why can't it be that deep?: an essay i wrote for a class that i liked and wanted to have on here date: may third, 2026
It took me nearly fourteen years to understand Gangnam Style.
Sure, I'd known for a while that the music video was parodying those who live beyond their means. Gangnam is one of the richest neighborhoods in Seoul, and on one website or another I'd stumbled across an explanation for PSY's antics in the video: by pretending to race horses or sun himself at a private beach that turns out to be a sandbox, he's commenting on how chasing wealth can make us look, at best, wildly lacking in self-awareness. But it was only a week or two ago that the words Oppa Gangnam Style really clicked for me. The literal translation, "elder brother is Gangnam style," probably makes just as much sense as the original Korean on the surface. Oppa isn't restricted to use for one's actual brother, though. It's an honorific used by a younger woman to address a somewhat familiar older man, such as an upperclassman in school or a longtime coworker. PSY isn't saying "I am" or "PSY is Gangnam style." He's speaking about himself in the way he wants someone else to see him- and that someone else is, of course, the "sexy lady" to whom the rest of the chorus is dedicated. "Oppa Gangnam style" isn't a nonsensical statement. It's a boast: "hey girl, look how good my life is." The music video adds the final piece of context that this man's life is not actually as opulent as he makes it out to be. After all, oppa is Gangnam style. Oppa, presumably, cannot actually afford to live in Gangnam.
So that's essentially two words that make the whole song come together. An easy Google or three. And no one I knew figured it out in 2012. To be fair, I was eleven years old and didn't even know where Seoul was, but I'm willing to bet not a whole lot of Westerners put in that effort regardless of age. Gangnam Style was, at the time, a strange novelty: a hit song that received little if any radio play. Everyone and their mom was perfectly content to simply watch the goofy man and do his goofy dance. We didn't understand the words. Therefore, they weren't important.
Today, languages other than English have a good deal more presence in the U.S. Top 40 than they used to. But are we really listening to these songs? Take the example of one unfortunate high school afternoon. I was making my way to where my mom had parked slowly, since I was also recreating Snoopy's struggle with the lawn chair trying to force my beaten-up umbrella to open. The raindrops on that day were like heat-seeking missiles, honing in on entry points down the back of my shirt or into my shoe. Obnoxiously high bass thrummed in the distance for a few seconds before the car from which it emanated came into view and drove through a puddle on the side of the roadway, and as I stood there shivering from gross road water, I heard laughter between the beats of Despacito. A few days later, I saw that car- playing the same song- parallel park in one and a half spots before the driver emerged. I recognized him. He was in my Spanish class, and he was absolutely bombing.
Maybe André 3000 put it best and most succinctly: y'all don't wanna hear me, you just wanna dance.
There is a meme that I can only assume was created with the best of intentions. A man's head peeks up from water as text proclaims Its (sic) Not That Deep. Despite the fact that the water in the original photograph does actually look relatively deep, it's become sort of a manifesto among passive consumers of media. You'll inevitably find this refrain in any comment section where someone's used sleeper-agent trigger words like encoding, subtext, or, God forbid, symbolism. The term "anti-intellectualism" has been tossed about a lot lately, and "it's not that deep" is perhaps a symptom.
If it's not that deep, though... why does it exist? Someone had to make it. Someone put time and effort into bringing every story or song or art piece into the world (unless they used generative AI, which I'd argue is the industry benefitting most from this aversion to analysis.) Why doesn't anyone seem to care why?
That's not a question I can definitively answer here, but I do wonder about it a lot. In many more ways than this, it seems like the ideal in our society right now is to care as little as possible. The pursuit of knowledge is not currently cool. But god damn is it fun.
I'm learning to speak some Korean right now- survival Korean, mostly, like 안녕하세요1 and 감사합니다2 and 화장실이 어디에 있어요?3- and I guess it's no surprise that that indirectly led me to put the pieces of the Gangnam Style puzzle together, even though I hadn't considered it a puzzle in the first place. Honorifics are interesting to me, because they're often quite difficult to translate. If you watch any anime for more than a couple of minutes, you'll likely run into an instance of a character addressing their older sibling in the third person by calling them "big brother" or "big sister" to their face. I'm an only child, but even I know that's not something we generally do in English. It's not a coincidence that Japanese culture, as well as Korean culture, places more emphasis on respecting one's elders than we do in the United States. Language is shaped by culture, and culture in turn shapes language. I wouldn't call it "chicken-or-the-egg" as much as I would "Mobius-or-the-strip." "Ouro-or-the-boros," perhaps. When it clicked for me- wait, it's oppa Gangnam style because he's talking to the sexy lady- I was laying in bed. The realization made me physically sit up. Understanding things is fucking baller.By subscribing to the philosophy (a word members of this school of thought would instinctively cringe away from) of "it's not that deep," we're not just doing artists a disservice. We're depriving ourselves of a lot of joy, I think. Everything is a puzzle, a cipher, a Rubik's cube of meaning waiting to be read between the lines. Once you've figured out the why? of something, you'll inevitably notice more the next time you go back. And then you'll realize more. There's very little better than the moment the circuit closes and the bulb starts glowing. The more you do it, the more light you have to read by. The power, as corny as it sounds, is yours: the power to learn, to discover, to find out what, exactly, makes oppa Gangnam style.
1 annyeonghaseyo, hello
2 gamsahamnida, thank you
3 hwajangsiri eodie isseoyo?, where is the bathroom?
