Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Subversive? Deconstructing Gangnam Style

Interesting attempt at analysis of the "Gangnam Style" song/video.  Excerpt:

This skewering of the Gangnam life can be easy to miss for non-Korean. Psy boasts that he's a real man who drinks a whole cup of coffee in one gulp, for example, insisting he wants a women who drinks coffee. "I think some of you may be wondering why he's making such a big deal out of coffee, but it's not your ordinary coffee," U.S.-based Korean blogger Jea Kim wrote at her site, My Dear Korea. (Her English-subtitled translation of the video is at right.) "In Korea, there's a joke poking fun at women who eat 2,000-won (about $2) ramen for lunch and then spend 6,000 won on Starbucks coffee." They're called Doenjangnyeo, or "soybean paste women" for their propensity to crimp on essentials so they can over-spend on conspicuous luxuries, of which coffee is, believe it or not, one of the most common. "The number of coffee shops has gone up tremendously, particularly in Gangnam," Hong said. "Coffee shops have become the place where people go to be seen and spend ridiculous amounts of money."

Um...actually, that IS our ordinary coffee.  At least for a lot of people.  But I guess we have "Doenjangnyeo" here, too.

Disclaimer:  We have had the tag line "Blogging Gangnam Style!" for about a month.  And we certainly intended it subversively.  Or at least sarcastically.

2 comments:

Michael said...

Blogger started doing this to me about a year ago, it seems to follow cutting and pasting.

What I did was a Find on Page search for the word "white" on the HTML mode and you'll find the < span style="background-color: white;" >Text with unfortunate background goes here< /span > commands. Just remove them and it will be fixed.


(The comment won't allow me to post the actual HTML tags, so I added spaces around the < and the >)

Anonymous said...

You mean Doenjangnyeo actually make trade-offs with their money?? Apparently there's a shortage of credit card companies in S Korea.