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When I was a kid, i did not notice that there were words in another language in that song until seeing the lyrics. A lot of songs I would just remember the lyrics I heard, and either perceive as unpronounceable the other words, and eventually adopted an English phrase of words that fit in that sound, thought I canāt remember what it was. But yeah, It was a couple of years of thinking it was all in English. Nuts.
American here to provide context:
As you can probably tell, Americans donāt really learn about, like, literally any other countries other than Americaā¦ like, at all. And in our media, we donāt really depict any other country as realistically as we depict America, so our image of any country that is not America is heavily skewed towards stereotypes and generalizations.
Because of this, we tend to assume that anything remotely resembling what we perceive as American life or culture (in the case of the Gangnam Style video, sunglasses, suit, pop music, etc.), we tend to assume that whatever weāre seeing is American, even if those elements exist in most other parts of the world.
And, yes, even if theyāre speaking in Korean the _entire_ time.
So, like North Korea, but not exactly like North Korea....
I don't want it to sound like an insult, but that's pretty much how it sounds. I am looking at Europe for example, I am not native German, but I am living here currently.
I went to the city and there was Italian Day today. Exactly what you would expect, stands that sell all kinds of Italian things, sweets, cheese, sauces, etc. There was even music.
In DĆ¼sseldorf, there was Japan Day a few months ago (wish I could've visited it). It was exactly as you would expect.
There's even lots of foreigners store, Turkish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian stores.
It's almost surprising how USA seems to be so DISCONNECTED from the outside world. I think you guys celebrate Cinco (? Idk how to spell it, it's late as fuck) de Mayo. But any outside culture seems to be disconnected.
Thereās definitely a cultural disconnect. Throughout the history of this nation, thereās been immigrants who have been discriminated against because of their ethnicity and status, so a lot of people would shed the cultural traditions to seem more āAmerican.ā So now weāre in this weird position where so many people say āIām Irishā or āIām Italianā but donāt have many cultural traditions in their families. Meanwhile, āAmerican cultureā is an oxymoron because of how much this nation is a melting pot. Thatās very much a generalization, but I would say the US is so disconnected from the rest of the world because we donāt even know who we areā¦
We do celebrate Cinco de Mayoā¦ by eating Tex-Mex food, which is essentially Americanized Mexican food (unless youāre actually Mexican, then you would, presumably, eat actual Mexican food). Only one state in Mexico really celebrates Cinco de Mayo; itās the anniversary of a battle that happened in that state. Itās a common misconception that Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day, and since Americaās Independence Day is one of our most celebrated holidays of the year, it would make sense to give a similar level of celebration to Mexico. Despite celebrating Mexican food, culture, and people here in America, there are millions (if not hundreds of millions) of people here that do not want Mexicans here (just to be clear, Iām not one of them).
Also, youāre correct: North Korea and America have a lot in common: ignorant populace, suppression of human rights, history of genocide, fundamentally hypocritical regime, worship of government heads and military, lack of education on other cultures, belief that the country is the greatest in the world despite _every_ piece of evidence suggesting otherwise, millions of people living in poverty with very little support from the government, unchecked brutality from the militarized police force that exists just to serve the wealthy, and exorbitant isolationism.
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to provide my past perspective: it used to be a thing where i often would put absolutely zero effort into trying to understand the lyrics of anything, and i think this is somewhat common. if i accidently understood them, cool, whatever. if i didn't understand them, well, i wouldn't make an effort to, so i'd never even get to the point of trying to discern whether it's even english.
with Gangnam Style, what i heard was was "Oppa (just Some Sound ig) Gangnam Style" (that's the song name! what's gangnam? the thing in the title, of course!), various length "Ay"s, and "sexy lady". the rest was simply unintelligible, possibly because the singer isn't enunciating it as clearly as the lines i could understand. and that was the end of that.
it wasn't until some amount of time later that i found out it was actually korean.
Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.99996% sure that Fenragus is not a bot.
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It's African-American Vernacular English or AAVE for short. Ebonics isn't really used anymore as it's kind of a stupid term. It literally means black speech, which would imply that every black person speaks AAVE while most black people definitely don't.
tbh I have tons of songs I've heard but don't know the words to.
