Thx God for this Dude cuz he brings the fun back
Sunday 28 October 2012
PSY - GANGNAM STYLE (강남스타일) M/V Making Film
From 2 years of break, PSY is finally coming back with his 6th album 'PSY6甲'!
THIS IS THE FUCKING BEST PSY SONG
REAAALLY THIS COMMENT WAS 6 MONTHS AGO
NOWSSS GANGNAM SYTLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
SEXXXXYYYYY LADDDDDYYYYYY
Friday 26 October 2012
Psy on Reddit: Funny, but clearly overwhelmed by fame
Congratulations to the Ohio University marching band! Psy has officially declared the band's version of "Gangnam Style" his favorite of all the tributes to the song.
Psy jumped on Reddit on Wednesday for an hour of Ask Me Anything (AMA), a regular feature on the site allowing people from around the world to post questions to a person of note.
Psy became an international superstar after his video for "Gangnam Style" went viral in August. It is the third most viewed video of all-time on YouTube with more than half a billion views. It is also the most liked video in YouTube's history.
Psy has received a lot of attention since the video went viral in August, but his Reddit AMA was still revealing.
For starters, even though he's been a pop star in South Korea for more than a decade, he's pretty overwhelmed by his international fame. When asked how his family and friends reacted to his sudden superstardom outside of South Korea he wrote, "They are normal people so they freaked out because it's way too fast and way too far. Even I myself get freaked out a bit. We were not ready for this."
Psy said he knew he had a catchy song on his hands with "Gangnam Style" but didn't expect it to go international.
When asked what is the weirdest thing he's ever seen a fan do, he responded, "I feel weird about all the fans because they are so worldwide. I cannot really believe it yet."
Psy also told the Reddit community that Psy is short for psycho, that he started playing clarinet at age 8, and that he also plays the drums. I was surprised to learn that his favorite clarinet solo is the theme of the movie "Dying Young" by Kenny G. His idol is Freddie Mercury. And one thing he wishes more people knew about him is that he writes all his music himself.
Also, if you thought "Gagnam Style" was a serious social critique of Gangnam, the wealthy neighborhood in Seoul, think again. Psy said the song is just "FUN."
Throughout the AMA he showed his funny side, sometimes using words we can't print here.
When someone asked why he always looks so serious when he's dancing he said, "Because I am serious about my dancing."
And when another fan asked if he could come hang out with pop star in Seoul, his response was, "Call me maybe."
Engineering Gangnam style
Sylvie Barak
10/26/2012 1:05 AM EDT
Yes, folks, we seem to be swinging our way into the singularity, as CHARLI the humanoid robot demonstrates in a YouTube video, bopping away to the beat, more convincingly, some would argue, than most average human club-goers.
The CHARLI robot series was developed as a research platform at Virginia Tech’s Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) to study bipedal walking and autonomous behaviors, with an emphasis on studying novel mobile robot locomotion strategies. And the locomotion it does! K-Pop style.
Ai Weiwei’s “Gangnam Style” Knockoff
Psy’s original video is, itself, a sort of parody—“Gangnam” is the name of a district known as the Beverly Hills of Seoul, and Psy’s video, with its snippets of horse stables, girls in yoga class, and dudes in a sauna and jacuzzi, pokes fun at the luxurious lifestyle of the South Korean élite. (The song’s lyrics probably do, too, but having no clue what they say is part of the fun.) Several parodies of Psy’s version have taken up the theme of skewering the rich or powerful, as in “Mitt Romney Style,” made by the site College Humor, and “Kim Jong Style” (Un, not Il, “sorry for the confusion”), by the YouTube channel Barely Political. But the humorous-depiction-of-a-subculture format has provided an easy platform for cultural spoofing—“Eastern Europe Style,” “Jewish Style,” “London Style”—and the lyrics of the original, indecipherable to non-Korean speakers, have inspired a subset of phonetically oriented videos, most notably “Hot Dog Condom Style,” which is worth watching if (and only if) you want to see condom-wrapped hot dogs used as dance props. Even the government of North Korea, whose average citizen has no access to the Internet and no knowledge of YouTube, has gotten in on the joke, releasing a video that makes fun of the conservative South Korean Presidential candidate Park Geun-hye by pasting her face on an image of a body in horse-trotting position.
All of these numerous imitations, and many others I haven’t mentioned, have garnered over a million views on YouTube; the astronomical popularity of “Gangnam Style” has given imitators who can capture even a tiny fraction of the original’s audience guaranteed viral reach (the North Korean one, which is low-tech and doesn’t use Psy’s music, is an exception). “Gandalf Style” has five and a half million views; “Gunman Style,” a Western-themed version, has fourteen million; “Byuntae Style” (“Pervert Style” in Korean) has eleven and a half million. As indicated by these view numbers, and by those of the many “Call Me Maybe” imitators before it, the music-video parody has come to embody a kind of trickle-down economics of Internet fame: one person strikes big with a YouTube mega-hit, and others can earn a tidy sum of “likes” in her wake.
