All I want for Christmas is a Gangnam-free week. A Gangnam-free week. A Gangnam-free week. All I want for Christmas …
Okay, you get the idea.
After weeks – no, months – of horse-trotting Korean, I’m ready to ask Santa for the gift that will keep on giving.
It’s nothing expensive, really. I just want to pull a George Bailey and wake up in a world when Gangnam Style had never hit the airwaves or my television set.
On first hearing the song, I thought I was having a slight stroke. Then I discovered the unintelligible lyrics were Korean. So I looked up a translation. They still made no sense.
The video itself has become so wildly popular that parodies have been popping up all over YouTube worldwide.
Already it’s out-pacing Call Me Maybe for bizarre remakes by random strangers.
Just Google Gangnam Style and you’ll see videos of lifeguards in California, Philippine prison inmates and even the intergenerational love between a mother and her son who will likely never get another date.
Ironically, the first time I saw the Gangnam Style video I thought it was a parody.
Actually, the video was supposed to be a satire of an exceptionally wealthy neighbourhood in Seoul with singer, Psy, portraying a caricature of a Gangnam resident.
Little did the Korean know he would become an international sensation, destroying countless shows along the way.
This fall, Dancing with the Stars chose Gangnam Style for their group routine. Apparently, they decided to forego ballroom dancing in a ballroom dancing competition for the sake of ratings.
Even The National’s Peter Mansbridge recently busted a move Gangnam Style along with members of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
And Glee’s William McKinley teens defied the logic of choosing a song with reasonable lyrics, melody and harmony for a singing competition and instead, went Gangnam Style for Sectionals.
Little surprise that in the end, one singer passed out and the club was disqualified. (Obviously, a dark power was at work.)
Gangnam Style wouldn’t be so bad if it were taken as the parody it was intended to be and left at that.
But folks are horse-trotting on dance floors and replicating other moves that look frighteningly like the Carwash I learned in my second grade gym class.
Meanwhile, the odd pendulum-swing leg move is eerily reminiscent of the New Kids on the Block – who, of course, had The Right Stuff but were too young to realize that Morris Day and the Time had Jungle-Loved it into history in the early ’80s.
And now with Psy’s involvement in the recent Christmas in Washington concert, it has spread to the Oval Office.
What’s next?
The North Pole?
So Santa, if you read this, see what you can do. Because if I wake up on Christmas Eve, it should be to the sound on the roof of “the prancing and pawing of each little hoof.” And not to a reindeer-trotting elf.
