More Angry Than Funny

[koganbot]

I'm only two views in, but so far this seems way more angry than funny. I wasn't expecting it. The jokes appear mean, deliberately, like tacks on a chair, electric-shock handshakes. Maybe Psy's attitude is that the decorum he's throwing raspberries at is mean in itself, so he'll be mean to decorum.

Watch on YouTube

Nine comments down I see:

cjua2803 6 seconds ago
PSy is such a troll lmao

The music is relentlessly nondevelopmental. Intentionally refuses to give us any release.

As a dance track, it isn't as compelling in its maddening repetition as "Harlem Shake," but maybe that's beside the point, if there is one.

Btw, Ga-In, his partner in mischief here, the one who gets him back with the chair trick, was in the best K-pop video I've seen ("Irreversible"), and another that's in my top ten ("Abracadabra").

*Maybe I should've been. The only Psy track I knew other than "Gangnam Style" was "Right Now," which maybe isn't just about getting the commuters to shake and the secretaries to feel better; maybe it also harbors background dreams of giving a wrong time, stopping a traffic line. The gag in the "Gangnam Style" vid is something of a "what am I doing here?" in relation to the posh life of Gangnam; in this one the answer seems to be "I'm fucking everyone up."

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Further thought: although PSY is being mean to women, I don't think he's being sexist. If anything it's feminist trolling -- "gentlemanly" social behaviour is just another way of pulling the chair out from under women and expecting them to like it.

The lyrics actually bear out this interpretation somewhat -- PSY confronting the girls with questions: do you know why you do these things? do you know why you want these things? what *do* you want? -- and ironically answering, Me, PSY, The Gentleman and Party Animal! while being cartoonishly horrible to them. And all cast in a broader, fuzzier, more antisocial sense that by breaking this stricture, you-the-everygirl Ga-In has broken through to a topsyturvy world and will shortly find yourself confusedly humping a lamppost in broad daylight and laughing about it. But by that same measure I don't imagine PSY expects everyone in his audience to perform this same exegesis. He might expect some people (like me) to come up with an explanation like mine, but also expect other people to derive other meanings. (During one Tumblr discussion one Korean friend said her mother defined a "feminist" as "a woman who wore lipstick." Famously, Japanese coopted "feminist" to mean "a man who is chivalrous to women as a matter of principle," leaving the original idea with no word to express it.)