If you're a fan of fins, or under the age of 5, you'll be pleased with one of the Billboard Hot 100's newest hits. Otherwise, you'll likely just be fascinated at how "Baby Shark," a children's song about sharks, is now making its way up the charts. Fox News reports that the video blasting the tune from YouTube's "Pinkfong! Kids' Songs and Stories" channel had racked up more than 2.1 billion (yes, billion) views as of Friday morning, and it's currently holding steady at No. 32 in Billboard's ranking. The nearly two-minute music video, a mix of animation and live action with child actors, features the lyric "Baby shark / Doo doo doo doo doo doo," which then replaces "baby shark" with other kinds of sharks (e.g., "mommy shark," "daddy shark," etc.) to the same four chords and repetitive beat.
Fox notes the video originally hit the scene in 2015 thanks to SmartStudy, an educational entertainment company based out of South Korea, and it gained steam after a 2016 social media dance challenge. NPR attempts to explain how and why the song has struck such a chord, pointing to everything from the success of K-pop groups and the easy-to-learn song and dance, to "the fickle nature of the Internet, which subsumes the strange and the novel and continues to be hard to focus-group." Still, the New York Times—with a quite appropriate headline—"preemptively [apologizes]" for the earworm, and calls it a song "as infectious as anthrax." Watch above or here if you can take it. (More viral videos stories.)
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