Mission: To Eliminate Gangnam Style (or To Get 100 Million Blog Views by Using It in This Title)

Last summer, during a pre-coital moment, my former lover pulled up a YouTube video that she said I must see. Though she summarized an erudite attempt to parse the video’s subtext she’d read in a literary journal somewhere, she insisted that I just watch it—experience it—first. Four minutes later, and I had become viewer 12, 220, 810. Yes, I had survived another "significant" pop-culture benchmark, but I couldn’t help wonder just what I had lost during those few incomprehensible—yet danceable—minutes.

Five months (and one billion views) later, we have come to the verge of a new year—and a choice: will we, the 1^st & 4^th Subbuteo Club, stand idly by as Gangnam Style preys upon another year, or will we do something about it?

Initially “Gangnam Style” referred to the gaudy lifestyle of Seoul’s lavish Gangnam neighborhood—home to the Korean nouveau-riche. For Korean audiences, PSY parodies the inane and extravagant habits of the bourgeoisie by appearing to ride and own horses, frequent trendy spas, and relax on tropical beaches. He sarcastically undercuts each of these, meanwhile hooking us with an innocuous refrain and annoyingly catchy beat—and an even more annoying dance move. In America, it seems only the dance gained traction; “Gangnam Style” has become the new Macarena. 

Finally, an aging K-Pop star (in his mid-thirties) manages to produce a hit in the United States—after years of toiling in the industry despite an education at one of America’s best music schools—and what do we do with it? Reduce it to it a parody of itself, and broadcast it so frequently that it threatens to overwhelm all other cultural entities. America has its own trashy pop-culture objects—an entire history of crazes, fads, and fixations—did we really need to appropriate Gangnam style and, inexplicably, make it more obnoxious?  The video is ridiculous, yes; you laugh with it, and laugh at it. But its ubiquity has reached the threshold of our patience.

Therefore, before a single second of 2013 is tainted, the 1^st & 4^th Club must dedicate itself to eliminating Gangnam Style. In the past, we made the public aware of charitable “causes” through our periodic Subbuteo tournaments. Now we have our own cause: saving our dance floors, our hotel lobbies, our sporting events, our morning commutes, our discotheques, and even our New Years Eve celebrations from the Gangnam Menace. Will you join us? Will you flick for freedom from a … song? At the risk of becoming just as mawkish at the PSY video, I implore you to “Op op op op oppan 1^st & 4^th style!”