Gangnam Style is a hard act to follow, but South Korean rapper Psy hopes his much-anticipated new single, released at midnight, will achieve equal success.
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 of his latest single, Gentleman, were kept under wraps until the song was released.
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’’.
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.
‘‘All Koreans know this dance, but (those in) other countries haven’t seen it,’’ Psy told South Korean television last week.
He has asked fans to wear white to Saturday’s event and his stylist said last month that the concept for the new song would again be a formal suit with ‘‘an unexpected twist of fun’’.
In Gangnam Style, written as a commentary on materialism in the wealthy Seoul suburb of Gangnam, Psy was decked out in sunglasses, a white dress shirt, bow tie and tuxedo jackets.
The song racked up 3.59 million digital sales last year in the US and Canada, according to Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen BDS, putting it ninth in the best-selling list. It was third on Amazon’s MP3 song bestseller list for 2012.
Gangnam Style catapulted Psy to global fame after an rocky
