He may have lost his grip on his home country’s number one pop chart slot just last week, but South Korean rapper Psy (whose real name is Park Jae-sang) was anything but despondent during his visit to the Harvard campus last night. The pop star, who became a worldwide phenomenon last fall when the video for his song “Gangnam Style” rocketed into the ranks of YouTube legend, was on hand to converse with Harvard students as “a modern global digital culture phenomenon,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Psy’s talk was filled with jokes and moments of self-deprecating humor. He reminisced about his time at Boston University, “marveling at Harvard from afar.” Though he had intended to gain a degree in business administration from Boston University, Psy gave up on that academic path when his interests started to skew toward musical performance and sonic experimentation instead. He took a few classes at Berklee College of Music, but ultimately left the United States to pursue a music career in South Korea, leaving his degree program unfinished. Perhaps that was for the best: he jested that his grades in school had been made up entirely of withdrawals and failures, earning him the nickname “WWF.”

The conversation also turned toward the meteoric nature of Psy’s success and the lighting-in-a-bottle phenomenon that was the “Gangnam Style” single. The performer is ready for what comes next, but he doesn’t expect he will ever see that level of pop-cultural ubiquity again.

“‘Gangnam Style’ was not normal,” he said. “‘Gangnam’ was not standard. That was an accident and accidents don’t happen often.”

“Gentleman,” the follow-up to “Gangnam Style,” was leaked to the internet about a month ago, and has since accumulated nearly 300 million views on YouTube. That figure is nothing to shrug about, though the song still doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessor. To date, “Gangnam Style” has accumulated over 1.5 million plays on the streaming video website–the most ever–and that number is still climbing.

While it’s easy to view Psy as a joke act that hit it big with a well-timed YouTube video, his biographical stories and his candid facade during the Harvard event showed humble roots that helped humanize and ground this particular global superstar.

“I cannot say I’ve been the best, but I can say I’ve done my best for 13 years,” he said.