Bill O'Reilly ponders the meaning of 'Gangnam Style'
- Music
Kids today, with their sunglasses and baggy pants and YouTubb videos! Bill O’Reilly just doesn’t get them — and can’t, for the life of him, figure out why they like that goofy PSY, if that is his real name. Thank heaven that Fox News youth correspondent Dr. Keith Ablow stopped by The O’Reilly Factor yesterday to explain the real reason your children love “Gangnam Style.” Spoiler: It’s because the song is like a drug, and also because Korean isn’t a real language.
O’Reilly begins the segment by making a topical point: PSY’s famous “Gangnam” dance is “just doin’ the pony,” à la currently popular recording artist Chubby Checker! Ablow, however, thinks there’s more to it than that. Here, verbatim, is his attempt to “explain the madness”:
“[Psy] is tapping into the fact that people don’t want any meaning right now. Music, the most popular music, apparently, is that without intelligible words to some extent, that simply conveys you to a distant place, beat-wise, doesn’t try to convince you of anything, that doesn’t try to raise your emotions. It just is sort of like a drug. And that seems to be what people seem to want right now…. It is the son of Facebook, if you will. The false face that so many people now put on their lives, the lack of insight, if you will, is reflected in this person’s popularity.”
Until this moment, I didn’t realize “being in Korean” was the same thing as being “without intelligible words.” O’Reilly agrees with Ablow’s main point — if you will — but takes issue with Ablow likening PSY to Elvis: “Elvis Presley could sing. He had a nice voice. His songs had words. Okay? All right? He put on a show. This is a little fat guy from Pyongyang, or something. Seoul. Whatever. And he’s jumping up and down. There’s no comparison.” You know, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe.
For more hand-wringing about how the Internet is ruining our brains, some random bashing of Ian Falconer’s Olivia books, and the greatest ever summation of what it’s like to watch “Gangnam Style” — “It’s the same as getting high in miniature” — check out the full video below. And please, Internet, someone make a GIF of O’Reilly doing the pony stat:
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