The first video on the internet to reach a billion views is a joke about class in Seoul, and almost nobody who danced to it in 2012 knew that. The joke is not on the district. It is on the man singing.
Here is what Gangnam is, what PSY is claiming about himself, and why he has since said the word satire is not quite right either.
The Short Answer
Gangnam is the wealthiest district of Seoul, south of the Han River, the local equivalent of Beverly Hills. Gangnam style means the lifestyle associated with it. PSY plays a man loudly insisting he has that lifestyle, in settings that make clear he does not, which is the whole joke.
The Story Behind the Song
Park Jae-sang had been a working South Korean pop star for twelve years, with multiple domestic number ones, when YG Entertainment released this on July 15, 2012 as the lead single from his sixth album, Psy 6 (Six Rules), Part 1.
It went to number one on Korea’s Gaon Chart on release. He wrote it, co-produced it and co-directed the video, which is unusual for a record of this scale and explains why the comedy is so consistent.
The video went viral in August 2012. It became the most-liked video on YouTube in September, the most-viewed in November, and on December 21, 2012 the first to pass a billion views.
What is Gangnam?
An administrative district of Seoul. The name means south of the river. It contains the most expensive property in South Korea, the private academies, the cosmetic surgery clinics and the luxury retail, and it functions in Korean conversation as shorthand for money and status.
Korean listeners hear the title as a claim, the same way an English speaker would hear somebody announce that they are Manhattan or Chelsea. Non-Korean listeners in 2012 heard two syllables and a horse dance.
What is PSY actually saying?
That he is exactly the kind of man Gangnam produces: refined by day, wild at night, worth your attention. He describes an ideal woman in the same terms and then presents himself as her match.
The claim is undermined continuously by what is on screen. He delivers it in a stable, on a tour bus, in a sauna, on a toilet, and in a car park, surrounded by nothing expensive. The word for the character is poser, and the record is his sales pitch.
Is it satire?
Billboard and most Western coverage read it that way, as a shot at people chasing status they cannot afford, in a country where household debt and cosmetic surgery rates had become recognized social issues.
PSY has complicated this himself. He told Newsweek that it was not a criticism of Gangnam, and he has elsewhere described the song as being about the women of the district. His own framing is closer to affectionate mockery of a type than to social commentary, and the type he is mocking most directly is the narrator.
What is the dance?
A horse riding motion, wrists crossed, knees bouncing. PSY has said he tried a series of animal movements before settling on it, and it was chosen for being ridiculous rather than cool.
That decision carried the record. A dance that looks foolish invites participation in a way that a difficult one does not, and it needed no translation at all, which is how a Korean-language single reached people who could not identify a single word in it.
Why did it only reach number two?
Because Billboard did not yet count YouTube. The song peaked at number two on the Hot 100 in October 2012, held off by Maroon 5’s “One More Night.” Billboard began factoring video streaming into the Hot 100 formula the following year.
By almost every other measure it was the biggest song in the world that autumn. It topped the charts in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and it took best video at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Did it open the door for K-pop?
Partly, and not in the way anyone expected. It was the highest-charting Korean song in Billboard history for years, and it proved that a Korean-language record could reach a mass American audience.
It also arrived as a novelty, which is not the door the Korean industry wanted opened. The acts that followed, BTS and Blackpink among them, had to establish that Korean pop deserved to be taken seriously, a different task from the one PSY completed. He passed the record for highest-charting Korean song to BTS in 2017.
What happened to PSY?
He kept working. He has said in interviews that he was ready to move on from the song years ago, while acknowledging it will define him. He runs his own label in Seoul and still tours.
The video sat at the top of YouTube’s all-time list until 2017, when it was passed first by “See You Again” and then by “Despacito.”
Why it worked
Because it operates on two levels that never interfere with each other. If you speak Korean it is a comedy about a man overselling himself. If you do not, it is four minutes of a man in a blue tuxedo doing a horse dance, which turns out to be enough.
Very few records survive being understood by almost nobody. This one was built so that understanding it was optional.
Songs in languages you do not speak are the hardest to look up, because there is nothing to type; when you have the sound and not the words, our song lyrics search is where to start.