South Korean rapper Psy released his much-anticipated new single Gentleman on Thursday, hoping to repeat the success of Gangnam Style, the song that made him the biggest star to emerge from the growing K-pop music scene.
The video for Gangnam Style has become the most watched item on YouTube with more than 1.5 billion hits and Psy’s horse-riding moves sparked an international dance craze.
The details Gentleman were kept under wraps until the song was released at midnight in New Zealand. The song, with a techno beat, was full of puns in Korean and contained the lines “I am a party mafia!” and the refrain, “I am a mother father gentleman.”
Check out the video below:
Psy, 35, will perform Gentleman in public for the first time on Saturday at a concert at Seoul’s World Cup stadium but he has been coy about what dance to expect this time, except to hint that it is based on traditional Korean moves.
He has asked fans to wear white to Saturday’s event and his stylist told Reuters last month that the concept for the new song would again be a formal suit with “an unexpected twist of fun.”
Gangnam Style catapulted Psy to global fame after a rocky career in the music business over the past decade.
Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, graduated from the Berklee College of Music in the United States and made his debut in 2001 with the album PSY from the Psycho World.
But he ran into trouble with the authorities for “inappropriate” content in the lead song on that album, which was seen as sexually suggestive. He was also charged with possession of marijuana in 2002.
Since then he has released five more albums.
A Music Industry White Paper published by the Korean Creative Content Agency said sales of K-pop outside Korea surged 135 per cent in 2011 from a year earlier to $196 million. In 2006 overseas sales were worth $16.7 million.