Gangnam Style

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · YouTube, uploaded by Psy and his label YG Entertainment · Also known as 강남스타일; Oppan Gangnam Style; The horse dance

What it is

A 2012 pop song and music video by the South Korean singer Psy. In the video he does a silly dance that looks like riding an invisible horse: wrists crossed as if holding reins, one arm sometimes swinging a lasso, feet hopping from side to side. The words are mostly Korean and make fun of people who pretend to be as rich and fashionable as the residents of Gangnam, a wealthy part of Seoul. The only English line most listeners caught was "Hey, sexy lady".

Where it came from

Psy's label put the video on YouTube, a website where anyone could upload and watch videos, on 15 July 2012. Psy said it was made for Korean fans. In August people outside Korea started sending the link to each other on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, and famous people shared it too. On 21 December 2012 it became the first YouTube video to be watched a billion times, and it stayed the most watched video on the site until July 2017, when "See You Again" by Wiz Khalifa passed it.

How people used it

People filmed themselves doing the horse dance and posted the videos: students, soldiers, office workers, wedding guests, sports teams. Others made parody versions that swapped Gangnam for their own town, school or politician, such as "Mitt Romney Style" during that year's American election, and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made one in handcuffs. Crowds gathered in city squares to do the dance together. In October 2012 the head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, did it alongside Psy. The expected reply to any of these was to join in and post your own.

Why it mattered

It was the first song mostly in Korean to become a worldwide hit largely because people passed a video around online, without radio or record shops doing the work. It reached number two in the American singles chart and topped charts in over 30 countries. The billion views mattered as a round number people watched climb. In 2014 YouTube said it had changed how it stored view counts because the video was close to 2,147,483,647, the largest number the old counter could hold. It also made Western audiences notice K-pop.

The jokes around it

• "Oppan Gangnam Style": the chorus, roughly "big brother is Gangnam style", with Psy calling himself big brother.
• "Hey, sexy lady": the one English line, sung at friends as a joke.
• "[Anything] Style": parodies that swapped in a town, a school, a job or a politician.
• The billionth view landing on 21 December 2012, the date of a supposed Mayan end of the world, was joked about as the real apocalypse.
• "Gangnam Style broke YouTube": the line people used about the view counter story in 2014.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People copied a dance from a song they couldn't understand, because the dance was the joke and didn't need translating. When politicians and the UN joined in, it showed that being filmed doing the popular meme had become a way for powerful people to look in touch.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen summary says Barack Obama performed the dance; he only mentioned the song's success in a 2013 meeting with President Park Geun-hye. David Cameron's attempt at the dance is reported but I'm not sure it was filmed. The specimen is filed under TikTok breakthrough hits, which is wrong: the song spread on YouTube in 2012, years before TikTok existed outside China. How widely the Mayan apocalypse joke spread is uncertain.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.