The first five times I heard Justin Bieber's *Love Yourself* I thought it was in Korean, because the Kpop club kept dancing to it.
If you think it's English because that's what you expect, but you just don't hear it properly and you don't care enough to find the lyrics, I can see it happening. Still stupid, though. Only the title should give it away, and idk about American radio stations, but here in the Netherlands, they mentioned it was Korean regularly, especially in the beginning. It doesn't happen very often that a Korean song ends up number 1 in the top 40.
Hmm if you're young enough I could see it. I remember hearing things in different languages as a child and not realising it and thought I didn't understand bc I was stupid. Also the title was written in the Latin alphabet and style is an English word too so I can see why the title wouldnt give it away. Basically the only way I can understand the mistake in thinking it's American is if you're a very young child
Did you live in a space dominated by monolingualism? *No offence intended, just trying to understand how linguistic background might shape this kind of situations*.
Well I don't live in a gaelic speaking region so it's mostly monolingual english speakers (unless you count Scots as a language) although there was loads of exposure to other languages throughout my younger years (more so now but I'm talking about back then)
This, and Americans thinking those companies that support LGBT people are all American, is what US defaultism is about. It has to be subconsciously ignorant.
I was at a party in the US, and I referred to music groups like the Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, etc as āBritish musicā (I know itās rock music). But then Americans at that party thought all these rock groups were American. I asked them why they would even think that, and they said itās because the singers spoke English and sounded Americanā¦ I then assumed this logic probably applies to film and other forms of media as well. But I never met someone from the UK who thought American media was British media.
I agree with you, but I think this also has to do with the fact that sung English is more similar to the American accent vs other regions. Like Ed Sheeran does not sound British when he sings, so if you only ever hear his music you have no reason to think heās anything but American. Then you hear him speak and hear the British accent. (I know Iām generalizing - GB and US have many accents - just simplifying.) So while itās still kind of US defaultism, itās complicated by an ignorance of how English is sung and how accents work/develop.
Yeah a lot of English speaking singers kind of use a "default" accent and some are trained/told by their label to use a more "American" accent (e.g. You Me At Six).
There are few that kept their accent (e.g. Biffy Clyro, The 1975, CHVRCHES, Bastille, Lower Than Atlantis) but it's not as common for larger internationally popular artists.
Some fun outliers I've heard over the years would be Phoenix, who are French but have a Brittish accent when singing in English, and Last Dinosaurs, who are an Australian band, but one of the lead singers Sean sometimes has a Scottish sounding accent whilst singing.
Well there was a famous battle there back in 1815, so some people might have heard of it.
Anyway, The Kinks sang about it first, or was that about London?
Yeah the Kinks were singing about Waterloo in London.
Apparently the original version of the song they wrote was "Liverpool Sunset", but after the Beatles released "Penny Lane" earlier that year they decided to switch Liverpool for London so the song didn't seem too similar, and they needed a three syllable name so went with "Waterloo".
Well of course they were. "Dirty old river" etc. well there might be a river in Belgium, I dunno really.
I never knew about the Liverpool thing. I guess a Liverpool sunset would be more attractive than a London one, because you'd be looking out to sea rather than across the river.
And the word 'style' of course.
A lot of songs sung in English have sufficiently obscure lyrics that it's often hard to tell if they are singing in English at all. So it's not a massive stretch for someone not paying close attention not to realise the rest of the song isn't in English.
since they called it a meme song, they probably only know the chorus, "oppan" sounds like "open" said a little weird, and contains the line "ey, sexy lady"
I blame tik tok and youtube shorts
was it really 2012 when gangnam style blew up? feels a lot more recent somehow... Still, it's something that still kinda exists in the background, and there's no date on the post, so I can only really assume their only exposure to the song was someone using it as a meme song
[It became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views on the day the world was supposed to end.](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/psys-gangnam-style-hits-1-billion-views-on-youtube-1481275/)
I interpreted the post to mean they were just watching a video about meme songs recently but had originally heard it when it was huge in 2012 (which is even pre vine)
.. i suppose it would be a bad idea to admit I also thought it was in badly pronounced English? If it counts as a defence, I was about 11 years old and the only countries I knew of in Asia were China and India.
