'Gangnam Style' Is No Longer The King Of YouTube Views

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Park Jae-sang, better known as PSY, is no longer the king of YouTube ... views, that is. Five years after the video for "Gangnam Style" was posted, and four-and-a-half years after that video was the first on the site to be viewed 1 billion times, the Korean pop star has been ousted from the top of the mountain by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's "See You Again," a song commissioned in memory of Paul Walker, the Fast and Furious actor who died in November, 2013.

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At the time of this writing, "See You Again" had inched ahead of "Gangnam Style" by some 1 million views. Each is approaching the new high-watermark of 3 billion total views — but Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito" video (approximately 2.5 billion views) may end up surpassing both by the end of the year.

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The song was, according to The Los Angeles Times, the result of a Frankenstein-ish process that saw Puth and 50 other songwriters submitting their work for Furious 7's planned Walker tribute before putting through an obstacle course of production:

The song then went through an extensive note-giving and production process — there's a Middle Eastern-flavored sample and other flourishes--and months went by, as beats were added, dropped, and added again, all atop Puth's simple melody. By the end, Knobloch and his team had a song they liked, and director James Wan and producer Neal Moritz had threaded "See You Again" around and through the poignant final scene.

"Gangnam Style," for its part, was apparently a soft satire of South Korean credit card debt.