ON THE FLOOR
GANGNAM STYLE! L
ast year, the presence of a short, smartly dressed man in a tuxedo dancing like he was riding a horse became a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Psy’s ‘Gangnam
Style’ fast bloomed into YouTube’s most watched video ever, clocking up well over a billion views to allegedly earn the K-pop singer around $8 million dollars in online advertising revenue alone. Promptly adopted as an internet meme, it was parodied, copied or commented upon by everyone from fellow Korean UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon — who tried out Psy’s distinctive dance — to British artist Anish Kapoor, who recorded a bizarre video in support of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the track’s cries of ‘Hey, sexy lady!’ clearly finding universal appeal. Few outside of Korea really understood its cultural context, however, until Psy appeared on the Ellen Degeneres show to teach Britney Spears the song’s dance, explaining: “The mindset of this dance is to dress classy and dance cheesy.”
Emerging from the cultural fog as both a celebration and a joke about the excesses of the city’s centre of nightlife, we got to experience it first hand when the DJ Mag Allstars were invited to DJ at Club Octagon, the hottest club in Seoul. Gangnam, or Kangnam as it also appears on signs in Seoul, literally means ‘South of the River’, and as Psy’s video pokes fun at, it’s conspicuously the most chi-chi area in the city’s capital, a megacity of over ten million which has bucked the global recession with the help of corporations like Samsung, who have their own Samsung Town in Seoul. Driving across the giant bridge from Incheon Airport with our host Minhoo Lee, aka DJ Mindbender and one half of Octagon residents Shut Da Mouth (alongside partner DJ Beejay), the streets of Gangnam are lined by expensive car show rooms — BMW, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari — on the way to our plush five-star Imperial Palace hotel.
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djmag.com
DJ Mag USA head to Seoul, Korea, to check out the real Gangnam style at game-changing venue Club Octagon...
Hitting rush hour along the way, we’re able to pick Minhoo’s brains on what to expect from Seoul’s most prosperous nightspot. For a start, contrary to the impression given by YouTube videos of Psy’s giant outdoor gigs, ‘Gangnam Style’ is not one for us to entertain the dancefloor, K-pop here aimed more at teenage music buyers than those seeking sophistication, glamour or simply credible music on the dancefloor. Instead, raised on a diet of subtitled US television from the country where many young Koreans also go to college, it’s the big guns of US and European EDM who hold sway here. International festivals Ultra and Global Gathering have taken advantage of this with recent incursions into Seoul and its surroundings. While this has created a healthy atmosphere for large-scale domestic events such as the World DJ Festival, there is also effectively no underground scene according to Minhoo who, while spinning electro, techno and progressive house as part of Shut Da Mouth, started his adventures in electronic music from a love of deep house and techno. Relocated due to his dad’s job to Singapore in the second half of the nineties, it was the European dance influences there — rather than Korea’s then taste for imported US hip-hop — that Minhoo became obsessed with, returning home to start hosting parties and eventually becoming the Executive Director at Octagon.
No trip to Seoul is complete without a lunch of ginseng chicken and a dinner of Korean barbecue, tender beef cooked on hot coals at your table. Yet we’re still treated, when we hit the club sometime around midnight, to pizza, steak, lobster and an assortment of meats, cheeses, nuts and fruits, all served from restaurants inside the club. Situated at the back of the main dancefloor, which itself is underneath the Hilltop Hotel (most clubs in Korea are found in hotels due to the city’s licensing laws),
Octagon’s kitchen serves up high quality cuisine all night until the early hours, Korean-style drinking always accompanied by food. This is especially evident on the VIP balcony, where those with cash to flash can hire private rooms to stock their table with bottles, and in the club’s smaller second room. The white (powdery) elephant in the room when it comes to dance music, of course, is drugs of the illegal persuasion, a collection of chemicals likely to cause heart palpitations, extreme mood swings and the grinding of teeth in those who’ve never tried them. With stricter drugs laws than even the US, it’s almost certain that one thing not on the menu in Octagon is molly. Instead, Koreans like booze. Lots and lots of booze. In 2012 they got through 20,000 bottles of Perrier- Jouët in the club alone, despite a bottle costing around $250 (and a large one $500). This gives at least one indicator of the degree of affluence amongst Octagon’s clientèle. No doubt the DJs do their bit too and we dutifully oblige, sharing each bottle with the succession of beautiful, long-legged women who stop by the green room — a pristine white, two-floored room that sports MP3 decks and a bed — while we listen to one of Octagon’s young residents, DJ Kindergarten, warming up.
With purely ethanol to shake up the body’s internal circuitry and brain chemistry, the music needs to do the rest which is why, despite many of the regular DJs having music collections that run river deep, Octagon’s main stage, flanked by state of the
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