Gangnam Style a reflection of ‘horizontal globalisation’

Dubai: Before it became a YouTube sensation, South Korean musician Psy’s K-pop single, Gangnam Style, was initially targeting just the Korean demographic.

It was believed that the song, infused with humour referring to the lifestyle of the Gangnam District of Seoul, would only attract the attention of those who got the joke. However, the day it was posted online, more than 500,000 views were logged. In a month, it circulated enough to be dubbed ‘viral’. Today, Gangnam Style boasts well over two billion views.

Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, sees Gangnam Style as a prime example of horizontal globalisation.

“Gangnam Style reflects a new form of globalisation, one where the center of economic gravity has balanced toward the East, and where so-called global “South” countries are producing companies and products that are disrupting Western dominance of global markets,” he said.

Molavi was speaking at a session entitled ‘Gangnam Style Globalisation’ during the Emirates Airlines Literature of Festival.

“In a matter of months, Gangnam Style became a cultural phenomenon,” he said. “Flash mobs choreographed to the song were organised in London, Dubai, and Indonesia. Psy himself, who was seen as the class clown of the K-pop scene, began attracting the attention of international stars like Madonna, who invited him to perform with her in Madison Square Garden.

“The export of Korean pop music is the direct result of government support,” Molavi said, adding that a country’s export of entertainment sparks a global interest in its culture, encouraging tourism and providing enormous business opportunities.

“This commercial story of non-Western companies going regional and global is not entirely new, but it will be a trend that will accelerate over the next decades as innovation grows across emerging markets,” he said.

Molavi further highlighted this trend by referring to Turkish soap operas, which are being continuously aired in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Balkans.

“Parents in Latin America began naming their children Noor and Scheherazade after their favourite characters in Turkish soap operas,” he said. “In the Middle East, women began asking for divorces because their husbands were not more like Mohannad, the male star of the Turkish soap ‘Noor’.

Molavi said the Turkish soap operas are reflective of a new kind of horizontal globalisation, “where countries of the so-called “periphery” serve other “periphery” countries with entertainment, a sort of South-South entertainment flow akin to the rise of South-South trade flows.”

With the internet and social media, Molavi said platforms were now available “for the size of the world to go global.

“Three out of four people in the world live in Asia and Africa,” he said, adding that by 2030 the population of Asia and Africa will increase by half a million people each, while in the US it will increase by a mere 50 million, and “Europe will be shrinking.”

Molavi said that this kind of geoeconomic transformation was unfathomable 10 years ago. He said if these trends continue, we will likely see a surge of emerging markets.

“When people eat Godiva chocolate, they think ‘Belgian’, when in fact it is owned by a Turkish confectionery,” he said. “Another example is Tata Motors. The Indian car maker is selling its products across the world and, in one of the great acts of post-colonial reconfiguration, the Indian carmaker owns the iconic British brands Jaguar and Land Rover.”

Molavi said that Gangnam Style remains exceptional for its global reach, “but the same technological forces that allowed for a modestly known Korean rapper to go global make it easier for other pop culture artists to find new audiences in unexpected places, in a new horizontal globalisation that is reshaping our world.”