Travelling Gangnam style

GANGLAND style is about Seoul’s criminal underworld,” one friend informed me with grave authority.

“There’s a video?” another asked – she believed the dance was something her Zumba instructor had come up with. Wherever you heard it or whatever you think it means, in 2012 and 2013, Gangnam Style – the annoyingly catchy song with the silly dance by Psy – catapulted South Korea into the global consciousness on a scale usually reserved for pregnant princesses. It is one of the year’s most Googled search terms and the video became YouTube’s most viewed of all time, topping a billion hits this month.

South Korea is hot. But most of us know little about it beyond “He-ey, sexy lady” line and the horsey hip wiggle. Which is why this month South Korean tourist officials released a YouTube guide to the real Gangnam, a video that has since had more than 400,000 hits. This is just one example of how the government and record companies are scrambling to create a tourist-friendly K-pop experience in Seoul, to ensure that current interest lasts longer than a one-hit wonder.