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“Op op op op, oppa Gangnam style.” I’ve just triggered an earworm in your head. You may now have the urge to crotch-dance in an elevator, make lasso motions with your arm and sing while sitting on the toilet. This is the fate of anybody who has witnessed Korean pop star Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Psy is now trying to recapture the magic with two new songs on YouTube.
Psy’s original hit song has nearly 2.5 billion (billion!) views on YouTube, making it the poster child for viral video success. It combined a catchy tune with straight-up weird visuals featuring dancing in a bus, explosions, horses, yoga, disco balls, butt shots and a parking garage.
“Gangnam Style” embedded itself in the Internet’s psyche back in 2012. Psy’s new songs for 2015, both released on Monday, don’t stray too far from the magic formula. They have pumping dance beats, oddball lyrics and even stranger visuals.
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“Daddy” revels in freaky CGI images of Psy’s face superimposed on baby and kid bodies. It features lyrics like “I’ll be your curry. You’ll be my rice.”
The overall theme seems to focus on how his apparently desirable body is a genetic inheritance. There’s also a hairy-chested, ballroom-dancing Elvis impersonator and butt worship. Yes, a toilet shows up again.
“Napal Baji” involves a funkier rhythm, some familiar-looking energetic dance moves and plenty of bell-bottom pants. And hey, there’s Psy sitting on a toilet and singing again. What’s up with that?
“Daddy” is the more popular of the two videos, having racked up nearly 6 million views since it was published. “Napal Baji” has only clocked in at about 2 million as of this writing. Even combined, that’s a mere drop in the massive sloshing bucket of the “Gangnam Style” success.
Anytime you reach into the millions for video views, you’re doing just fine, but Psy’s video will always be compared to his first massive hit. The lesson here is that “Gangnam Style” was an outlier, an exception, a strike of Internet luck and lightning fed by a catchy tune with a brazen video.
Given time, the new videos will tally up the views. One of Psy’s previous follow-ups, “Gentleman” from 2013, is nearing 900 million views. They just won’t reach the dizzying heights of “Gangnam Style,” still the most-viewed video on YouTube.
