Gangnam Style,” that lampoons South Korea’s obsession with wealth and material success, is big, big, big in Silicon Valley.
How big? The video just hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Social 50.
Psy, the star of “Gangnam Style,” just crossed 100,000 Twitter followers.
Twitter, which prides itself on being on the pulse of the world’s interests of the moment, served up Korean food for lunch in its cafeteria today as an homage to the “soul of Seoul.”
That’s an apparent reference to Gangnam, the hyperrich neighborhood featured in the video, which has 75 million views on YouTube.
Google’s video subsidiary is no stranger to the popularity of Korean pop music, or K-pop—in 2010, YouTube served up 2.3 billion views of K-pop videos. Google Korea hosted a Hangout, or video chat, earlier this week to teach Psy’s distinctive “Gangnam Style” dance moves, and we note that YouTube business-development executive Eric Mauskopf just returned from a trip to Seoul.
There’s even one Silicon Valley company, Viki, that tells us it’s actively working on helping K-pop stars make money abroad. (They don’t make much money at home, because of the popularity of subscription music services.) Viki users, who add subtitles to videos, have translated “Gangnam Style” into 17 languages.
Perhaps the subversive message of “Gangnam Style” resonates with Silicon Valley, whose inhabitants are at once obsessed with getting rich and reflexively allergic to obvious trappings of wealth.
Twitter did not respond to our request to stage a “Gangnam Style” flash mob in its cafeteria.
Here’s the video: