"Gangnam Style" by singer Psy from Korea, is a popular song, but its extraordinary global success is really the result of its music video, which is a great piece of genius. On September 22nd, Guinness World Records listed "Gangnam Style" as the most-liked video in the history of YouTube. It's been performed at West Point (West-Point Style), and Google's CEO, has done the "Gangnam Style" horse dance at the company's office in Seoul. Even Samsung is trying to make Psy the new model for the latest type of fridge.
The song's global popularity is such that the vast majority of people who enjoy it don't speak Korean, and have no idea what it is about. That's fine --- part of what makes "Gangnam Style" so fun is, like international pop music, the difficulty in understanding it. When we sing along, "Hey, sexy lady", we don't really know what we're singing about.
The joy of incomprehensibleness is familiar to anyone who loves pop music from elsewhere. Anthony Lane, in his 2010 review of the Eurovision Song Contest, Only Mr. God Knows Why, used "Eurovision English" as one of its chief pleasures. It's "a complex tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the heartfelt poetry (诗意) but absolute nonsense to a level of what sci-fi writers could only have dreamed. " In similar ways, "Gangnam Style" is just an over-the-top video where a fat man does a funny dance and sings repetitive words that don't make sense to most of us.
But on the other, the magic of the song also lies in its funny dance, which reflects not just cultural morals specific to Korea, but cultural values easily recognizable to western viewers. This song's words may be in Korean, but its scenes are in clear American. The dance moves are simple enough to copy.
Nonsense, in other words, forces us to let down our guards. It makes us relax, and asks us to let in all sorts of feelings from which, otherwise, we might distance ourselves. "Gangnam Style" happens to be so interesting because of its incomprehensibleness.
小题1:Some complex languages are used in pop music because _______.
A．singers regard it as one of the chief pleasures at the concert
B．they make the music hard to understand but poetic and attractive
C．the music can sound more pleasant and beautiful to the audience
D．people like listening to the music which makes special sense to them小题2:What is true about the popularity of "Gangnam Style"?
A．It was considered as the most popular video on the Internet.
B．It makes people amused and removes their emotional guards.
C．Its dance only reflects cultural and morals specific to Korea.
D．Psy, its singer, has been the new model for Samsung .小题3:What does the underlined word "incomprehensibleness" mean in Paragraph 3?
A．Being interesting to listen to.
B．Being simple enough to copy.
C．Being complex and repetitive.
D．Being difficult to understand.小题4:The text is mainly about ________.
A．how "Gangnam Style" becomes popular among the youths
B．why "Gangnam Style" is popular even if few people understand it
C．how Psy gains worldwide success through his talent and hard work
D．what emotions and cultural morals Psy wants to convey with his song
