5 years on, Gangnam Style slips to no 2

Roisin O’ Connor 

The viral video for Gangnam Style is no longer the most-watched video on YouTube, almost exactly five years after its release. The music video accompanying the song by Korean artist Psy became the first on the website to reach one billion views, and forced the website to upgrade its storage capabilities in 2014 to cope with demand.

However it has since been knocked off the top spot by artists Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth and their song See You Again. Their 2015 collaboration, which featured on the Furious 7 soundtrack and paid tribute to the late star Paul Walker, has reached 2,902,454,646 views (at the time of writing) while Gangnam Style had 2,896,173,595. Billboard notes that the views on both videos equate to more than 21,000 years of streaming each.

Psy had said that his success with Gangnam Style was an “accident”.

“Gangnam Style was not normal,” he said in 2013. “Gangnam was not standard — that was an accident and accidents don’t happen often.” Charlie Puth responded to the news about See You Again, writing: “For the record, I joined @YouTube in 2007 hoping to make a video that would reach 10,000 views. Just heard about See You Again... wow.”

Walker’s father recently gave a rare interview where he opened up about how his son’s death had impacted him. 

Walker died in 2013 following a crash. Paul Walker Sr. said the loss of his son had taken “a lot out of me” but he had “good friends, who I stay in touch with, and they’ve been so supportive and nice”. He added that keeping a journal of things his son used to say had helped bring him comfort. “I can’t believe how profound he was when he was so young,” he said. “And they were totally original thoughts that came from him. He’d figured them out himself. 

“In fact, I think he was very capable of looking inside himself. I remember he once said, and it’s one thing that I wrote down: ‘I love very deeply.’ And he meant that. It’s memories like that which help me get through the day.”

— The Independent