South Korean rapper PSY's "Gangnam Style" video has already passed 300 million YouTube views and counting, and it's easy to see why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively entertaining performer's crazy horse-riding dance, the song's addictive chorus and the video's brilliantly odd series of misadventures.
Beneath the antics and funny dancing in the video of this world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social commentary about South Korea's newly rich and Gangnam — the affluent district where many of them live. Gangnam is only a small slice of Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and bitterness.
Gangnam is the most coveted address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage ditches
The district of Gangnam, which literally means "south of the river" in Korean, is about half the size of New York City's Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul's population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam apartment costs about US$716,000 (approximately NT$21 million), a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn.
The seats of business and government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in the neighborhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families still live there.
Gangnam, however, is new money. Many of the people there benefited from a property development frenzy that began in the 1970s. As the price of high-rise apartments skyrocketed during a real estate investment boom in the early 2000s, landowners and speculators became exceptionally wealthy practically overnight. The district's rich families got even richer.
The new wealth drew the trendiest boutiques and nightclubs and a host of plastic surgery clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious private tutoring and prep schools. Gangnam households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average in South Korea.
The notion that Gangnam residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted piece of geography, angers many people. The neighborhood's residents are seen by some as monopolizing the country's best educational opportunities, the best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth.
"Gangnam inspires both envy and distaste," said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. "Gangnam residents are South Korea's upper class, but many South Koreans consider Gangnam residents self-interested, with no sense of the social responsibility that should come with being rich." In a sly, entertaining way, PSY's song explores this sensitive topic.
