2 Legit 2 Gangnam Style: How The Amazing Hammer/PSY Duo Was Born At Google Zeitgeist

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Monday, November 19th, 2012

The question isn’t really whether you’ll watch the amazing Gangnam Style video with MC Hammer from the American Music Awards last night. It’s how many times you’ll hit “replay.” I’ve now watched it half a dozen times.

How does something like this get organized? We’d imagine months of negotiations between lawyers and various rights holders ending in some sort of complicated contract. In reality, it all came together one evening at a late night revelry at Google Zeitgeist last month.

Scooter Braun, who’s PSY’s agent (as well as Justin Beibers’s), was apparently hanging out with super angel Ron Conway, MC Hammer and others at the Google event. Braun mentioned to Hammer that PSY was a huge fan of Hammer’s and had expressed an interest in bringing Hammer on stage at the AMA to perform with him.

Hammer agreed. Scooter then handed Hammer his cell phone, which was ringing to an outbound phone. PSY picked up and the details were arranged.

One month later, we get to see PSY in parachute pants dancing with Hammer on stage, including cuts to the audience where celebrities are doing the ridiculous Gangnam Style dance.

No one can ever take that away from us.