Pour one out for Gangnam Style, the fever dream YouTube video that once got so many hits it straight up broke YouTube, and has today been superseded by the new Most Watched King, See You Again by Wiz Khalifa feat. Charlie Puth. Culture comes to us in shocks and waves, and this is a seismic moment in the grand canon of it: the torch passed from one iconic video to another, a worldwide passing of the general mood, from banter to #respect. Gangnam Style is a relic from a more frivolous age – 2012, when we didn’t have the cares we had now, before Trump and that longread about climate change – and See You Again is a more sombre meter-reading of the way the winds are blowing. We do not like men in child-coloured suits singing about style, anymore. We prefer to reverently pay homage to our deceased driving gods, RIP.
But which is the best video? Reader, as ever, I am glad you asked me. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to watch both videos, score them off against each other on an almost wholly arbitrary scoring system, and then we’re going to embark on a letter-writing campaign to YouTube asking them to permanently delete the losing vid. Are you with me? You are with me.
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Style!
SUPERCARS
Gangnam: yes (+1)
See You Again: yes (+1)
Score draw, here. See You Again has supercars: it is a song for a movie about supercars and dedicated to a man who died in a supercar and is targeted squarely at music listeners who either have supercars or want supercars, and so features a lot of shots of Charlie Puth sandwiched on a piano between two supercars and Wiz Khalifa respectfully rapping in a hangar-sized garage (of supercars). Gangnam Style, also, features a fantastically expensive vehicle: your boy Psy has a sort of quasi-dance off with someone outside what looks like a Mercedes. So both videos gain points. And we, all of us, gain knowledge: if you want your video to do well on YouTube, just put a really nice Lamborghini or something in it.
CAN U ABSOLUTELY BLAST IT OUT OF A SUBWOOFER SYSTEM IN A FIESTA
Gangnam: yes (+1)
See You Again: no (0)
Thing about See You Again is that half the views are from legitimate, actual people, and the other half are from those lads in car gangs who go around every single provincial town in England and open their doors on the big roundabout every Friday and Saturday and always talk about lowering their car another half-centimetre and are constantly looking in actual print catalogues for new valves and lighting systems to put underneath them, always prising their car’s badges off with a screwdriver and smoothing the holes out with polyfilla, basically constantly either talking about fingering or purple glow paint. And all of those lads love Fast & Furious, and they all #love and #respect Paul Walker RIP, and they all love the song See You Again by Wiz Khalifa feat. Charlie Puth, because it is the only commercially produced sort-of-about-cars songs made since Jump In My Car. And if you don’t believe me, literally search Facebook for “Paul Walker memorial“, to find the next nearest 16-Saxo caravan of #respectful #lads, sombrely convoying down the M1 absolutely blasting out Wiz.
Weirdly, though, See You Again, all twinkly piano and oh–ooh–oh sounds, doesn’t actually lend itself well to being fucking pounded out of a Halfords-installed subwoofer system, despite that being it’s primary mode of communication. Gangnam Style, however, with it’s high whip snares and pulsating beat, absolutely is. So what the fuck.
DOES IT KIND OF LOOK LIKE PSY IS DYING AT THE START OF THE VIDEO?
Gangnam Style: yes (+1)
See You Again: no (0)
Ah, bad form for See You Again, here: Gangnam Style here opens with a shot of Psy looking fatally exhausted on a CGI beach, lolling in a chair, head tipped far back on his neck, essentially 30 or 40 slow heartbeats away from death, and I like that: it’s Psy’s way of addressing us all, looking us clear in the eye and saying, “whatever happens in the next four minutes 12 seconds, and believe me things are about to get hectic, remember: you, and I, are both dying one second at a time, enjoy these moments while you still can.” Meanwhile, the See You Again video doesn’t even have Psy in it, alive or dying, which for me has to be an oversight.
DOES THE VIDEO INCLUDE A NUMBER OF SHOTS OF VIN DIESEL?
