The Gangnam Style Expo

This week’s Loading Time covers Graham and Paul’s trip to the inaugural Escapist Expo. Graham and Paul both had a great time at the Expo – meeting new fans, taking their first trip to North Carolina, sitting in on amazing panels … but most of all, hearing a lot of Gangnam Style.

You see, the expo happened to fall over the week that the mainstream really figured out what the internet was going on about. What did that mean? Gangnam Style everywhere. At the expo itself, the phenomenon was mainly the work of two cosplayers who showed up as Psy and Noh Hong Chul (the elevator guy). They had the song playing on loop, and at one point they lead a conga line through the expo hall.

Meanwhile in the real world the song had finally started to arrive on radios, DJ playlists and iPods. I went to a wedding shortly afterwards where the sound of the song managed to bring every able bodied attendee to the dance floor – even the two who had snuck off to make out behind a tent.

The internet wasn’t slacking off either. ComScore reports that a full 38.6 percent of all links posted between Sept. 6 and 17 were actually just links to the official YouTube video.[1] This was also about the same time music snobs and hipsters began to proclaim Psy’s previous single, Right Now, was even better than Gangnam Style, mainly because there was no believable way they could claim they listened to Psy before he was cool.[2]

Those desperate to hear more of Psy’s music, but too cheap to actually buy the rest of the album on iTunes even resorted to listening to Korea, his official song for the 2012 South Korean olympic team. Pleasantly surprised by its quality, they dubbed it more listenable that the last two official olympic anthems, which were just Muse pretending to be Queen for 5 minutes, and some terribly Canadian thing that wasn’t so much written as it was assembled in a laboratory dedicated to finding the dullest, least offensive music in the world.

In closing, the Expo was great, and we hope to see you there next year!