Hey, I'm Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex, and Money, an energy show here at Slate. And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June. I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Eric Eshnet. Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones, my favorite film, The Station Agent.
And Eric Eshnet, who is a director, screenwriter, playwright. They are married, and we're going to talk about making art separately and collaboration and how they've built their life around that. Join us. It should be a great event.
It's their first joint interview they've done ever together. And we are so glad at Death, Sex, and Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival. The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theater at 5.30pm. Get your tickets at TribecaFilm.com slash audio.
See you there. This podcast contains explicit language. About a year ago, Jonathan Wright, a DJ and a children's musician, who goes by the stage name Johnny Only, started getting strange comments on his YouTube page. I don't read my YouTube comments very much, but I did start seeing comments.
Hey, look at the song out there exactly like yours, you know. These comments refer to a song Johnny often performed for toddlers, and that he had posted on YouTube in 2011. It came with a video that he recorded with his kids and his sisters kids at her pool. This song was perfect for three-year-olds.
It has simple lyrics and off-repeated chorus and hand motions that correspond to each verse of the song, which little kids love. I knew my kids well enough that I knew that was going to be a hit before I even recorded it, you know. The song did well for Johnny, but it wasn't massively popular or anything. It still has less than 100,000 views on YouTube.
But it was an important part of the show for years. And then he started to get those comments. And I go to look for it. It was Pinkfaw's version.
This song is called Baby Shark, and that version comes from the South Korean Children's Entertainment Company, Pinkfong. If you don't have a little kid or know a little kid or know a little kid's parents, you may not know this song, though that's about to change. Unlike Johnny's version, this version of Baby Shark is extremely, extremely popular. As of this recording, it's been viewed over 2.3 billion times.
It is beloved by small children. That, by the way, is one of my small children singing it. But it has also been performed on talk shows all over the world, tweeted about by famous people and inspired a viral video dance challenge. It's been performed by celebrities.
Please welcome Sophie Tan. And inspired countless covers in different genres. In January 2019, Baby Shark even debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, where it has been as high as number 32. In other words, Baby Shark is a top 40 hit.
And that, like all of this, is not normal for a song whose target audience just stopped wearing diapers. Baby Shark is a massively popular Billboard charting on stably catchy, super sticky earworm that has endured for decades, gone viral multiple times, and become the subject of an international copyright dispute. Baby Shark is not just a song. Baby Shark is a phenomenon.
This is decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Pascan. Every month we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. I have had Baby Shark stuck in my head for months.
I have two small children, and like a lot of small children, they are totally obsessed with it. As I've heard Baby Shark and sung Baby Shark and made up new words to Baby Shark, I have had occasion to wonder, who is responsible for this unstoppable earworm? In this episode, we're going to try to answer that question, starting with the present day of viral version of Baby Shark and then swing backwards through time into the song's past, of which Johnny only is just one part. Today, on decodering, a ridiculously comprehensive answer to the question, where does Baby Shark come from?
Let's start with a company that made the viral version of Baby Shark, the aforementioned South Korean company Pinkfong. Pinkfong. That's the Pinkfong logo tone, which plays at the beginning of all of their videos, a bit of sonic branding. Since being founded in 2010 by another South Korean company called Smart Study, Pinkfong has produced more than 4,000 animated videos and stories for children.
Many of them poppy renditions of kids' songs in the public domain, like Mr. Sun and Five Monkeys jumping on the bed. In 2018, Pinkfong had 5.7 billion views across all of its content, and its YouTube channel has 15 million subscribers. Just to put that in perspective, Sesame Street only has 5 million subscribers.
Children's entertainment is a world unto itself on YouTube, a bubble populated primarily by a strange but very lucrative genre of super popular videos expressly designed for toddlers. Then, unless you've got kids, you probably have no idea exists. Little kids entertainment, like toddler entertainment, is it's totally YouTube driven. It's basically all music videos for kids, and it's wildly international.
That's Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who's reported on the types of companies that make these sorts of videos. There are companies like In Dubai, India, Hong Kong, South Korea. Turns out that this is kind of a universal thing that you can make. It's like a highly scalable, across the world kind of entertainment form.
Alexis estimates there are about a dozen or two dozen major companies doing this sort of work and hundreds of smaller ones. Their videos generally have a similar aesthetic, bright, simple animation with big-eyed human or animal characters, often doing funny dance moves to upbeat and catchy songs with pop music flourishes. That song, which you may have noticed, bears some sonic similarities to Baby Shark, is called Johnny Johnny Yes-Papha, and it went viral in 2014. For adults who are raised on Sesame Street and Mr.
