Music Review: The Gentlemen

A song came out last summer and a lot of people heard it playing on youtube. It was called Gangam Style. Psy swept the world by storm with his song Gangam style and went viral all over the internet. Well, he’s back and this time he has brought a whole new song to the table called “Gentleman”. The song is pretty good. It has a techno kind of beat to it along with lyric styles similar to Gangam style.

Gangam Style had the iconic dance that everyone knew. “OPPA GANGAM STYLE!” Followed by tapping your feet side to side and putting your hands out front. Well, with Gentleman, Psy has created a new dance to go along with the chorus. Not as dance happy as Gangam style, but still as weird. When it starts, dancers put their left arm across their bodies and put their right arm as if they are thinking , with their hand resting on their chin. While doing this, they move their hips side to side, but in a pelvic thrust kind of way to the beat. Halfway through, their arms go up for a “yay” kinda look, then go back to thinking while they pivot around one foot to do a complete 360 to the beat. At the very end, a thriller-like dance then occurs going side to side with T-Rex hands out. If this sounds confusing at all, check out the music video, it’ll make a little more sense.

Speaking of the music video, Gentleman is strange. It starts out with Psy in a department store with 3 older men carrying all his purchases in hand. It switches to what is the main theme of the video, which is essentially Psy being mean to his girlfriend, kids, and to other people. But then the girlfriend starts to be evil back which turns Psy on but also his girlfriend, which makes no sense. That’s strange but let’s not question their relationship. From there, the group shot of the dance is played and the music video ends with Psy and his girlfriend pole dancing on street lights.

On youtube, Gentleman has already gained 164 million views as of April 19th, just after coming out on April 13th. But it’s not popular everywhere. In South Korea, the music video is banned from television. One scene in the beginning that is not gentlemanly behavior to public property. KBS said that “the music video doesn’t meet its standards as a public broadcaster. In the offending scene, Psy is shown kicking a traffic cone in the first five seconds while he then looks at the camera and laughs. Really, it has nothing to do with anything else Psy does in the video.”

All in all, the song and video are pretty cool and worth a check-out when you are done studying for your thermo test tomorrow or not contemplating whether or not Chuck Stone actually wears pants.

Photo Courtesy of School Boy Records