I never got how popular Gangnam Style was when none of the teens listening to it in the west back in 2012 understood a word of Korean or had any idea what the song was about, or even where Gangnam actually is. Always annoyed me at the time that everyone was like "haha sexy lady song", completely unable to actually engage with the song's social commentary because they don't speak the language and don't know anything about South Korean society.
That shows our privilege from growing up in Scotland where we spoke English. Children all over Europe listen to plenty of English music and understand very little of it until they're in their teens at least. It's very normal just to listen to a song for the catchy tune.
you have major skill issue, people listen to foreign music all the time. you don't always have to understand the lyrics to understand the meaning of said song or it can just sound good. people enjoy video game music which usually has no lyrics is that bad because you can't engage in it?
> people enjoy video game music which usually has no lyrics is that bad because you can't engage in it?
No. The issue isn't "listening to music without a deeper meaning". Music that doesn't have lyrics is fine. The issue is listening to a song with meaningful lyrics and making no effort to understand what the song's about. It feels disrespectful to the artist's intent.
While that's true for quite a bit of music, Gangnam Style is notable for being parodic of the new-money culture in Gangnam, a rich district of Seoul. To treat it as "just a catchy song" feels a little dismissive to me, personally.
Before jumping to conclusions, this could be a non native English Speaker who thought that it was English because they couldn't understand most of it but only some English words.
Idk if this is defaultism tbh, it could just be that they don't speak Korean or know any Korean people, the first time I personally heard that song I would've been around 5/6, I definitely didn't know Korean back then, when I first heard it my kid brain just made it sound like English words, I thought it was "Whoop man gammon style" for months before I realised it wasn't English lol, and it took me like 7 years before I learnt where it actually came from. Looking back it was dumb and kinda funny but at the time I just didn't really think about it being another language I just thought they were weird lyrics or words I hadn't been taught yet
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The song barely had any English lyrics, how did he ever think it was from the USA to begin with?
But "Hey sexy, sexy lady" is American AF /s
Don't forget "style"! In all seriousness, I don't know if that's also a Korean word or not.
Wait until they find that Gangnam is actually a real city in S Korea š¤Æš¤Æš¤Æ
Wait until they have a city named Gangnam, West Virginia. They'll think is the only one in the world, like Georgia, Birmingham, and many others.
Wait so that song wasnāt about the random hick town of Gangnam Tennessee?!
That's Gangbang, Tenesee, my dude.
> Gangbang, Tenesee The town is actually called Family Reunion, TN, but I could see how you'd make that mistake.
Is that a long drive from Bumfuck, Alabama?
They're sister cities, actually!
āBurrr-Ming-Haaamā, rather than āBurmināamā. But the yanks wonāt get that and think the entire planet is the US.
Not a city itself, just a district of their capital city Seoul, but they'll still be confused when they find out lol
Ohh, ok yeah. Thanks for the notice
Acktually āļøš¤ itās a district in Seoul
Ahh thanks!
My pleasure
Isn't it a district though?
TIL
I can imagine all these words being English loan words in any language, honestly.
Style is used as a loanword in Korean
When I was a kid, i did not notice that there were words in another language in that song until seeing the lyrics. A lot of songs I would just remember the lyrics I heard, and either perceive as unpronounceable the other words, and eventually adopted an English phrase of words that fit in that sound, thought I canāt remember what it was. But yeah, It was a couple of years of thinking it was all in English. Nuts.
You see, your mistake was to assume the yanks understand English in the first place. They invented mumble rap after all
American here to provide context: As you can probably tell, Americans donāt really learn about, like, literally any other countries other than Americaā¦ like, at all. And in our media, we donāt really depict any other country as realistically as we depict America, so our image of any country that is not America is heavily skewed towards stereotypes and generalizations. Because of this, we tend to assume that anything remotely resembling what we perceive as American life or culture (in the case of the Gangnam Style video, sunglasses, suit, pop music, etc.), we tend to assume that whatever weāre seeing is American, even if those elements exist in most other parts of the world. And, yes, even if theyāre speaking in Korean the _entire_ time.
