SEOUL–South Korean rapper PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video has 220 million YouTube views and counting, and it’s easy to see why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively entertaining performer’s crazy horse-riding dance, the song’s addictive chorus and the video’s exquisitely odd series of misadventures.

Beneath the antic, funny surface of his world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social commentary about the country’s newly rich and Gangnam, the affluent district where many of them live. Gangnam is only a small slice of Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and bitterness.

Here’s a look at the meaning of “Gangnam Style” — and at the man and neighborhood behind the sensation:

The Place

Gangnam is the most coveted address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage ditches.

The district of Gangnam, which literally means “south of the river,” is about half the size of Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul’s population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam apartment costs about US$716,000, a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn.

The seats of business and government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in the neighborhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families still live there.

Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s.

As the price of high-rise apartments skyrocketed during a real estate investment frenzy in the early 2000s, landowners and speculators became wealthy practically overnight. The district’s rich families got even richer.

The new wealth drew the trendiest boutiques and clubs and a proliferation of plastic surgery clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious private tutoring and prep schools. Gangnam households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average.

The notion that Gangnam residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted piece of geography, irks many. The neighborhood’s residents are seen by some as monopolizing the country’s best education opportunities, the best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth.

“Gangnam inspires both envy and distaste,” said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. “Gangnam residents are South Korea’s upper class, but South Koreans consider them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige.”

In a sly, entertaining way, PSY’s song pushes these cultural buttons.

The Guy

More mainstream K-Pop performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried and failed to crack the American market.

So how did PSY — aka Park Jae-sang — a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly US$4,500 for smoking marijuana after his 2001 debut, get to be the one teaching Britney Spears how to do the horse-riding dance on American TV?

“I’m not handsome, I’m not tall, I’m not muscular, I’m not skinny,” PSY recently said on the American “Today” TV show. “But I’m sitting here.”

He attributed his success to “soul or attitude.”

PSY, whose stage name stems from the first three letters of the word psycho, has always styled himself as a quirky outsider. But he is from a wealthy family and was actually raised and educated south of the Han River, near Gangnam.

He’s an excellent dancer, a confident rapper and he’s funny, but another reason for his breakthrough could be that less-than-polished image, said Jae-Ha Kim, a Chicago Tribune pop culture columnist and former music critic.

South Korean music has scored big in Asia with bands featuring handsome, stylish, makeup-wearing young men, including Super Junior and Boyfriend. But seeing such singers “makes some Americans nervous,” Kim said.

“People in America are comfortable with Asian guys who look like Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who are good-looking, but they’re not the equivalent of Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves,” Kim said.

Part of the initial interest in “Gangnam Style,” Kim said, was a kind of “freak-show mentality, where people are like, ‘This guy is funny.’ But then you look at his choreography and you realize that you really have to know how to dance to do what he does. He’s really good.”

The Song

PSY, at times wearing sleeveless dress shirts with painted-on untied bowties, repeatedly flouts South Koreans’ popular notions of Gangnam in his video.

Instead of cavorting in nightclubs, he parties with retirees on a disco-lighted tour bus. Instead of working out in a high-end health club, he lounges in a sauna with two tattooed gangsters. As he struts along with two beautiful models, they’re pelted in the face with massive amounts of wind-blown trash and sticky confetti. The throne from which he delivers his hip-hop swagger is a toilet.

The song explores South Koreans’ “love-hate relationship with Gangnam,” said Baak Eun-seok, a pop music critic. The rest of South Korea sees Gangnam residents as everything PSY isn’t, he said: good-looking because of plastic surgery, stylish because they can splurge on luxury goods, slim thanks to yoga and personal trainers.

“PSY looks like a country bumpkin. He’s a far cry from the so-called ‘Gangnam Style,’” Baak said. “He’s parodying himself.”

The video abounds with ironic, “not upper-class” images that ordinary South Koreans recognize, said Park Byoung-soo, a social commentator who runs a popular visual art blog. Old men play a Korean board game and middle-age women wear wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces as they walk backward — a popular way to exercise in South Korea.

PSY’s character in the video is modeled on the clueless heroes of movies like “The Naked Gun” and “Dumb & Dumber,” he told Yonhap news agency earlier this year. He has also said his goal is to “dress classy, but dance cheesy.”

Others see more than just a goofy outsider.

“PSY does something in his video that few other artists, Korean or otherwise, do: He parodies the wealthiest, most powerful neighborhood in South Korea,” writes Sukjong Hong, creative nonfiction fellow at Open City, an online magazine.

Top New Artist:
Bad Meets Evil
Big Sean
Foster the People
Scotty McCreery
Wiz Khalifa — WINNER

Top Male Artist:
Justin Bieber
Chris Brown
Drake
Lil Wayne — WINNER
Bruno Mars

Top Female Artist:
Adele – WINNER
Lady Gaga
Nicki Minaj
Katy Perry
Rihanna

Top Duo/Group:
The Black Eyed Peas
Coldplay
Lady Antebellum
LMFAO — WINNER
Maroon 5

Top Billboard 200 Album:
Adele 21 — WINNER
Michael Buble Christmas
Drake Take Care
Lady Gaga Born This Way
Lil Wayne Tha Carter IV

Top Hot 100 Song:
Adele “Rolling in the Deep”
LMFAO Feat. Lauren Bennett & GoonRock “Party Rock Anthem” — WINNER
Maroon 5 Featuring Christina Aguilera “Moves Like Jagger”
Kay Perry Feat. Kanye West “E.T.”
Pitbull Feat. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer “Give Me Everything”

