레지덴셜 어드벤스드(Residential Advanced) 과정을 들으러 며칠째 욕대학(York University)에 가고 있다. 아침 8시 반부터 수업이 시작된다. 비교적 일찍 일어난다고 하지만 꾸물대면 시간이 금세 가버린다. 뜰앞 화분과 뒤뜰 토마토에 물을 주고 샤워를 한 후 주섬주섬 옷을 챙겨입다 보면 어느새 여덟 시다. 부랴부랴 출발해보지만 8시 40분이나 되어서야 강의실에 들어서곤 한다. 킬과 하이웨이 7에서 차가 막혀 한참을 지체하는 것이 이유라면 이유일 수 있겠다. 10분 늦어지는 게 아무것도 아닐 수 있지만 따지고 보면 그게 아니다. 조금씩 늦어지는 것도 습관이다. 늦는 사람이 늘 늦지 않던가.
안 되겠다 싶어 아침 7시에 집을 나서 센터(Center)와 하이웨이 7에 있는 맥도널도로 왔다. 무료로 제공하는 신문도 읽고 오늘 배울 것을 미리 보아두면 도움에 되겠다 싶다. 아니나 다를까 맥도널드에 오니 늘 오는 사람들이 앉아 신문을 읽고 커피를 마신다. 부지런한 생활 습관이 몸에 배었다. 일찍 나는 새가 먹이를 얻는다는 말도 있듯이 부지런히 노력하는 사람에게는 기회가 주어지기 마련이다.
본 남성합창단 공연이 이어지고 있다. 매주 다른 곳에서 연주를 한다. 지난주는 크리크찬 월드 창간 9주년 기념음악회에서 노래했고 이번 주는 토론토 한인 장로교회가 주최하는 음악회에 찬조출연을 한다. 노래하면서 느끼는 감동이 진하다. 한 곡을 가지고 오랜 기간 연습을 하여 지겨울 듯하나 사실은 그렇지가 않다. 노래를 부르면 부를수록 그 곡의 깊이를 알아가게 된다.
음색이 통일되어 아름다운 하모니를 이룰 때의 기쁨을 느껴본 사람은 알리라. 어제저녁에도 늦게까지 연습을 했다. 없는 시간을 쪼개서 연습하고 공연하는 것이지만 보람을 느낀다. 노래가 삶 가운데 많은 비중을 차지한다. 감사한 일이다. 누군가 당신은 언제가 가장 행복하냐고 묻는다면 책을 읽고 글을 쓸 때 그리고 노래할 때라고 말하고 싶다. 사람들과 만나 교제하며 이야기를 나눌 때도 행복하다. 알지 못했던 걸 새롭게 알아갈 때의 기쁨 또한 적지않다.
오늘(9월 20일) 자 토론토 스타에는 뮤직 비디오 '강남 스타일'이 시작된 강남을 소개하고 있다. 노래 덕분에 강남이 유명세를 탄다. 이 기회에 강남을 세계에 알리고 전 세계 사람들이 한 번쯤 가보고 싶어하는 명소로 만들었으면 좋겠다. 80년대 강남이 지금처럼 개발되기 이전의 사진이 인상적이다. 싸이의 '강남 스타일'이 하루아침에 유명해졌듯이 길게 보면 강남도 하루아침(?)에 변한 것이나 다름이 없다. 이래저래 설레는 아침이다.
토론토 스타에 게재된 강남 스타일과 강남에 관련된 기사 전문을 올린다.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA—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 neighbourhood 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 per cent of Seoul's population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam apartment costs about $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 neighbourhoods 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 neighbourhood'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 — a.k.a. Park Jae-sang — a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly $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 neighbourhood in South Korea,” writes Sukjong Hong, creative nonfiction fellow at Open City, an online magazine.
-From TORONTO STAR web page at www.thestar.com. Published by TORONTO STAR THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2012. page A3-