Baby Shark

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes of shows like Dear Prudence and Slow Burn. Sign up now to listen and support our work. Baby Shark is an megaviral YouTube video, an unstoppable earworm, a top 40 hit, a Eurodance smash, a decades old campfire song, and the center of an international copyright dispute. This month on Decoder Ring we explore the strange history and conflicted future of the song, what makes it so catchy, and how it came to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Pepsi Max. Christmas is great, but there's loads of ways to make it better.
0:08.0	Like sneaking some chili into the gravy for some extra ink, or building a playlist that will even get your
0:14.8	none up on the table. Or just cracking open an ice cold Pepsi Max.
0:20.1	Christmas.
0:23.0	Better with Pepsi Max. This podcast contains explicit language.
0:35.0	About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician who goes by the stage name Johnny only started getting strange
0:44.2	comments on his YouTube page. I don't read my YouTube comments very much but I did
0:49.7	start seeing comments hey there's a song out there exactly like yours you know. These
0:54.0	comments referred to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers and that he had
0:58.4	posted on YouTube in 2011. It came with a video that he'd recorded with his kids and his sister's kids at her pool. This song was perfect for three-year-olds.
1:15.0	This song was perfect for three-year-olds.
1:18.0	It has simple lyrics and off- repeated chorus
1:20.0	and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love.
1:25.0	I knew my kids well enough that I knew that was going to be a hit before I even recorded it, you know?
1:30.0	The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything.
1:34.0	It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube, but it was an important part of his show for years.
1:40.0	And then he started to get those comments.
1:44.0	And I go to look for it.
1:45.0	It was Pink Fong's version. This song is called Baby Shark.
1:55.0	This song is called Baby Shark.
1:57.0	This song is called Baby Shark.
2:00.0	And that version comes from the South Korean Children's Entertainment company, Pink Fong.
	...

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