Gentleman
by Psy

Album: single release only (2013)
Charted: 10 5
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Songfacts®:

  • Psy's follow up to "Gangnam Style," "Gentleman" follows a similar pattern of familiar club beats and rap/sung lyrics in both Korean and English, but a raunchier storyline. It was officially released in 119 countries around the world on April 12, 2013 at midnight. New Zealanders got the first taste thanks to their country's early time zone location.
  • Those of you not fluent in Korean will be unlikely to be able to decipher all of the song's words, but some of the more understandable English ones include such lyrical gems as, "Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you wet. You know who I am? Wet Psy!"

    Psy wanted to satirize a crude and tacky man who refers to himself as a gentleman.
  • The video was shot in various locations around Seoul. The clip also features another K-pop singer Ga, who's a member of the popular female act, Brown Eyed Girls. The hip-shaking dance it showcases was inspired by her group's 2009 hit "Abracadabra."
  • The video registered 18.9 million YouTube hits worldwide on April 13, 2013, breaking the record for the most views on the day of its release on the video-sharing Web site. The clip's initial view almost doubled the previous record-holder, Justin Bieber's "Beauty And A Beat" which logged over 10.6 million hits when released in May 2012.

    The title premiered at 5 a.m. PDT on April 13, 2013, so the initial 18.9 million views were earned in less than 24 hours. The video received 38.4 million views in total on the following day, which was certified as a Guinness World Record. The single-day record was previously set by the documentary KONY 2012, which was a film made by the charity group Invisible Children about a Ugandan warlord.

    Psy's record was broken by Taylor Swift's clip for "Look What You Made Me Do," which achieved 43.2 million views on its first day after release in August 2017.
  • Major South Korean broadcaster KBS banned the video because Psy is shown abusing public property. The clip opens with the rapper kicking a cone that says "no parking" and the state-funded station said the scene doesn't meet its standards as a public broadcaster.
  • Psy's biggest fear was that he would be a one-hit wonder outside of Korea. "I honestly changed this song so many times until the very last moment. I was not excited, I was terrible; I was so nervous," he admitted to MTV News a fortnight after the song's release. "My only goal was to avoid being called a One-Hit Wonder. So that was a very nervous moment right before the premiere; and in two weeks, with 230 million views, I'm not a one-hit wonder. I'm really happy and relieved about that!"
  • Psy was going to follow up "Gangnam Style" with a song called "Assarabia" or "Assaravia" in English. The title is slang used by South Koreans to express thrills without suggesting any ethnicity or body part. However, worries arose that Arabs might misinterpret the title and be offended, so Psy changed course.
  • Psy told MTV News about Brown Eyed Girls' "Arrogant Dance," which he showcases in the video. "It's a dance plus an attitude," he explained. "It's new moves to the world, but in Korea, a girl group did it before, and it was very famous. So I thought 'Oh, we have a lot of catchy moves in K-Pop, so I can remake it and bring it to the world.'"

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