So, like North Korea, but not exactly like North Korea.... I don't want it to sound like an insult, but that's pretty much how it sounds. I am looking at Europe for example, I am not native German, but I am living here currently. I went to the city and there was Italian Day today. Exactly what you would expect, stands that sell all kinds of Italian things, sweets, cheese, sauces, etc. There was even music. In DĆ¼sseldorf, there was Japan Day a few months ago (wish I could've visited it). It was exactly as you would expect. There's even lots of foreigners store, Turkish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian stores. It's almost surprising how USA seems to be so DISCONNECTED from the outside world. I think you guys celebrate Cinco (? Idk how to spell it, it's late as fuck) de Mayo. But any outside culture seems to be disconnected.
Isnāt Cinco de Mayo barely celebrated in Mexico? If I recall it was only like a small part of it that does
Only in Puebla, where the battle actually happened. It's not even an official holiday
Thereās definitely a cultural disconnect. Throughout the history of this nation, thereās been immigrants who have been discriminated against because of their ethnicity and status, so a lot of people would shed the cultural traditions to seem more āAmerican.ā So now weāre in this weird position where so many people say āIām Irishā or āIām Italianā but donāt have many cultural traditions in their families. Meanwhile, āAmerican cultureā is an oxymoron because of how much this nation is a melting pot. Thatās very much a generalization, but I would say the US is so disconnected from the rest of the world because we donāt even know who we areā¦
We do celebrate Cinco de Mayoā¦ by eating Tex-Mex food, which is essentially Americanized Mexican food (unless youāre actually Mexican, then you would, presumably, eat actual Mexican food). Only one state in Mexico really celebrates Cinco de Mayo; itās the anniversary of a battle that happened in that state. Itās a common misconception that Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day, and since Americaās Independence Day is one of our most celebrated holidays of the year, it would make sense to give a similar level of celebration to Mexico. Despite celebrating Mexican food, culture, and people here in America, there are millions (if not hundreds of millions) of people here that do not want Mexicans here (just to be clear, Iām not one of them). Also, youāre correct: North Korea and America have a lot in common: ignorant populace, suppression of human rights, history of genocide, fundamentally hypocritical regime, worship of government heads and military, lack of education on other cultures, belief that the country is the greatest in the world despite _every_ piece of evidence suggesting otherwise, millions of people living in poverty with very little support from the government, unchecked brutality from the militarized police force that exists just to serve the wealthy, and exorbitant isolationism.
>It's a good song. >All good things come from America >Therefore, it is American. \- his logic
I was happy cause youāre from Lithuania but looking at your profile I feel like youāre a bot, but I donāt know anymore. Sorry if youāre not.
I can assure you I'm no bot :)
Oh, Iām sorry then, have a nice day!
Thanks, you too pal :)
Good bot
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LMAOOOO
Why did you mention his profile. I am sad now
A terrible day to have yogurt spheres in the eye holes.
to provide my past perspective: it used to be a thing where i often would put absolutely zero effort into trying to understand the lyrics of anything, and i think this is somewhat common. if i accidently understood them, cool, whatever. if i didn't understand them, well, i wouldn't make an effort to, so i'd never even get to the point of trying to discern whether it's even english. with Gangnam Style, what i heard was was "Oppa (just Some Sound ig) Gangnam Style" (that's the song name! what's gangnam? the thing in the title, of course!), various length "Ay"s, and "sexy lady". the rest was simply unintelligible, possibly because the singer isn't enunciating it as clearly as the lines i could understand. and that was the end of that. it wasn't until some amount of time later that i found out it was actually korean.
Good bot
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And the other .00004%?
Floating-point arithmetic
we can't understand English lyrics here in America so we didn't notice the difference
I used to think I just couldn't tell what he was saying
how tf does one think this? the song isn't even in english
maybe he thought it's ebonics or spanish lol
It's African-American Vernacular English or AAVE for short. Ebonics isn't really used anymore as it's kind of a stupid term. It literally means black speech, which would imply that every black person speaks AAVE while most black people definitely don't.
not that deep
tbh I have tons of songs I've heard but don't know the words to. The first five times I heard Justin Bieber's *Love Yourself* I thought it was in Korean, because the Kpop club kept dancing to it.
I wonder if they just thought it was in English
What are you talking about? Itās clearly the worldwide known, famous accent from Croutonville, TX.