Rogers, or even Dora the Explorer, 30 minute to an hour programs that have a gentle vibe and a clear, well-executed pedagogical vision, these videos can feel like they lack a purpose, besides generating clicks. But kids all over the world are clicking on these things, which means that whatever their flaws, they're unprecedented. Children that are being produced all over the world, soldered together from all the different world's cultures, it's just like new melange of cultures that just didn't exist before. You couldn't really make this exist in any real other medium, in particular because all these companies copied from each other relentlessly.
The Indians copying from the South Koreans, copying from the Russians, copying from the guys in Dubai, or Israel. And then that is like making money for YouTube in the United States of America, and being shown to people in the Philippines. In a world in which entertainment is increasingly segmented, Ping Fong and companies like it have created a global shared experience for three-year-olds. Baby Shark is part of a wild and strange monoculture for toddlers, a demographic that doesn't much care about language, cultural-specific taste, or adult measures of quality.
To be fair to Ping Fong, in South Korea, it's considered to be a trustworthy educational company. If its educational bent is lost on English-speaking audiences, that's because we already know what Ping Fong videos are trying to teach. English. Baby Shark is a good, simple vocabulary lesson, but the video has been so successful because it also works as pure entertainment.
In the video, which was posted in June of 2016, a boy and a girl trade versus and do very specific hand motions, the Baby Shark dance, in front of simple, colorful, aquatic animation. For the verse about Baby Shark, for example, the boy does a little finger pinch that's supposed to be the Baby Shark's jaws going up and down. The girl uses her whole hands for Mama Shark. Daddy Shark gets both arms.
For the let's go hunting verse, they do a particularly cute gesture, pressing their hands together above their heads like their shark fins and swaying back and forth. All these motions make the song extremely appealing to toddlers, who love a song that comes with movements. Think of head shoulders, knees and toes. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.
The hokey pokey. The itsy-bitty spider. Honestly, most songs for toddlers. But it also made the song appealing to another demographic entirely.
South Korean pop singers. That's the girl group Red Velvet in the Baby Shark inflected ad for this gloss. K-pop, Korean pop, is a very competitive field and it stars are constantly trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, not just the teenagers who make up their core fan base. One of the ways to reach that broad audience is on variety shows, which are extremely popular in Korea and Asia more generally and are goofing around with a meme, particularly one that is a children's song, is a good and reliable and cute way to appeal to a lot of people.
The K-pop stars amplify Baby Shark both as a song and as a viral sensation. More and more regular people began to dance to Baby Shark, recording their own routines to it and posting them on TikTok and extremely popular app in Asia where you post short clips of yourself lip syncing and dancing along to a song. Meanwhile, Pinkfong has kept up with the craze by releasing over 100 different versions of the song in 11 different languages. There's now an EDM version of Baby Shark and a Halloween version and a Valentine's Day version.
Throughout 2017 and 2018, the song just kept growing and growing, moving around the world until it caught on in the United States, first and foremost with kids, who liked it so much they helped propel it up the Billboard charts. I'm not sure there's a real precedent for Baby Shark. Chris Malanti is a host of Slates Hit Parade podcast and an expert on all things having to do with the Billboard charts. As Chris explained to me, there are a few kids songs that have charted on the Hot 100 before.
The Chipmunk song, a Christmas song, went to number one in 1958. Rubber Duck Eats from Sesame Street has also been on the charts. So of a number of novelty hits that aren't necessarily kids songs but that really appeal to kids, like Monster Mash and Size Gangam Style, another K-pop crossover mega hit. But those songs appeal to kids who are like school aged kids and the kids who are into Baby Shark are much littler.
It's the kind of record that somebody under the age of, I don't know, six might hit again again again on. That YouTube data factors into the chart and has made it an enormous hit. But this raises the question, why of all of the animated kids songs that are out there on YouTube? Do toddlers like this one best?
Why did this one break out? Here I think we have to turn to the song itself. Yes, the Baby Shark video is adorable. But that song, it's catchy.
Well, this song is successful because it perfectly balances familiarity, repetition with novelty. That's Charlie Harding, a musician and the co-host of Switch On Pop, a podcast that takes pop songs and explains why and how they work. The melody itself is nursery rhyme. It's very simple.
