When friends and colleagues found out my wife and I were expecting, they instantly pegged me — a music writer who’s covered rock and pop for 20 years — as a potential “cool dad.”
I tried to live up to the mantle immediately by sitting next to my wife’s pregnant belly and strumming Echo and the Bunnymen songs on guitar, playing Smiths records louder than normal and even reading my unborn child extracts from the biography of late Fall singer Mark E. Smith, despite (or perhaps, because) he once threatened to hit me during an interview.
In the delivery room, our daughter was born to the sound of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” I cut the umbilical chord during the final guitar solo and after much pleading with my ever-patient wife, I even gave our firstborn the middle name “Valentine” after My Bloody Valentine — an Anglo-Irish band famous for searingly loud concerts that have destroyed at least 20 percent of my hearing. I called it a “tribute,” most other people called it “stupid.”
Two-and-a-half years later, my toddler cares nothing for all I tried to teach her. “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Let It Go” are played in what feels like an ear-bleeding loop, and soundtracks to animated films like “Coco” and “Moana” are also on high rotation. These bright, melodic ditties are also popular with her preschool chums, which only ingrains them more. My wife and I have a playlist of her favorite songs to keep her happy in the car. Any deviation is met with an earth-shattering scream that makes My Bloody Valentine seem like a gentle spring breeze in comparison.
In the streaming age, children are turning into powerful music curators, and in the case of “Baby Shark” it’s beginning to show on the charts. This nagging, two-minute earworm — created in 2016 by the South Korean children’s entertainment company Pinkfong — peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 32 last month. It’s still holding steady in the Top 40 five weeks later.
What’s its secret? The song — about a family of sharks on the hunt — comes complete with an animated video and features its own easily aped dance. Aside from being short, sharp, colorful and catchy, it’s also relatable. “Children can affiliate with the words baby, daddy, mommy, grandpa, grandma,” Valorie Salimpoor — a neurological consultant at the Montreal Neurological Institute — told the Huffington Post. “This helps create a connection or a bond with the music. These are people that children are likely to have a very positive connection with, again providing a pathway to target the emotion and reward systems in the brain.”
That intense connection also means Li’l Johnny or Li’l Jenny wants more of it. And you must obey.
“Kids definitely have a lot of influence over what their parents stream,” says Shanon Cook, trends expert at Spotify, where “Baby Shark” boasts more than 50 million plays. “In recent years we’ve seen songs like ‘Let it Go’ and ‘How Far I’ll Go’ compete with pop and hip-hop tracks on our charts. With music being so accessible now — including through speakers in the home and car — parents can easily hit play to soothe an unhappy child or provide instant focus with a song that’s familiar to them.”
The “Rockabye Baby!” series, launched in 2006, that turned hits by everyone from The Beatles to Black Sabbath into soothing lullabies for babies was aimed at newborns and continues to do decent business. Last year, the series racked up 315 million streams from around 85 albums. But that’s a drop in the ocean compared to “Baby Shark,” which hits a sweet spot with the toddler set. Just last week, the video and all of its spin-offs clocked up close to 5 billion views, becoming the most-viewed trend of all time in YouTube’s “education” category.
Now, it’s having a knock-on effect on the entertainment industry. Business title Bloomberg noted that Pinkfong’s parent-company SmartStudy is looking to capitalize on the song’s Top 40 chart position and social-media success by “expanding its kid-oriented entertainment business with short videos via Netflix Inc., a cartoon series and a musical in North America this year.”
So while Drake’s “Scorpion” album might be all over Sunday’s Grammys and Lady Gaga’s “A Star is Born” dominates this month’s Oscars, 2019 could actually turn out to be the year of the shark.
“‘Baby Shark’ is definitely not going away — you’ll see merchandise, maybe a movie,” says Jenna Capozzi, CEO of Capozzi Productions, which has produced children’s content for 13 years. “Toddlers are becoming a driving market. Do I think [production companies] will create more films just for this age? Absolutely. They would be stupid not to. I think they’d be shorter films too — maybe 45 minutes.”
So, far from gobbling up the mopey, old-man material I’ve tried to feed her, my daughter and her age group are forging new forms of entertainment — and forcing industrywide change — before they’re out of diapers.
And, to be honest, I’m not-so-secretly glad about it. My daughter’s musical tastes highlight the start of the generation gap. It’s the natural order of things for her to have her own unique interests because it helps kids separate themselves from their elders.
Anyway, it would be tragic if she grew into a teenager having dad-rock conversations with me about the best Oasis B-side (it’s “Acquiesce,” by the way).
Hardeep Phull is a music critic and writer whose work has appeared in the NME, Rolling Stone and the Sunday Times of London.