Gangnam Style – The Korean Kolaveri!

There’s a vested interest in the choice of this blog topic. Gangnam Style has been viewed around 550 million times, while, ‘Why this kolaveri’ has been viewed around a 62 million times. So I have strategically titled my blog so that my counter ticks with the left over morsels. If you are one of those who googled for either of these songs and landed on my blog I’m sorry and grateful to you at the same time. I don’t want to disappoint you both, here’s the link to both the songs on youtube.

Gangnam Style

Why this Kolaver di!

I first came across Gangnam style, thanks to one of the audio rounds in a School Quiz show hosted by Derek O’ Brien. Couldn’t answer it and hence came back home and googled and was deeply depressed that this song was heard 383 million times before I did. In fact during the good old days of quizzing, the audio rounds were all about identifying the voices of Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru (passages with & without ‘at the stroke of midnight hour…’), Winston Churchill or a piece from Pink Floyd and trivia on identifying musical instruments were confined to a Jalatharangam or Mandolin.

In fact I could sympathise with an average South Korean, since he must have felt remorse and pride almost simultaneously the way Korean language gained worldwide fame, just as Tamil did over an international audience a couple of months back. The irony was the common link of fragmented pieces of English strewn all over in both the songs.

When Chris Gayle and co danced to the tunes Gangnam Style after mauling the Aussies, instead of a Calypso I realised the world of music was skewed. There was a time when a calypso was composed in praise of Gavaskar in the early 70’s,and it was rated the highest honour and almost 4 decades later the West Indians who themselves are traditionally rich in music were celebrating their resurgence to a Korean song.

The sad part is that trash is being recognised as music these days and gets an unwarranted mileage thanks to curious passers by on the net. The quantifying parameter for song popularity is the number of hits it gets on youtube from where it gets catapulted into ‘fame’. Youtube is unfortunately a visual medium where the auditory credentials are overshadowed by visual impact. This is definitely not a platform to evaluate or rank a song.

But some how the mechanics remain the same , Illayaraja a legendary South Indian musician recently mentioned he was surprised at the fact that all the songs of his first movie ‘Annakilli’ almost 4 decades back were hits in spite of him being a novice and without the aid of propaganda mechanisms of today. People identified themselves with the songs that wafted through the air waves is what he said; remember these were All India Radio days with a population of 1 radio per street. The opinions or the hits on the song travelled ear to ear. The speed at which it was relayed was proportional to the distance between the household that had a radio and the one that didn’t.

People identify themselves with / patronise a ‘Gangnam style’ or a ‘Why this kolaveri di’ for different reasons. It’s not out of the love for music but more out of sheer curiosity and wanting to join the ‘been there, done(heard) that, before the 599 million did’ bandwagon. Such songs sure do get more than a million pairs of feet tapping, unfortunately that’s where they stay, never quiet reach your heart, let alone stay there.