The Chinese government has also been paying attention to the Psy phenomenon. As Evan Osnos pointed out in an article earlier this month, the video has left Chinese leaders, eager to develop their country’s “soft power,” wondering why they couldn’t come up with a “Gangnam Style” of their own. “The exports of [China’s] cultural products are far from satisfactory,” wrote one commentator today. “It is still far from making a product like Gangnam Style.” According to a blog post last week in the Financial Times, an essay on Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, blamed the lack of creativity in China on its culture of “shanzhai,” the Chinese term for imitation and pirated goods.
Ai Weiwei’s version of “Gangnam Style” is as stupid-silly as any other, and more poorly made—it is the ultimate “shanzhai,” a cheap imitation made by splicing footage from the original video with footage of himself dancing around in a pink T-shirt and, in one scene, waving handcuffs—but it’s also an ingenious response to the attitude toward creativity put forth in the Chinese media. Ai called his video “Grass Mud Horse Style,” after a made-up creature, invented in 2009, that has become a symbol of anti-censorship in China—the phrase in Chinese sounds similar to the Chinese phrase “fuck your mother” and, by embedding it in otherwise harmless content, it has become a way for dissenters in China to give the finger to government censors. (There’s a video, with English subtitles, of children singing about these mythical beasts, with incredibly inappropriate results.)
The Grass Mud Horse has been a recurring theme in Ai’s work—he recorded a video of himself singing along to the singing children video, and shot a nude photo of himself with a Grass Mud Horse stuffed animal covering his crotch. This time, by including the anti-censorship trope in his “shanzhai” version of Psy’s video, itself a symbol in China of the power of cultural ferment, he exposes the absurdity of the Chinese government seeking to promote creativity while maintaining its strict censorship laws. By this afternoon, Ai’s video had been viewed three hundred and fifty thousand times, but most of those views were not from within China: authorities reportedly removed his video from Chinese Web sites within several hours of its release.
Psy's Gangnam Style YouTube party is just getting started
South Korean rapper Psy's "Gangnam Style" video continues to be No. 1 on YouTube's music chart and has already spawned a parade of parodies and tribute videos, including the Klingon version, the Oregon Duck version, the Naval Academy version, and the version that got those young lifeguards fired in El Monte.
Depending on how deep into Gangnam Style tribute territory you have ventured, you may have found the video of the b-boy dancing with his mom in his living room, or watched them re-create the dance later on "Ellen."
And you know things are really heating up when a video featuring 1,000 inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines dancing to the song surfaced on YouTube. (This is the same prison that brought you the "Thriller" dance from 2007).
This week, two of the most shared "Gangnam Style"-inspired videos on YouTube both in the U.S. and in South Korea are covers of the song by American artists.
Unlike previous tributes and parodies, these videos aren't about aping Psy's singature Gangnam Style dance, or mimicking the scenes in the original video, rather they are about reinterpreting the song itself.
The a capella group Pentatonix, who won the third season of "The Sing Off," released a version of the song. They allude to the famous Gangnam Style dance, but dancing is not the focus here. And somehow, that makes it all the more surreal.
And then there is this version, by Ra-On, a Korean rock band from Berekley. They chose to take the song in a more bluesy direction.
YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca said the two videos together have racked up more than 3 million views.
"The covers, which were produced in the U.S., are quite unique compared to others we've seen," he said. "Not only are they unusual stylistic takes from nontraditional artists, but they can be differentiated from the rest by the fact that they tackle the song in its full Korean-language glory."
And that takes real style.
'Gangnam Style' Halloween light show? Bring it!
The "Gangnam Style" tie-ins just keep getting stranger. This video of a Halloween light show set to Psy's "Gangnam Style" is starting to get traction on YouTube, thanks to a flurry of interest from the media.
The house is located in the Edwards Landing neighborhood of Leesburg, Va., about 33 miles west of Washington.
On his YouTube page, the lighting mastermind identifies himself only as "Edwards Landing Lights," but thanks to the Washington Post, we know he is Brandon Bullis, a father of three.
He programmed 8,500 lights to click on and off in sync with 13 songs. Only one other song -- "This is Halloween" by Marilyn Manson -- has been uploaded on his YouTube channel. It hasn't received the same attention as the "Gangnam Style" video, but the camera angle is certainly more interesting.
People who park their cars outside Bullis' house will enjoy a 25-minute show that incorporates about half the songs in his repertoire. If you want to see everything he's got, you'll have to go by on consecutive nights.
On his information-packed Facebook page, Bullis explains the ground rules for attending the show as well as the light show times -- 7:15 p.m. to 10 p.m. on school nights and 7:15 p.m. to 11 p.m. on non-school nights.
He does not however, publish his address. If you want to figure out exactly where the house is, you'll have to do some detective work.
Still, that hasn't stopped people from showing up. Earlier this week, he noted on his Facebook page that he had just caught some people doing Psy's horse dance outside his home.
"....sometimes my view is better than yours :-)" he wrote.
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