�� Baby Shark �� | Nursery Rhymes Songs for Kids

January 27, 2019

�� Baby Shark �� | Nursery Rhymes Songs for Kids | Karaoke for Сhi...

Baby Shark

"Baby Shark" is a children's song about a family of sharks. Having long been popular as a campfire song, it has been
popularized since the mid-2000s by social media, online video and radio.

Origins

"Baby
Shark" originated as a campfire song, where each member of a family
of sharks is introduced with different hand motions. Different versions of the
song have the sharks hunting fish, eating a sailor, or killing people who then
go to heaven.

Lyrics:

Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Baby shark!

Mommy shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Mommy shark!

Daddy shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Daddy shark!

Grandma shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Grandma shark!

Grandpa shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Grandpa shark!

Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Baby shark!

Little fish, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Little fish!

Swim away, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Swim away!

Swim faster, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Swim faster!

Safe at last, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Safe at last!

Goodbye sharks, doo doo doo doo doo doo

Goodbye sharks!

Germany, 2007

A
dance version of "Baby Shark" was popularized online in a 2007
YouTube video named "Kleiner Hai" and published by Alexandra Müller,
also known by her stage name alemuel. This version is set to
the theme of Jaws and
tells the story of a baby shark who grows up and eats a swimmer. The video
gained popularity shortly after and alemuel was offered a record deal by the
label EMI, which published the song accompanied by disco beats on May 30,
2008. The single peaked at place 25 of the German chartsand place
21 of the Austrian charts. Based on the single and the original video,
the YouTube community created a popular music video which is a typical example
of crowdsourcing. The German version of the song remains popular among German
youth groups and multiple variations (also in different dialects of German)
have been published since it first gained popularity in 2007.

Korea (Pinkfong), 2015

The
"Baby Shark" song was further popularized by a video produced
by Pinkfong, an education brand within South Korean media startup SmartStudy. "Baby Shark" (Hangul: 상어 가족; RR: Sang-eo
Gajok; lit. shark family) was released on November 25, 2015, and has
garnered over 2.1 billion views as of January 2019. This version of
the song starts with bars from Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 which
are reminiscent of music from the movie Jaws. The song features a family of sharks
which go hunt a school of fish which escape to safety. It became a viral video
in Indonesia in 2017, and throughout the
year it spread to many other Asian countries,
particularly those in Southeast Asia. The related mobile app was
among the top 10 most downloaded in the family apps category in South Korea, Bangladesh, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia in 2017.

As
of January 2019, the dance version of the "Baby Shark" song,
uploaded on June 17, 2016, has received over 2.1 billion views worldwide,
making it the 23rd most
viewed video on YouTube. Due to a
2012 change that the Billboard Hot
100 music charts made to account for online viewership of
YouTube vidoes, "Baby Shark" broke into the Billboard Top
100 at #32 during the week of January 7, 2019.

Due
to its popularity, this version of the song has spurred an online dance craze
(sometimes referred to as Baby Shark Challenge) while being citedas
"the next big thing after the domination of Gangnam Style". K-pop groups
including Girls' Generation, Twice, Red Velvet and Black Pink have been credited with
further spreading the viral song through their coverage of the song and dance,
specifically on their featured TV shows and concerts. The song began to go
viral in the Western world in
August 2018.

Controversies

While
the English version just listed members of the shark family, the Korean version
says Mommy Shark is "pretty", Daddy Shark is "strong",
Grandma Shark is "kind" and Grandpa Shark is "cool". In
January 2018, the South Korean newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun published
a front-page editorial condemning these lyrics as sexist.

In
May 2018, the Liberty Korea Party started
using "Baby Shark" to promote its candidates, prompting SmartStudy to
threaten legal action over copyright infringement. Prior to this,
the Liberty Korea Party had
contacted American children's entertainer Johnny Only to enquire about
permission, as he had published a similar version in 2011. Only had assumed
that no copyright could exist due to the song's traditional origins, and told
the party that he understood it to be in the public domain. He had heard a version of Baby
Shark 20 years earlier, and decided to make a kids' version by removing any
violent imagery from the song, instead focusing on the family. "I was the
first one that did that," he told the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. "And basically Pinkfong's version
does the same thing." Only has been working with a Korean copyright lawyer
to understand if some aspects of modern arrangements of the song can be
copyrighted, and the case is before the Korean courts.

Other performances, 2018

In
September 2018, Ellen DeGeneres released
her own version of the song on The Ellen DeGeneres
Show, and James Corden performed a version on The Late
Late Show with James Corden. The song was performed
on The X Factor in
early December 2018 because it was requested by Simon Cowell's four-year-old son Eric.

Mashup

The
lyrics to another internet phenomenon song, "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa",
has been mashed up with "Baby Shark".