It's very memorable. It has a sort of rhythmic bounciness to it, so it catches in your ear and you get it over and over and over again, which you think you should get bored, but you don't. And the reason why you don't get bored is every time they sing that repeated melody, something changes. Right?
So the first time they sing it, it's just a bunch of kids and a bass. And then they start adding in hi-hats the second time around. And then the next time when you get Daddy Shark, you have to get the guitar tone voice. And then you have the guitar tone of the baritone voice and it's kind of surprising.
And you have Grandma voice, and Grandma voice is surprising when in the context of what you heard before. And then they add keys, and then they add more voices, they add like a chorus that comes in. And then at that point, we now heard like six or seven of the debut shark refrain and they modulate into another key. They take a whole thing higher which is a very common trope of like 80s and 90s ballads.
And once they do that, they even add more arrangements, more of these, but you can know our peggies. At that point, everything drops out except for maybe a kick drum and a voice. And last time, everything comes back. And so there's a way of doing the exact same thing over and over again, but providing just enough variation that you stay interested.
I love Charlie's explanation of Baby Shark. Before talking with him, I had never noticed like any of that, and I've listened to Baby Shark a lot. Charlie's explanation also made me find Baby Shark a lot less annoying. The fact that there's all this slight variation to it that keeps kids interested, it made me think about how repetition and variation work for adults.
Yes, we're more sophisticated listeners than four-year-olds, or I hope we are, but we also like repetition, so long as it has the right amount of variation. We want the pop song to come back to the hook, or the orchestral music to return to the motif. And when a song gets it just right, I don't know about you, but I do listen to it dozens of times in a row. And we do the same thing with what we watch.
We watch movies and TV shows we've seen before, and see how specific genres, crime shows, or superhero movies, or whatever's happening on Twitter, where we basically know exactly what's going to happen. It's just the details that are different. Pinkfong's version of Baby Shark is especially sticky, but I think that there's something elementally enticing and irreducibly catchy about Baby Shark no matter what its arrangement. And I think this because of Pinkfong version, it's not the first time that Baby Shark has gone viral.
Today I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy. The U.S.
Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slade's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick. We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment.
He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody saw the Gorsuch who joined the majority on this. He is the Justice, most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activists.
Slow Burn becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come. Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. So now, in order to chase down Baby Shark's origins, we're going to have to leave the present and start moving backwards into the past and the early days of YouTube.
My name is Alex and Hermanine. In 2006, Alex and Dormueller was working at a camp for kids, teaching journalism. There was a song they sang at the camp called, The Kleiner Heit. Kleiner Heit.
Kleiner Heit. Kleiner Heit. Kleiner Heit. Kleiner Heit.
Kleiner Heit. Kleiner Heit means a little shark in German. As you can hear, the song has a different tune than Baby Shark, but it's recognizably related. The verses mean more or less the same thing, and it comes with all of the same hand motions.
Some of the campers recorded Alexandra Stinging Kleiner Heit. In January of 2007, she uploaded the video to her YouTube channel, under the name Alemuel, and abbreviation of her first and last name. In the video, which is pretty grainy, Alexandra is sitting in a retro, pea green armchair, wearing a teal sweater and a bright red headband. Her motions are exaggerated and very distinct.
She gradually gets more and more into it until she gets to the daddy shark and she starts using her whole body. It's weird, but extremely watchable. And people watched it. I think it took about half a year that it got a million views, and then e-mates started to pour in, asking me for interviews.
Like, you're a viral video, and it's German, and can we ask you about it? And I was like, what the fuck is happening here? And then a record company wrote to me and said, Hey, you're so famous in the internet. Can we do a recording of the song?
This record company was EMI, the giant label that's released in music by the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and thousands more. She recorded new vocals for a dance-oriented version of Kleiner High. The song became a smash. In 2008, it's been 16 weeks on the German single start, peaking at number 25.
Alexandra became something of a viral sensation herself. She released the song under the name Alan Ewell, the name that had been on her YouTube channel, and there was a lot of speculation about who she really was. This was further fueled by her outfit, the teal turtleneck and the red headband, which she wore to all of her public appearances, like she was playing a character. And she had a lot of public appearances in 2008.
She went on a number of German talk shows, toured clubs in Germany and Austria, and played two performances in New Yorka. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Her performances did not always go exactly as planned. The people in the in the club were to own.
