Recently I witnessed several discussions where people expressed their disdain for the song of the year – Gangnam Style. If you follow the music tag on this no-blog you will probably get a good impression of the kind of music I like even if you cannot read the text in Bulgarian. Based on this you may expect that I will join the resistance and hate Gangnam Style but the fact is that I am a big fan and there are several reasons for this.

   First of all I hated the music when I first heard it. I never liked any kind of fancy night club dance music and this song fits the style perfectly. Then I saw the video and I saw Psy. He has this face that can fix your day and make you laugh no matter what. He is like the musical version of Jim Carrey.

   The topic of the song is not bad either. Psy is making fun of the kind of people who like to parade with money they do not have. I am sure we all know such people. This makes the music OK because this is the kind of music these people would listen to. In addition there is the dance. I have never seen a dance that describes the idea so accurately and I cannot fathom how Psy came up with it. If one looks carefully he will notice that when the girls dance they look sexy and if they were on their own they could fit in a regular pop song without any irony. However when slightly overweight Psy does it he looks really funny. He just does not fit despite doing all the steps right.





   The most important reason I love Gangnam Style does not have anything to do with the song, the dance or the performer. No one listens to national anthems because of the music despite the fact that many of them are pretty good. Some songs take on a meaning above their musical value and lyrics message. They become symbols. For me Gangnam Style has become one. I believe the song "leaked" outside South Korea through the gaming community. I do not have any proof of that but I saw the song on StarCraft tournament streams first and my StarCraft playing friends were flooding my Facebook feed with it full two weeks before anyone else posted it. Gangnam Style came from Korea – one of the most high-tech countries in the world and Mecca of e-sports. The song became the biggest pop hit in history crashing songs and performers promoted by the music business and defying all its rules. There was no promotion outside Korea, no airplay, nothing. The Internet took care of this. Remember when Rage against the Machine got on top of the BBC chart because "Fuck you! I won't do what you tell me."? Gangnam Style took this a step further. Now we tell you what you will listen to. We are the geeks and nerds of the world who spend our life on the Internet. We play computer games and watch StarCraft as a sport. We love math and physics. We check our Facebook three times on the way to work on our smartphones more powerful than your computer. We use our TVs to watch movies we bought or stole on the Internet. We read our books on a Kindle and refer to your magazines as "dead tree". There was a time when we were not cool but guess what! Now we tell you what is cool.

Game over. All your culture are belong to us.