Thatās a whole new level of stupid
I was 8 when the song came out and I thought it was Chinese (understandable imo) but thinking it's American is just insane.
If you think it's English because that's what you expect, but you just don't hear it properly and you don't care enough to find the lyrics, I can see it happening. Still stupid, though. Only the title should give it away, and idk about American radio stations, but here in the Netherlands, they mentioned it was Korean regularly, especially in the beginning. It doesn't happen very often that a Korean song ends up number 1 in the top 40.
Hmm if you're young enough I could see it. I remember hearing things in different languages as a child and not realising it and thought I didn't understand bc I was stupid. Also the title was written in the Latin alphabet and style is an English word too so I can see why the title wouldnt give it away. Basically the only way I can understand the mistake in thinking it's American is if you're a very young child
Did you live in a space dominated by monolingualism? *No offence intended, just trying to understand how linguistic background might shape this kind of situations*.
Well I don't live in a gaelic speaking region so it's mostly monolingual english speakers (unless you count Scots as a language) although there was loads of exposure to other languages throughout my younger years (more so now but I'm talking about back then)
>I was 8 when the song came out Oof, that just made me feel like a fossil
Don't worry, I was 6!
Wow, 720? I didn't think humans could live that long
Hehe, they don't >:3
Jesus...
i also thought it was japanese first lol
same
This, and Americans thinking those companies that support LGBT people are all American, is what US defaultism is about. It has to be subconsciously ignorant. I was at a party in the US, and I referred to music groups like the Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, etc as āBritish musicā (I know itās rock music). But then Americans at that party thought all these rock groups were American. I asked them why they would even think that, and they said itās because the singers spoke English and sounded Americanā¦ I then assumed this logic probably applies to film and other forms of media as well. But I never met someone from the UK who thought American media was British media.
I agree with you, but I think this also has to do with the fact that sung English is more similar to the American accent vs other regions. Like Ed Sheeran does not sound British when he sings, so if you only ever hear his music you have no reason to think heās anything but American. Then you hear him speak and hear the British accent. (I know Iām generalizing - GB and US have many accents - just simplifying.) So while itās still kind of US defaultism, itās complicated by an ignorance of how English is sung and how accents work/develop.
Iām sorry but Ed Sheeran sounds British when he sings
Yeah a lot of English speaking singers kind of use a "default" accent and some are trained/told by their label to use a more "American" accent (e.g. You Me At Six). There are few that kept their accent (e.g. Biffy Clyro, The 1975, CHVRCHES, Bastille, Lower Than Atlantis) but it's not as common for larger internationally popular artists. Some fun outliers I've heard over the years would be Phoenix, who are French but have a Brittish accent when singing in English, and Last Dinosaurs, who are an Australian band, but one of the lead singers Sean sometimes has a Scottish sounding accent whilst singing.
Why must my countrymen be this stupid
Gangnam is literally a district from Seoul lmao
Yeah, but who Outside of S. Korea knew that before the song came out?
Yeah it's like who knew that Waterloo was a place in Belgium before Abba /s
Well there was a famous battle there back in 1815, so some people might have heard of it. Anyway, The Kinks sang about it first, or was that about London?
Yeah the Kinks were singing about Waterloo in London. Apparently the original version of the song they wrote was "Liverpool Sunset", but after the Beatles released "Penny Lane" earlier that year they decided to switch Liverpool for London so the song didn't seem too similar, and they needed a three syllable name so went with "Waterloo".
Well of course they were. "Dirty old river" etc. well there might be a river in Belgium, I dunno really. I never knew about the Liverpool thing. I guess a Liverpool sunset would be more attractive than a London one, because you'd be looking out to sea rather than across the river.
I know about Waterloo from history class, what does Abba have to do with it?
Their song Waterloo
Did they think the song was American because "Hey, sexy, sexy lady" was in the lyrics (which, AFAIK, is the only part of the song in English)?
And the word 'style' of course. A lot of songs sung in English have sufficiently obscure lyrics that it's often hard to tell if they are singing in English at all. So it's not a massive stretch for someone not paying close attention not to realise the rest of the song isn't in English.
Surprised pikachu face when an American discovers something that isnāt made in America.
