Who let the dogs out?

Woof

“Final Girl Exodus,” Robin F. Williams

You try to expose your children to beauty. You try to get out of the way. To trust in the radiant strange of their blooming little personalities. Like, here’s a good song. Here’s another. You read to them at bedtime. You choose your stories wisely. You notice that you are noticing more, and that too is a kind of nudging, of nurturing, of teaching. Curiosity, it’s contagious.

But don’t get it twisted, dad. You are no curator, no tastemaker. No one, and I mean no one, requested a DJ. The big job is love your children, keep them safe, but not too safe. From there it’s all about the way the wild otherness of everything helps them sprout their own reckoning, their precious subjectivity that you helped to make but will never know.

My son: He has a favorite song. It was not my doing. I do not like the song. No one of sound mind likes the song, not really, but he loves it. It helps him go to sleep at night. He requests it, all the time. “Pease,” he will say, which is how he says “please”—and who can resist that?

Pease, daddy, pease mama: Pease play “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

It was funny at first. Also, I remembered the song as being fun, in a way. I misremembered. There is no revisionist angle here: It is one of the worst pieces of music ever to leach onto, and into, the popular consciousness.

In the response part, are they saying the word “who” or making a barking sound? Or something in between? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out? Woof.

The Baha Men, obviously, were from the Bahamas. They had been chugging away as a small-time band, known as High Voltage, for two decades. Playing local nightclubs and hotels and self-releasing albums on CD and cassette. Then an A&R man, a guy by the name of Steve, got their tape and liked what he heard. He signed them to a major label around 1991 and changed their name. And so the Baha Men were born.

But that wasn’t the big break, not yet. They sputtered along. Nearly a decade later and now at a new label, Steve—who I guess really believed in the Baha Men—heard a song while he was traveling in Europe. According to one of the Baha Men, he called and told them “it was an absolute must that Baha Men record that song, because they had the vibe to make it a huge hit.” But Baha Man Isaiah Taylor was unimpressed. There’s “no way in hell we’re recording that song,” he told Steve. But Steve was a convincing guy, it seems. The Baha Men recorded the song.

Around seven months after the Y2K worries were averted and thirteen and a half months before the Towers fell, the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” was released into the world.

It was their only hit. But what a hit. It won a Grammy! I don’t know. You may have heard it a time or two at sporting events. It was in a film called Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, which I have never heard of but grossed $100 million at the box office. The song remains so ubiquitous that it is almost hard to imagine a world without it.

Alex Rodriguez, a star baseball player I truly despised, chose “Who Let the Dogs Out” as the song to play over the loudspeakers when he came to bat. Woof.

“The Super Powers,” Howard Finster

My son is two years old, plus four months if you’re counting, and always in a hurry to run in circles. He likes to observe dead frogs, but not too close. He frequently requests “rough stuff,” which means he climbs up on my bent legs when I’m lying on the floor and gets bobbed up and down and then tossed.

He loves his sister and follows her around like a little dog but wants every item she has and does not want her to touch any item of his own. He is easily frustrated and screams like a monster. He has a gravelly voice and has possibly had a cold his entire life, so sometimes the scream doesn’t come out, it’s just kind of muffled anger from the back of his throat that croaks and dies with its first contact with oxygen. When he dreams, he often dreams of dinosaurs, and he is frustrated when they are no longer there when he wakes up. He is frustrated when his shoes are off, because he wants them on, or when his shoes are on, because he wants them off. He loves chicken, fried and breaded in any shape or size. He likes yogurt, in a pouch. He does not approve of tomatoes.

When nursing, he demands “bofe muckas” (both milks), meaning that both boobs must be out and at the ready.

If you offer him something he does not want, he will bat away your hand. One morning, my wife told him it was time to get dressed. He looked at her sternly and said, “Be gone, booty!”

I don’t know who introduced him to “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Must have been my wife. She has a mother’s sensitivity to his complaints and will do anything to solve them, including leaning on atrocious children’s music.