My kind of fan group were 40 and 15 year olds. I think in the club they were like 25 to 30, and they often stared at me with white eyes asking themselves, What the hell I was doing there and why they should kind of perform a children's song with me. By 2009, the Kleiner High craze had wound down. EMI offered Alexandra the opportunity to record another song, a kid song about a fish, but she declined.
She went into journalism instead. People often ask me if I'm embarrassed that this happened to me, but no, it was great. And I'm really happy that I just jumped into the cold water and swam without being eaten by a shark. It helped me a lot, I think.
I gained a lot of self esteem, because if you're booed from stage, then you're much cooler after once, I'd say. Her young daughter recently found out about Kleiner High in school. One of the women who work there, she's shown her the video, I didn't do that. And now she wants to see it all the time.
And if somebody says hi, a shark, then she immediately starts doing the gestures. Okay, so how is it possible that an American children's musician, a South Korean entertainment company, and a German camp counselor all recorded different but successful versions of a song about a baby shark? To answer that, we have to go back even further in time. So I think it was about 1989 or 1990, and I was at Summer Camp in New Hampshire, Camp Maravista.
It was one of our favorite songs, we loved it. That's Rebecca Onion. She's a writer and colleague of ours at Slate, and she's one of the many, many kids who sang Baby Shark in the 80s and 90s. When it was just a song, kids sang at camp and school and after school and Girl Scouts and Sunday School, and whoever kids gather and sing songs.
There were hundreds of different versions of it. There are some with different tunes. Just as there are German versions, there are French versions, where it's usually called Papa Lei Cat, that sometimes but not always is sung to the tune of Menomina, the song made famous by the Muppets. Moo, chum, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
But even with all the variation, these versions have similar adjusters, and almost all of them have something else too, violence. Star got lost and there are a lot of variations to the violence, but it seems to be what made the song. And then it would be shark attacks, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and you kind of like would move your body around it, though you were being like, um, attacked by a shark, like violently? And that was a fun part for everyone, because you'd be like, oh my god, we're dying, and kind of like, why on the ground?
The Grizzly Parts, which are not in the Pinkfong version, or a number of other versions of the song on YouTube, including Johnny Only's Made It A Little Edgy and They're For Fun For Older Kids, Teenagers Even, and while the song was not until recently, primarily for toddlers. Violence, I think it's a clue about Baby Shark's origins. We kept looking for earlier and earlier versions of Baby Shark. In print, we dug around and found a version of it in a book called Making Music Fun that was first published in 1981, and that already refers to there being many different versions of the song.
And then we spoke to Patricia Sheehan Campbell, an ethno musicologist at the University of Washington, and an expert in children's musical culture, who also happens to have worked as a camp counselor in Ohio in the 1970s. This might have been the mid-late 70s, something like that. The song came up on a bus one time. So I learned it from a child, and every child knew it actually already.
And it sounded pretty much the same as it does now. I asked Pat, it was possible that all of these different versions of Baby Shark had popped up spontaneously. A kind of polygenesis, like the way emus and ostriches evolved on different continents. She was skeptical.
That'd be a little far fetch given that the gestures were just very explicit. It could have been separately created without some influence. But I don't know how to connect with that. We kept looking for a record or memory of Baby Shark before the mid-to-late 1970s, but we couldn't find one.
And then it occurred to us that there was something happening around this time that was extremely relevant. To be clear, we are now entering the realm of speculation. But honestly, what's the first thing you think of when you think of a shark attack? Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in the summer of 1975.
And it was a huge deal. Huge deal almost under sells it. Besides almost single-handedly creating the blockbuster as we know it today, the movie spread through all parts of American culture. The film industry began producing cheap copycats with titles like Piranha and Orca.
There was a video game about sharks and Saturday morning shark cartoons and recurring Saturday Night Live sketch about a shark. And there were tons of novelty records. Songs that took John Williams' famous theme music and riffed on it. That's an instrumental disco version of the theme by Lalo Shiffrin called Jaws that samples William's score.
In this next one, Do the Jaws by the End, the song starts with some shark hysteria. And there's a beat derived from the Jaws theme. This next one is my favorite. It's called Jaws is Working for the CIA, a novelty funk record by the investigators.
And it starts with a reference to a family of Jaws. I'm not saying any of these songs directly inspired Baby Shark. But I am saying that they're evidence of the shark crazy atmosphere at the time and the ubiquity of the Jaws theme song. If those things inspired a number of musicians, maybe they inspired some camp counselors too.
