Culture Re-View: The day Gangnam Style broke a billion views

Before BTS amassed its army, before ‘Squid Game’ went viral, and before Parasite swept the awards ceremonies, there was ‘Gangnam Style’. K-pop star Psy (Park Jae-sang) was relatively unknown on the global stage before 2012. He had accrued a fanbase across five albums in South Korea and was set to release his sixth album which was also aimed at a local audience.

The lead single from ‘Psy 6 (Six Rules), Part 1’ was ‘Gangnam Style’, a catchy K-pop tune that cheekily referred to the hip Gangnam district in Seoul. Alongside the song, Psy released a music video directed by Cho Soo-hyun.

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If the song was catchy, the video was a deadly infection. It literally went viral. Featuring cameos from Korean celebs like K-pop singer Hyuna, 7-year-old Hwang Min-woo, and comedians Yoo Jae-suk and Noh Hong-chul to entice the Korean fans. But it was the horse-riding dance move that brought in the world.

The entire video is a frenetic whirlwind through colourful Seoul locations as Psy fires off his trademark ‘Oppa Gangnam Style’ chorus line. During the whole thing, Psy and others prance around with the iconic horse dance move, alongside odd interludes such as an elevator door opening to reveal the thrusting Noh and Psy underneath singing.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of K-pop’s maximialist stylings, bringing together as many immaculately curated elements as possible and throwing them at the wall to see what sticks. In this case, everything did.

‘Gangnam Style’ was released on YouTube globally on 15 July 2012. Within a day it had 500,000 views. From there, the video skyrocketed in views.

There are a few reasons behind the almost instant virality of ‘Gangnam Style’. For a Korean artist, at a time when K-pop was still far from the dominant cultural force it is today, it was shared extensively by western musical figures. T-Pain shared the video on 29 July, and was followed by Robbie Williams, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry.

It also inspired more content creation. Today, it’s typical for the most popular songs to gain their ubiquity through becoming a new trend for TikTok creators to either copy or sample. ‘Gangnam Style’ received a similar treatment. YouTubers started creating reaction videos and performance videos where they imitated the dance moves.

Through the internet, flash mobs gathered together to perform the video’s dance moves. Some of the earliest unofficial flash mobs took place in California and Australia. On 6 October 2012, 15,000 came together to perform in a flash mob for the song in Seoul. Alongside online and print articles, news segments, and covers, ‘Gangnam Style’ grew in popularity exponentially.

By 3 September, the video was receiving 5 million new daily views. It overtook the previously most-viewed YouTube video on 15 July 2012, Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ video which had set the record at 245,400,000, in 2010. At this point, ‘Gangnam Style’ had 803,700,000 views.

Then, on this day in 2012, it hit the unprecedented 1 billion views mark. It’s a record that has since been met by over 300 videos, but in 2012 this was a huge moment. ‘Gangnam Style’ signified a success for the South Korean government’s Hallyu policy, a soft-power initiative to see Korean culture gain international success.

Today, ‘Gangnam Style’ has an incredible 4.98 billion views on YouTube. It’s only the 11th most viewed video on the site though. That honour goes to ‘Baby Shark Dance’, a children’s song video with 13.78 billion views.