Scene from 'Gentleman', the new music video from Psy
South Korean rapper Psy was crowned king of YouTube last year when his music video for K-pop hit ‘Gangnam Style’ became the first video ever to breach 1bn views on the network. Now he’s continuing his record-breaking run with his new video for ‘Gentleman’.
Gentleman was released worldwide at midnight GMT on 13 April and even the singer himself was surprised by the overwhelming response.
Just 16 hours after it was uploaded, he tweeted “OheMGee!!!!!!! 10mil views in 16 hours!!!” to his 2.5m Twitter followers. This figure meant that Psy had already smashed the record for most views of a video on its first day, previously held by Justin Bieber for the music video for Boyfriend, which had received 8m views 24 hours after uploading in May last year.
By the end of Gentleman’s first day on YouTube, the video had amassed about 20m views. Today the video reports close to 53m views, and counting.
It’s not the first time Psy has knocked the Canadian pop star out of the YouTube record books, as last year the internet sensation Gangnam Style became the most-viewed video on the site, stripping Bieber’s Baby of the title. Gangnam Style now has more than 1.5bn views and was a No 1 hit in more than 35 countries.
While Gangnam Style poked fun at the hyper-stylish inhabitants of Seoul’s Gangnam District, Gentleman sees the man with the motto ‘dress classy, dance cheesy’ acting anything but gentlemanly. The video also features a dance routine that looks a lot easier and more sedate than the Gangnam Style gallop, so you can expect this to be replicated all over the internet in due course.
For the curious, Business Insider has reproduced the lyrics to the song in phonetic Korean and in English.
