Anecdotally, I’ve seen “Gangnam Style” chicken restaurants in Indonesia and multiple street vendors selling PSY-shaped balloons in Singapore, four years after the song’s success. PSY proved especially popular around the continent, topping charts across Southeast Asia and in China, even appearing on Chinese New Year TV specials-a valuable inroad to a burgeoning market. “Asia has always been the target,” Mimyo adds, noting the inroads Korean music had made across the region the decade before. Though the West was more aware of Korean music than ever before, America wasn’t the primary target.

“Korea finally acknowledged that an international K-pop market was possible,” Mimyo says. “There were tons of useless articles like, ‘The dance moves are from our ancestors being horse riders.’”Įlsewhere, views of Korean artists’ videos tripled following “Gangnam Style,” according to YouTube data. “That song was strongly interpreted as a heroic achievement by nationalists, with K-pop ‘conquering the world,’” says Mimyo, K-pop critic and founder of the site Idology. Today, you can visit a giant bronze sculpture in Seoul that's modeled after PSY’s hands, mid-pony move in the “Gangnam Style” video. In Korea, “Gangnam Style” was treated as a point of pride, highlighted by a massive PSY concert that attracted over 80,000 fans. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. “Gangnam Style,” however, looked and sounded nothing like the K-pop norm, its big EDM chorus poking fun at the upper-class Seoul neighborhood of Gangnam. K-pop, with its controlled star-grooming system and skilled performance groups, was starting to get attention internationally and inspire an avalanche of trend pieces. But nobody expected anyone abroad to notice. Released July 15, 2012, “Gangnam Style” immediately reached the top of South Korea’s music charts, as one would expect from PSY (real name Park Jae-sang), a rapper boasting nationwide success over the previous decade.

Alas, Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s plodding Fast & Furious ballad “ See You Again” finally leap-frogged over “Gangnam Style”-a changing of the guard that arrives just as PSY’s hit celebrates its fifth anniversary. Korean pop star PSY had held the title since November 2012, when he became the first person to reach 1 billion views, then 2 billion, breaking YouTube’s view counter in the process. Earlier this week, “Gangnam Style” was knocked off its perch as the most viewed video on YouTube.

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