한류의 빅뱅 <강남스타일>

Psy's 'Gangnam Style' as a Big Bang of Korean Wave: A Study of the Korean and American Culture Code

Why is Psy's 'Gangnam Style' such a big bang of the globally popular music in 2012 and 2013? 'Gangnam Style' has distributed rapidly and directly to the international viewers right after that Scooter Braun happened to see Psy's music video and gave it with surprisingly good comments. It began to have an uprising fascination from American popularity and spreaded out radically to Korea toward all over the world. Even with a language barrier, this global popularity of K-pop symbolizes an interactive communication through storytelling strategy. This paper has the aim to analyse reasons of the big bang success of 'Gangnam Style' through the perspective of cognitive culture codes based on the ecological system of Youtube. This paper insists that 'Gangnam Style' has a creative genius and originality, but universal code of horse dance with the ultimate freedom and wish fulfillment of American Dream. With the slogan of "dress classy and dance cheesy," 'Gangnam Style' music video has dominant colors of black and yellow-orange implying the unconscious desire for ruling domination and sex. In the urban buildings and horse locked stables, a black suited no muscled chubby guy with black sunglasses, Psy is trotting with horse dances in order to represent the contemporaries lived with "noble on the day but crazy at night." This self-mocking performance has a minimum signification, "Opan Gangnam Style... Oh! sexy lady," which has the strong sign of culture code in the contemporary urban individuals repressed with hard works and economic glooms. This paper concludes that the big bang success of 'Gangnam Style' is founded on the theory of mirror neuron, which affects emotions sympathizing to liberate out of the economic hardship with the code of self fulfillment of American and Korean Dream and global wishes as well.