Musical nonsense phrases

Last month saw PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ video break big online. If you’ve not seen it, you should. The music’s catchy, and they clearly had far too much fun making the music video. Go on, watch it.

After a few days’ trouble keeping it out of my head, I took a look into some of his other tracks and found those amusing enough to prompt me to grab his album. And I discovered something interesting: rap other languages is way catchier than rap in English. Because I can’t understand the lyrics, the vocals become rhythmic instrumentation and, again because I can’t understand what’s going on, I’m not distracted or offended by the drivel that sometimes passes for lyrics in rap. That’s not to say PSY’s lyrics are drivel – I haven’t the foggiest what he’s saying. All I know is that I have trouble excising from my mind what seems to me to be musical nonsense phrases.

For kicks, here’s another of his videos. Again, having too much fun.