Sometimes you get lucky. Last weekend, we were on a roadtrip and he was screaming for a song about wolves. “I don’t know any songs about wolves!” my wife fretted. She looked at me frantically.

I played TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me,” a song we dig. I try to put my thumb on the scales when I can. He began dancing like a wild dog. When the song was over, he said, “Wolf song! Again!” We listened to it on repeat for the next hour. Howling forever.

“Barney,” George W. Bush

“Who Let the Dogs Out” was originally called “Doggie,” recorded by Trinidadian musician Anslem Douglas in 1998. According to Douglas, the song was not about dogs.

“It’s a man-bashing song,” he said in an interview:

I’ll tell you why. The lyric of the song says, “The party was nice, the party was pumpin’.” When I said the word “party” I was being metaphorical. It really means things were going great. The “Yippie-Yi-Yo,” that’s everybody’s happy, right? “And everybody was having a ball.” Life was going great. “Until the men start the name-callin’ / And then the girls respond to the call.” So the men started calling the women “skank” and “skettel,” every dirty word you can think of. The men started the name-calling and then the girls respond to the call. And then a woman shouts out, “Who let the dogs out?” And we start calling men dogs. It was really a man-bashing song.

So there you go. Here’s the recording of “Doggie.” Slightly different vibe. It sucks, I’m afraid.

In 1998, the song was covered by Fat Jakk and his Pack of Pets (truly inspired band name). I believe this was the version that Steve, the A&R guy heard: “Doggy (Who Let the Dogs Out).” It features more bark-oriented responses and a sample from “Whoomp! (There it Is).” It sucks.

One last twist to the story: That phrase/chorus — “who let the dogs out” — Anslem Douglas didn’t come up with it. A few years before he released “Doggie,” a couple of Toronto radio producers wrote a radio promo that featured the “Who Let the Dogs Out” chorus. The producers let Douglas record the song but didn’t bother with retaining the rights. Years later, they heard the Baha Men’s ubiquitous megahit. Oops!

There’s yet more competing claims — a 1995 song with a similar “Who let the dogs loose” chorus, a 1992 rap song called “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, a high school in Michigan that chanted “Oooh, let the dogs out!” at football games in 1990, and so on.

It is hard for me to judge because the phrase is so lodged in my head, it seems almost impervious to copyright. Maybe we cannot say that any single one of us created “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Perhaps we all did. Maybe we’ve always said it, in one way or another, as long as there have been human beings to feel fear and exhilaration, as long as there have been fathers and sons, as long as there have been dogs, as long as there have been pens, as long as there have been cages, as long as there has been that feeling of release and uncertainty when the dogs are not where we thought they were, when the dogs are free. And what can we do but wonder? Who? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out?

Painting by Cosmo Sun Ramsey

My son is more into dinosaurs than I have ever been into anything in my entire life. He also loves shark documentaries. In general, he likes carnivores. I think maybe I preferred herbivores as a kid, but I can’t remember.

We sleep in exactly the same position. Sometimes we take naps together: The Snooze Brothers. My wife will take a picture and it is amazing how similar our bodies look, and how identically they are positioned.

Not too long ago, he was sick and we had to give him something to help get his fever down. He didn’t want the medicine. He was screaming and I was holding him down, as gently as I could without letting him thrash, and he was crying, so pitifully, protesting in his feverish weakness. And my wife got the first squirt in, and he kept crying, in agony, but newly attentive in a way I couldn’t quite place, and the tears and wailing kept coming and through the tears, he said, “It’s delicious.”

Our boy, our son, our little guy, our dog. If he doesn’t get his way, he will lie down on the floor in silence with his face to the floor. If he gets his way, he runs around in any space he is granted, back and forth, in delight and motion. Just like what he is: An animal. Or if he is strapped down in a car seat, he will ask for his favorite song—and how can we resist? And he dances in the car seat, pumping his little fists, in delight and motion, slobbering like a puppy in his own private happiness.