If the jump from this song to this song to this song sounds big. Remember that Baby Shark was transmitted orally. And the jump from... ...with about a dozen stops along the way, that sounds more like a game of telephone.
In fact, there's a version of Baby Shark sung by various Girl Scout troops to this day. It's more of a chant than a song. The Ties Baby Shark and Jaws together very nicely. Because it's a version of Baby Shark about a specific shark family.
A family of Jaws. So Jaws, that is our provisional answer to where Baby Shark comes from. The fact that it's made it to us over four decades later means that the song, and the Jaws theme music that may have inspired it has always been viral. This is what analog virality looks like.
Something so catchy that it's passed from person to person, kid to kid, counselor to counselor, musician to musician, until it makes its way around the world slightly different each time, but still fundamentally itself. So Chris crossed and cross-pollinated. It's hard to untangle where exactly it started at all. Design is everywhere in our lives.
Perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing it. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. Host Roman Mars asked questions like, Why do we use the bleep sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and TV? Why are houseplants having a moment right now?
And why is the punctuation mark the M dash caught up in a fight about AI? 99% Invisible will answer all this and more every Tuesday. If you would like to quote a ring, I know you will like 99% Invisible a show that I love and that feels like kind to us. We have a lot of the same sensibility and curiosity as so much so that often when we're thinking about a topic here, we actually check to see if 99% Invisible has already done it.
Because if they have, we know they have done such a good job, we just have to back off. But our loss in that instance is absolutely your game. Follow and listen to 99% Invisible wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Anna Sale, the host of Death, Sex and Money, an energy show here at Slate.
And I want to tell you about a very exciting event coming up in June. I am hosting a live episode taping at the Tribeca Festival featuring Peter Dinklage and his wife, Eric Eshmit. Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones, my favorite film, The Station Agent, and Eric Eshmit, who is a director, screenwriter, playwright. They are married and we're going to talk about making art separately in collaboration and how they've built their life around that.
Join us, it should be a great event. It's their first joint interview they've done ever together. And we are so glad at Death, Sex and Money to be back at the Tribeca Festival. The show is June 10th in New York City at the SVA Theatre at 5.30pm.
Get your tickets at TribecaFilm.com.com. See you there. So now we're going to move out of the past and head back to the present. But we're not going to get all the way there just yet because there's still a bit of a gap in the Where Do Baby Shark come from?
Mystery, which is how exactly did Pinkfong find Baby Shark and decide to make their own video with it? I initially thought this would be pretty straightforward to answer. We talked to someone at Pinkfong, but Pinkfong declined to speak with us, and then declined, and then declined. To be fair, they are in the middle of a huge wave of attention, and I'm sure there are lots of people asking to speak with them.
But then we learned about Johnny Only, the children's performer we spoke with at the very beginning of this episode, and it became clear that there are some good reasons why Pinkfong might want to be vague about how they discovered Baby Shark. To explore those good reasons, we have to get back to Johnny Only's story. Just a reminder, this is what Johnny Only's version of Baby Shark sound like. He had first heard the song in the late 1990s, while performing at Summer Camps.
He'd made changes to it, like removing the verses about grandma and grandpa shark, but it's not like he had written the thing. So when he heard Pinkfong's version of the song, he thought that was that. You know, I felt a little bit, you know, a little bit violated, you know, I didn't think I was just like, oh well, it's probably a domain. There's probably a domain that's the way it goes, you know.
But then a representative from a South Korean political party, the Liberty Korea Party, an opposition party contacted Johnny, asking him for permission to use his version of Baby Shark. And so, so I just gave them permission. permission, you know. So the Liberty Korea Party used the song, at which point Smart Study, the company that owns Pinkfong, got involved, threatening a lawsuit against the Liberty Korea Party for copyright infringement.
So all of a sudden, as you can imagine, the lights are going off. I'm like, wait a minute. Smart Study doesn't even realize that it's my version instead of theirs, right? So there's a big red flag.
And two, you know, Smart Study is saying, okay, I can sue you for copyright infringement. So all of a sudden, I'm like saying, wait a minute, that means that I could sue for copyright infringement. You know what I mean? There's something called a derivative copyright, meaning that when something like a public domain song, which Baby Shark is considered to be gets recorded, things that are changed or added to it that are unique to that recording are protected under copyright law.
