A to Z of 2024: Viral song Apt. takes the world by storm

SINGAPORE – “Apateu, apateu, apateu, apateu.” From the moment K-pop girl group Blackpink’s Rose released her song Apt. with American singer-songwriter Bruno Mars, the catchy tune has been inescapable.

While her bandmates Lisa and Jennie released songs in 2024, there is no doubt Rose has the biggest hit of them all.

Apt., inspired by a South Korean drinking game of the same name, dropped on Oct 18 and became a viral sensation almost overnight.

The lead single from Rose’s first studio album Rosie (2024) debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart – the highest a K-pop female soloist or K-pop girl group has charted. It also claimed the top spot on both the Billboard Global 200 and Global (excluding the US) charts.

Its music video has more than 650 million views, and is the fastest K-pop music video to achieve 500 million views, in just 47 days. And cuts of the song have been used in millions of videos on TikTok. 

Even prior to Apt.’s release, the New Zealand-born Rose and Mars were already hyping fans up by posting photos of themselves playing the game, which Rose has declared her favourite among popular South Korean drinking games.

The game is a simple one, designed to get players drunk. In it, the leader calls out a random number and players stack their hands on top of one another’s, like floors of an apartment building (pronounced “apateu” in South Korea). They pull their hands out from the bottom and place it on top of the stack until the number called is reached. Whoever has his or her hands on top of the stack takes a shot.

Rose recently appeared on K-pop boy band BigBang member Daesung’s YouTube talk show and played the game with him.

Thanks to the song’s link to South Korean drinking culture, the country’s leading soju-maker, HiteJinro, saw its stock price climb by 6 per cent after the song’s release, marking its biggest gain since February. Trading volume also surged beyond one million shares due to heightened investor interest.

This was after Rose demonstrated how to make somaek, a popular cocktail mix of soju and beer, featuring the company’s Jinro Chamisul Original soju in a video interview with Vogue while promoting the song.

To think it almost never saw the light of day.

In the same interview with Vogue, Rose revealed she “freaked out” after writing Apt. She recounted: “I was, like, is this okay, that I’ve written a song about a drinking game? Is this too unserious?”

She even got her producers and fellow songwriters to delete it from their mobile phones. But the ditty was salvaged after she realised how well people were responding to the upbeat, pop-rock number.

Parodies of the song abound, and one version is Singapore’s own blogging godfather MrBrown parodying it by replacing “apateu” with “attap chee” – the fruit of the nipa palm that is a common ingredient in ice kacang. The video has been played more than 600,000 times on TikTok and over 1.4 million times on Instagram.