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.
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