Gangnam Style as ideology
example · Korean popular culture ·
retold in 3 talks
The K-pop mega-hit functions ideologically precisely because it mocks itself: audiences find it disgusting yet return compulsively, and its self-parody of Seoul upper-class culture makes the ideology viable rather than undermining it.
As told 2
“it's not that you like it...when you first hear it you find it disgusting, but in a weird way pleasurably disgusting. You become haunted by it.”
“Gangnam Style I claim is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it's ideology because of this. Disgustingly attractive.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Owen Flanagan1Paul Celan1William Randolph Hearst1Pol Pot1Ezra Pound1Saskia Sassen1Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer1Humphrey Bogart1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
The K-pop mega-hit functions ideologically precisely because it mocks itself: audiences find it disgusting yet return compulsively, and its self-parody of Seoul upper-class culture makes the ideology viable rather than undermining it., illustrating cynicism,ideology,ironic distance as ideological mechanism
Žižek uses the global viral success of Gangnam Style, a song that ironizes its own vacuity but entraps listeners in its rhythm, to illustrate that ironic distance does not escape ideological enjoyment but constitutes it., illustrating ideology,the sacred as collective trance,Western Buddhism