Presenting Decoder Ring: Baby Shark
Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show
Slate Audio
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Decoder Ring is Slate's culture documentary show and this month they have an episode on a subject of special interest to Mom and Dad Are Fighting listeners: Baby Shark.
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, mom and dad are fighting listeners. It's Gabe here. We have something quite special for you right now. |
| 0:05.0 | This is a very special episode of one of Slate's other podcasts. It's called Decoder Ring. It's the show on which our culture critic Willa Paskin solves cultural mysteries. |
| 0:14.4 | I thought you guys would particularly want to hear this episode because this month, Willa addresses the mystery of Baby Shark. Stay tuned and if you |
| 0:23.5 | enjoy this episode, be sure to subscribe to Decoder Ring in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get |
| 0:29.1 | your podcasts. |
| 0:34.7 | This podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:40.0 | About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician who goes by the stage |
| 0:45.1 | name Johnny Only, started getting strange comments on his YouTube page. |
| 0:49.6 | I don't read my YouTube comments very much, but I did start seeing comments, hey, there's a song out there exactly like yours, you know. |
| 0:57.4 | These comments referred to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers and that he had posted on YouTube in 2011. |
| 1:04.6 | It came with a video that he'd recorded with his kids and his sister's kids at her pool. |
| 1:08.9 | Baby Shark doo-to-to-to-to-to-to-d-d-d-d-d-d-baby shark. |
| 1:14.6 | Baby shark, too, too, too, baby shark. |
| 1:18.6 | This song was perfect for three-year-olds. |
| 1:21.6 | It has simple lyrics, an off-repeated chorus, and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love. |
| 1:28.6 | I knew my kids well enough that I knew that was going to be a hit before I even recorded |
| 1:33.1 | it, you know? |
| 1:34.0 | The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything. |
| 1:38.1 | It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube. |
| 1:40.7 | But it was an important part of his show for years. |
| 1:46.9 | And then he started to get those comments. And I go to look for it. It was Pinkfonds version. Baby shark to do da da baby shark. |
| 1:56.0 | Baby shark. This song is called Baby Shark. and that version comes from the South Korean Children's Entertainment Company, Pinkfong. |
... |
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