Revisiting Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out

Recently I’ve been all about the “Dollar CDs” shoebox at a certain record store in Monterey. Maybe someday I’ll buy an actual record from those guys. But in the meantime, here’s a score from said shoebox: Surprise—it’s Baha Men, the holy prophets of the 2001 Grammy Awards themselves, back from the island (their words, not mine—check out 1992’s “Back to the Island”) with a dozen whiskey-dicked stabs at commercial radio fodder that even the convenience store male enhancement pills and heavy indica combo couldn’t fix. This is Who Let the Dogs Out.

Look—I know this band has existed since 1977. I know that I’m probably about to say something grossly overbroad, reductive, and insulting. But heed this shit: I am going to dump heaps of hate on this particular Baha Men album. It’s gonna be all cheap shots and adjective-wrapped abuse at this audio’s expense from here on out. Know that, and be circumspect. You have nothing to lose but your heavily glossed memory of what you think the world was like immediately prior to 9/11.

How do I even discuss this thing as a full musical project? Ironic nostalgia as a defense mechanism? The forced authoritative sneer of a former humanities major? Or against all odds—a shred of sincerity? I’m going with “all of the above, while cross-faded at midnight.”

If you decide to get cross-faded and listen to Baha Men, beware the spins. This shit is sonically schizophrenic, dancing gleefully in a thousand circle-styles at the hypnotic command of some echoing, glittering, digital inner voices choir. It pulls from every party-pop trope in the entire global songbook and beyond—its reach extends even into the newest-sailed oceans of that final earthen frontier, cyberspace. So many sounds, so much to hate, so little time.

Thematically, it hasn’t aged great. The album aspires to embody the absolute peak of an endless growth, “computers will carry us to infinity and beyond” idealism in musical form. But happy songs are like bloodletting—you pay the price in your own substance. Maybe it’s the desperate gasping for airplay to blame, but almost every song on this album reads like it was written by a shiny new desktop computer, fresh from the foreign factory just in time for Christmas ‘99—now a deteriorating dial-up box wasting space in some landfill. “Every day is a brand new start,” Baha Men sing on “You Can Get It.” And similarly, on the very next track, “It’s All in the Mind,” they drop a “Wild, Wild West” pastiche with a vague instruction to “open your eyes,” because “too many people close their minds to the truth.” After all, “You just do what they tell you to do.” What political message is this? It’s like Bill Clinton—it panders to the lowest common denominator of baseless individualist rhetoric. “Control your own thoughts, control your own fears.” It could only have been written by software—but it’s a bot outclassed by your average mid-2000s Captcha.

Lyrics are just whatever though, right? Why are you listening to Baha Men for themes? This is party music, you nerd—who gives a shit? But the album’s “built by AI decades before AI’s time” thesis seeps into the instrumentals too—toxically, corrosively, like an environmental class action in the making. These songs gun hard to capitalize on early-public Internet maximalist “we survived Y2K” bombast by calling on references to every sound possible. There’s bucketloads of rancid musical schlock here to clean up—take the “in the jungle, the mighty jungle” sample on track two, “You All Dat.” I guess using that sample isn’t strictly taboo—it’s not like there’s some ancient “Scroll of Forbidden Samples” hidden away in a temple somewhere—but it’s about the execution, and Baha Men songs leave no bodies in their wake as an apparent rule. The shit feels either out of place or downright forced. Throw in a hefty schmear of store brand cream cheese “soul” vocals on about half of these tracks, and you’ve got a recipe for one hot, confusing culinary disaster. 

These are not short songs, by the way. That makes the chaos worse than overwhelming—it’s relentless. It’s hard to count all the hard pivots between genres—sometimes within the same track. Imagine something in your car making a horrifying clunk sound somewhere abandoned on the interstate. Hell no. What the fuck was that? I’m talking about the painfully sober ballad “Where Did I Go Wrong” getting its ass kicked in the ring for far too many minutes before someone finally rings the bell. Somehow they get the album back to its corner chair, and somehow they manage to slap it in the face, towel its near-broken neck, Gatorade-spray it, and force-feed it enough stimulants to wake it up. And for what? Obviously, for “You’re Mine,” an Earth, Wind, and Fire karaoke binge without an ounce of self-awareness. Without an ounce of sex, either—which is a travesty for a song that actually goes and drops the word “sexual” on an album whose single got consistent airplay on Radio Disney. They were on Disney Mania too, remember? Jeez.

And then, it’s “What’s Up, Come On.” I have absolutely no clue what this song is about. It’s a transforming void deeper than filler. It’s dark matter—the negative space in space itself that forms the body of the shapeless, rotting, millennial mass that is Who Let the Dogs Out. It’s exactly like all the other songs in that it’s never enough for Baha Men to just riff on a Funkadelic archetype—the song also has to be a “get the party moving” Pharcyde-style joint inexplicably (in true throwaway form) about peace in the streets. We close the album with a runaway locomotive-paced “Shake it Mamma.” It aims to rip, and leans heavily on its horn propulsion engines to distract from the fact that it basically doesn’t exist as an independent song—rather as a Stepford Frankenstein’s Monster of a good musical time. 

And that’s the gist. As an album, it is almost entirely gloss without any punch. As an album, it sucks. As an album, it is basically irredeemable. “Unfocused” is the obvious, largely accurate descriptor—but I’m going with “unabashed.” Because if there’s one thing that makes this Wal-Mart/McDonalds birthday party band a classic, it’s the title track. And yes—it, too is gargantuan and stupid. It’s thunderous, comically hyper-masculine  (even though it’s a feminist song against catcalling—but you didn’t know that because you didn’t read the Wikipedia page like I did) and it’s filled to the brim with the kind of pitifully well-intentioned, Full House Hawaiian vacation episode energy that makes even the average white suburban dad lose his shit off six or seven rum drinks at the tropical-themed hotel bar. Incidentally, whose dad did you picture when you read the last sentence? For me, it’s Hal from Malcolm in the Middle. Who let the dads out, am I right? 

And like that joke, all of this is so idiotically fun as to be fucking awesome. It doesn’t matter what else is on this album. It’s not even an album, really—it’s a raucous earworm single backed by an entire album’s worth of filler tracks. It’s hard to tell whether the decision to stick this song at the very beginning of the non-album was stupid or brilliant. In one sense, it completely eliminates the need to listen to anything on the rest of the non-album. In another sense, it mercifully eliminates the need to listen to anything on the rest of the non-album. Hard to say which perspective reflects worse on Baha Men, a band with plenty of actual albums, plenty of fans, and (at least at some point) plenty of money. But I like to think, and sincerely hope, that they don’t give a shit. I mean, come on—would you care if you had fuckin’ Rugrats in Paris money?