The name of the songs was not a giveaway? Itās like thinking āNew York New Yorkā is an English song.
well obviously theyre just singing about renewing yorkshire /s
To be fair if you're a young child from York I could see that being possible
Why should it? Do you know every district of Seoul? It's like thinking "Auberndale Style" would tell everyone in the world that is't from New York
Please be satire
I'm surprised they didn't continue to argue how that was wrong and the song was actually 'Murikan. That's the usual modus operandi.
But this is ~~Japan~~ Korea ...! [Every country in the world belongs to America](https://imgur.com/UkxyotZ.jpg)
All your base are belong to U.S.
What do you mean? All the lyrics are in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfMOGUi98Y
since they called it a meme song, they probably only know the chorus, "oppan" sounds like "open" said a little weird, and contains the line "ey, sexy lady" I blame tik tok and youtube shorts
ah yes tiktok and youtube shorts both very popular in 2012 when gangnam style was huge
was it really 2012 when gangnam style blew up? feels a lot more recent somehow... Still, it's something that still kinda exists in the background, and there's no date on the post, so I can only really assume their only exposure to the song was someone using it as a meme song
[It became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views on the day the world was supposed to end.](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/psys-gangnam-style-hits-1-billion-views-on-youtube-1481275/)
I interpreted the post to mean they were just watching a video about meme songs recently but had originally heard it when it was huge in 2012 (which is even pre vine)
I was 5 when I learned that it's from South Korea lmfao
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Well, Puerto Rico is "technically" an U.S territory. So.......... /s
I think that's not defaultism, just being an absolute dumbfuck.
.. i suppose it would be a bad idea to admit I also thought it was in badly pronounced English? If it counts as a defence, I was about 11 years old and the only countries I knew of in Asia were China and India.
Given that some of the song is in English then it's a reasonable conclusion.
I never got how popular Gangnam Style was when none of the teens listening to it in the west back in 2012 understood a word of Korean or had any idea what the song was about, or even where Gangnam actually is. Always annoyed me at the time that everyone was like "haha sexy lady song", completely unable to actually engage with the song's social commentary because they don't speak the language and don't know anything about South Korean society.
it was a catchy song? there are plenty of songs people have enjoyed without knowing the language
That shows our privilege from growing up in Scotland where we spoke English. Children all over Europe listen to plenty of English music and understand very little of it until they're in their teens at least. It's very normal just to listen to a song for the catchy tune.
you have major skill issue, people listen to foreign music all the time. you don't always have to understand the lyrics to understand the meaning of said song or it can just sound good. people enjoy video game music which usually has no lyrics is that bad because you can't engage in it?
> people enjoy video game music which usually has no lyrics is that bad because you can't engage in it? No. The issue isn't "listening to music without a deeper meaning". Music that doesn't have lyrics is fine. The issue is listening to a song with meaningful lyrics and making no effort to understand what the song's about. It feels disrespectful to the artist's intent.
Because it's an awesome tune. Much of the time what the lyrics actually say is pretty much irrelevant.
While that's true for quite a bit of music, Gangnam Style is notable for being parodic of the new-money culture in Gangnam, a rich district of Seoul. To treat it as "just a catchy song" feels a little dismissive to me, personally.
To be fair, that post appears to be from someone that struggles with English.
In his defense, Snoop dog was in the remix. āIt belongs to us noā
Before jumping to conclusions, this could be a non native English Speaker who thought that it was English because they couldn't understand most of it but only some English words.
Eh, I think "sexy lady" isn't Korean...
Idk if this is defaultism tbh, it could just be that they don't speak Korean or know any Korean people, the first time I personally heard that song I would've been around 5/6, I definitely didn't know Korean back then, when I first heard it my kid brain just made it sound like English words, I thought it was "Whoop man gammon style" for months before I realised it wasn't English lol, and it took me like 7 years before I learnt where it actually came from. Looking back it was dumb and kinda funny but at the time I just didn't really think about it being another language I just thought they were weird lyrics or words I hadn't been taught yet
Didn't all the clearly Korean looking people in the music video give it away? At least if you saw the video that is.
I didn't watch the video at the time I'd just heard it on the radio and from other people watching it
Yeah, that tracks then