Top Pop Artist:
Adele — WINNER
Lady Gaga
LMFAO
Katy Perry
Rihanna

Top R&B Artist:
Beyonce
Chris Brown — WINNER
Cee Lo Green
Miguel
Rihanna

Top Rap Artist:
Drake
Lil Wayne — WINNER
LMFAO
Nicki Minaj
Wiz Khalifa

Top Country Artist:
Jason Aldean
Zac Brown Band
Lady Antebellum — WINNER
Blake Shelton
Taylor Swift

Top Rock Artist:
The Black Keys
Coldplay — WINNER
Foster the People
Foo Fighters
Mumford & Sons

Top Alternative Artist:
The Black Keys
Coldplay — WINNER
Foster the People
Foo Fighters Mumford & Sons

Top Latin Artist:
Mana Pitbull
Prince Royce
Romeo Santos
Shakira — WINNER

Top Dance Artist:
David Guetta
Lady Gaga — WINNER
LMFAO
Rihanna

from: Aol. http://blog.music.aol.com/2012/05/20/billboard-music-awards-2012-winners/

Adele was the big winner at this year’s Billboard music awards in Las Vegas.

The British singer picked up the top artist prize and best album for her second record, 21, winning 12 awards in total from 18 nominations.

Adele’s awards were not presented during the live show and the singer wasn’t present at the event.

Other winners included Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and LMFAO, who picked up song of the year for their single Party Rock Anthem.

The US pop act also picked up five other awards at the MGM Grand Casino Hotel.

Rappers Wiz Khalifa, Lil Wayne and R&B singer Chris Brown won top new artist, male artist of the year and R&B artist of the year respectively.

Former American Idol winner Jordin Sparks and John Legend performed a tribute to Whitney Houston at the event.

Social artist

A shirtless Chris Brown sang his dance single Turn Up The Music with BMX bikers doing stunts on stage.

Katy Perry, wearing a white dress, hung above the stage in a swing to sing her latest single Wide Awake.

LMFAO performed a medley of their hits including Sexy And I Know It

Justin Bieber also sang his new track Boyfriend accompanied by dancers dressed as clowns and neon geisha girls.

Other performers included Kelly Clarkson, The Wanted, Carly Rae Jepsen, Usher, Carrie Underwood, Linkin Park and Nelly Furtado.

Taylor Swift was named Billboard woman of the year and picked up the award from New Girl TV star Zooey Deschanel and veteran artist Kris Kristofferson.

Bieber, 18, picked up the award for the most social artist, thanking his 22 million Twitter followers and 43 million Facebook fans, saying “the internet is where I got my start”.

Perry was given the spotlight award for being the only female artist in history to have five number one singles in America from one album.

Michael Jackson is the only artist to have received the award previously.

from: BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/18141372

Best Songs Of The Century?

Judy Garland singing Over the
Rainbow and Bing Crosby dreaming of a White Christmas top the 365
“Songs of the Century” announced by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording
Industry Association of America.

The list is
designed as a way for schools to teach the appreciation of how music is
developed, they said in a joint statement. An NEA official said the songs could
also open a window on social and economic conditions of the times when they
appeared. They are almost all American popular songs.

Rounding out the
top five: White Christmas by Bing Crosby; This Land Is Your Land
by Woody Guthrie; Respect by Aretha Franklin; and American Pie by
Don McLean.

This
Land Is Your Land was written as Guthrie’s retort to Irving Berlin’s God
Bless America, ranked 19th.

The list includes a wide selection of
pop, rock, jazz, country, and patriotic songs from all decades, with the 1950s
and 1960s especially well-represented. Rapper’s Delight by the Sugar Hill
Gang is the highest-ranked rap song, at No. 162.

The top 20 also cover a
wide variety of copositions. Among them are Mack the Knife from Kurt
Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, the
entire score of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side
Story and John Philip Sousa’s march The Stars and Stripes Forever,
played by his band.

Sousa did not conduct his band for recordings, by the
way, disdaining recordings as “canned music” — a phrase he
coined.

The list was compiled from “about 200″ ballots filled out
by musicians, critics, industry professionals, elected officials, and amateur
music fans, RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said. Voters chose from a list of 1,100
songs selected for popularity and historical significance.

“We wanted
a broad cross-section of people who cared about music,” Weiss
said.

Weiss said the RIAA sent out about 1,300 ballots and around 200
were returned.

“American music has touched everyone’s lives throughout
its short history,” said Hilary Rosen, president of the recording group.
“It’s the perfect educational tool.”

“This project demonstrates that the
recording industry takes seriously its role as a caretaker of our nation’s
cultural heritage,” said NEA Chairman Bill Ivey.

Not everyone was
impressed by the selections.

Bob George, director of the Archive of
Contemporary Music, a nonprofit popular-music library in New York, said more
recent pop-music genres such as electronic dance music, punk rock, and rap were
given short shrift.

“These are songs a lot of people would recognize
if they were white, middle-class and old,” George said. “It’s a great
list for people who go to baseball games.”

An informal survey of
CBSNews.com producers, not all of whom are “white, middle-class and
old,” also found surprise and dismay at the choices on the list!

The
past year has seen a spate of best-of music lists. Yesterday by the
Beatles topped two separate best-song lists: one by Rolling Stone
magazine and MTV, another by England’s BBC Radio 2. Music-video channel
VH1 picked (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones as
its No. 1 song. MTV and VHI are owned by Viacom, the parent
company of CBSNews.com.

The RIAA list ranked Yesterday 56th
and Satisfaction 16th.
(from CBS NEWS http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/03/08/entertainment/main277218.shtml)