So Johnny got a lawyer and filed a petition in Korean court, which as of this recording is still pending. He isn't saying that he invented Baby Shark, but he is saying that he added things to his version that Pinkfong then used in their version. The, you know, the driving beat is the same. The tempo increase partway through it, the same, the way that they add the harmonies, like when Daddy Shark comes out of the scene, you know, when my recording, I use my voice as a lower voice to emulate Daddy Shark and they suddenly have a male voice coming in for Daddy Shark, you know.
So this is very similar, very similar approaches. I want to be really clear here that I have no idea if Pinkfong heard Johnny only his version of Baby Shark before making their own. But if it wasn't his, it was probably someone's. I mean, they had to have learned it from somewhere.
Maybe someone who worked there sang it at Summer Camp. There's a risk for Pinkfong in revealing if the song comes from any one source, because among other things, there's now a huge amount of money at stake. Pinkfong's parent company Stock Price is soaring. The videos are generating ad revenue, handover fist.
There's tons of Baby Shark merchandise. And the company just signed a deal with Netflix to create a TV series. Pinkfong is hoping Baby Shark isn't just some flash in the pan, but the beginning of a global children's media empire. I have two minds about all of this.
The entire history of Baby Shark is an iterative one, of people taking other people's version of it and changing it, massaging the tune and the lyrics and the language, sometimes for the better. Johnny only and Pinkfong's version sound pretty similar, but Pinkfong's version is catchier. Why should Pinkfong have to worry that they learned the song somewhere and made it their own? That's what everyone else has always done.
But at the same time, the history of Baby Shark also shows us that this song belongs to everyone. And there's something kind of unsettling about the fact that right now it seems to belong to Pinkfong, who has real financial incentives to try and make it more and more proprietary. A representative of Pinkfong and Smart Study recently told the CBC, quote, we are the producer and publisher. We own and control 100% of the song.
And many people already think that that's true. And that's why for Johnny, even if he ends up winning his lawsuit, the emotional stakes are settled. The Pinkfong version is so popular that even my fans prefer theirs over mine now, you know, which is very depressing. You know, it's really kind of disheartening.
I mean, they're very kind about it. My fans tell me my version is better. You know, they're very kind about it. But honestly, I know when they go home, you know, the Pinkfong version is everywhere.
And so, and I've even had, you know, I'm watching my audiences as I'm performing my version of course my version does not have Grammar Shark and Grammar Shark. And my audience as I go into the next line and they're starting to make the hand motion for Grammar Shark. And it hurts. It hurts.
It hurts a lot. It is really discouraging. It's really derailed me in many ways. I hope Johnny takes some comfort in the long history of Baby Shark, of which Pinkfong is just a small part.
I don't know. Maybe their version of the song will help them spawn a children's media empire. But maybe it's just a novelty. Another vital craze that has captured our attention right now for this moment and that we won't even remember it in a few years.
But when I say we there, I mean us, adults, as Baby Shark demonstrates, both the internet and children's culture are petri dishes for virality, for memes, for things that get passed from person to person, altered and tweaked but that stay essentially themselves. The story of Baby Shark in some ways is a story of these two meme generating powerhouses, joining forces to amplify this song. This will not be the last time this happens. The amount of video content being directed at kids is only going to increase, as is the amount of time they spend in front of screens.
It's hard to make a song as catchy as Baby Shark, but someone will manage it, maybe by rifling through children's songs of the past again. And when they do, they will have an even bigger audience of three-year-olds all around the world doing exactly what they did with Baby Shark, watching and singing it over and over again. One of the funny things about Baby Shark is that this two-minute video that was designed for little kids very short attention spans is going to live on longer in their collective memory than it is in the memory of most adults. For us, Baby Shark is a passing fad, yet another fleeting internet meme.
But for kids, Baby Shark doesn't just exist on the internet. It's not some pop culture object, something cute to share on social media. It's outside of all of that, too. Part of an older, but still viral, still vital way of communicating.
If the history of Baby Shark tells us anything, it's the version of Baby Shark that was made to last, is the version you can sing however you want. So you can bear it. Keep singing. This is Decodering.
I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at willaPaskin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code, you can email us at decodering at slate.com. If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed and have a podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, and even better, tell your friends.
This podcast was written by WillaPaskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode. Thanks to Max Reed, Bernie Cho, Jeff Benjamin, Franklin Bruno, Quinn Myers, Michelle Cho, Agnes Guano, David Bevin, Inga Kang, Jun Thomas, Cleo Levine, Gabriel Roth, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.