Gangnam Style: no (0)
See You Again: yes (+1)
I am particularly a fan of Vin Diesel because i. he sort of looks like a toad, man! Like a strong handsome toad! I love it! ii. he is an ancient throwback to a far-gone time where Hollywood cherished strength over every other possible leading male feature and so you had Arnie and Sylvester Stallone battering each other to death in vests with gatling guns for like an entire decade and it was amazing, and what I am saying to you is can you even imagine how much Vin Diesel would have mopped up the scene if he rocked a sleeveless tank and made his ascendency in, like, 1983, instead of at the turn of the millennium when he actually broke thru iii. Vin Diesel is fundamentally incapable of playing any role other than “a slight variation on Vin Diesel” and “tree who is also an alien” and I thoroughly respect that anti-hustle iv. his name is “Vin”. Vin Diesel. Come on.
So “See You Again” really wins points for loads of shots of Vin Diesel sort of smiling at an out-of-shot Paul Walker and then… oh, the smile fades a little. Huh. What did Vin just see, that we didn’t? Guess we’ll never know. Guess we’ll never know.
EXTENDED VISUAL ANALOGY FOR DEATH + HEAVEN
Gangnam Style: yes (+1)
See You Again: yes (+1)
See You Again does have the most overt references to death and life thereafter: it closes, as Furious 7 does, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker engaged in some sort of purgatorial death race, where the road splinters and Walker roars smoothly off into the sunset, and Vin Diesel stays here, corporeal and gruff, driving cars and doing double-agent missions for Charlize Theron whose villainous layer in a radar-proof aeroplane, and everyone watching at that exact moment shuts the laptop lid when their mum comes in and goes “I’M NOT CRYING, YOU’RE CRYING”. So we can see that. It’s harder to see where Psy’s Gangnam Style plays with the concepts of time, space, the brief glimmer of life that lives inside all of us, and the clanging metal sound of the abyss, but it does: essentially every shot of the Gangnam Style video – from a child breakdancing on a beach to Psy killing two dancers with a controlled explosion – is an extended analogy for what waits for us all after the sun sets, with Psy as God and the Devil both. Gangnam Style might be about style, yes, and the area in Seoul where people with it go, but it’s also a lot about death, and a lot about life, too.
DOES THE VIDEO INCLUDE THIS SHOT OF LUDA STARING WISTFULLY ON A BEACH?
Gangnam Style: no (0)
See You Again: yes (+1)
Take the L, Gangnam Style. Your video is an L.F.Z. (Ludacris-Free Zone.)
HAS MATTYBRAPS COVERED THE SONG IN HIS OWN INIMITABLE STYLE?
Gangnam Style: yes (+500)
See You Again: yes (+500)
HAS THE MOST IMPORTANT CULTURAL FIGURE OF THIS MILLENIUM RECORDED A VERSION OF YOUR SONG WHICH IS EXPLICITLY ABOUT HIM PISSING OFF HIS BABYSITTERS? YES, 500 POINTS TO GANGNAM STYLE.
HAS t/m/i/c/f/o/t/m RECORDED A VERSION THAT IS ACTUALLY QUITE A STRAIGHT UP COVER, ACTUALLY, A DISAPPOINTMENT IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS, JUST HIM LOOKING SAD BEHIND AN ICE MACHINE AND RAPPING ON A CAR, WHO IS PAYING FOR MATTYBRAPS, WHO IS PAYING FOR THIS CAREER—? YES, 500 POINTS TO SEE YOU AGAIN. YOU BOTH GET 500 POINTS.
Man, it is pretty close. Let’s go into the final round—
HEY MY GUY YOU GOT A WHOLE EXTENDED BIT WHERE A DUDE IN A LIFT JUST FLIPS HIS CROTCH OVER PSY’S HEAD FOR A REALLY LONG TIME???? HMMM????
Gangnam Style: yes (+1000)
See You Again: no (-1000)
Western death celebrations are complex rituals and arguably See You Again is the high waterline for all of them – wade into the comments and you will note that a lot of people like this song about a dead friend because it reminds them of their own personal dead friend, and also the imagery in it is basically saccharine enough to make even the hardiest car-loving dude do anything from a single tear for a full sob – buuuut also they rarely involve a man pushing his crotch out in an elevator over and over again, and over, and over and over, and that for me is where Gangnam Style takes the crown.
So the final tally is thus:
See You Again: -496 points
Gangnam Style: 1,504 points
Gangnam Style is the best video in the world, delete See You Again. We’ll do this all over when Despacito comes up to the 2.9 billion views line in about… ooh, three months’ time? Something like that. Oppa see you then style!
