Skip to content

Viking Row

14 July 2026, 11:52 am

Occasionally, this blog is relevant―like really, really relevant. Topical too. Like when the sportsball team from my ancestral homeland makes the national news with an epic crowd chant, and the hot new beats widget is up within the week.

The Viking Row is a popular soccer chant used by the Norwegian team. It consists of two tom-toms followed by shouting “Roo!” which is a cute Norwegian way of saying “row.” It gradually speeds up until it reaches a climax at breakbeat tempo—a popular sports song trope which mimics the sexual experience.

This is how the Vikings discovered America, shrooming and pillaging to a 4/4 beat.

First, there is a rest between measures. The fermata is held at the drummer’s discretion. As the tempo picks up, the space between the notes shrinks and smears into noisy applause.

Before the Row, there was the Viking Clap, which is basically the same thing but with a clap and a “Huh!” Some prefer the elegance of the seated Row, while others the stand-up Clap. We Scandi bros shouldn’t fight about it.

There are many similar chants, and they’re all based on the beat of “We Will Rock You,” which is a sportsball staple with its stomp-stomp-clap pattern.

All these soccer chants are said to derive from the scene in 300.

“Spartans! What is your profession?” They bang their shields and shout: “Huh!”

They don’t actually bang their shields, fake news.

“Fans in Scotland picked up on it at some point after the film. “It’s been popular here for a few years but I’m not sure quite when it started,” says Motherwell fans’ representative Dave Wardrope. He agreed that the film played a part and said: “No one is certain but we don’t think our fans took it from another club’s supporters. They made it up themselves.” [source]

That’s the story the Scotsman tells, but we know he can never be true.

The biggest sing-alongs on Earth are found at sporting events. People will clap and stomp to the sparsest of musical cues, a Hammond organ or a tom-tom, to produce the flammiest of beats spread across miles of subjective timings—the slow speed of sound be damned.

Yeah, I like Sports.

Tagged ,
Comment

The Loudest Bird in the World

1 December 2025, 11:43 am

Here on Los Doggies Dot Com, we’ve blogged about birds. We’ve blogged about the loudest note in the world and the Emergency Broadcast Signal. Now it’s time for all three—the loudest bird in the world that sings an annoying set of tones like a FEMA alert.

The White Bellbird has recently gone viral for his stentorian song measured at a ridiculous 125 decibels, louder than a rock concert, loud enough to wiggle the wattles around your throat. He’s got a nice wattle (pictured above). I’d go insane with that thing flapping around my face, but the females seem to like it distended.

This song is also for the females, and they like it loud and in their face. Click on that score down below and let the noteheads tell you about it.

The bellbird song is two notes long—an F#6 that resolves up to a B6. This is the perfect cadence at its most perfect. Every TV show theme ends with this interval. The lyrics to the song are “kong-kay,” because the first ornithologist to write about it gets to attach their own onomatopoeia.

When a female gets close, the bellbird sings the first tone with his back turned, then swings his body around to the right, always the same direction, like Zoolander, to blast the second tone into the female’s face. In other words, they cadence in the face.

Is there any better mating call than screaming into a woman’s face?

Recorded music has been steadily increasing for a century. The bellbirds are also in the midst of their own loudness war. The louder he gets, the shorter his tones. It is women’s want. They will dictate how loud and short it can go. The bellbird’s song is notated above as a half-note and a quarter, but if things keep getting louder, they’ll evolve into hemi- and semiquavers, eventually hemidemisemiquavers at quadruple forte (𝑓𝑓𝑓𝑓).

As songbirds go, there certainly are prettier tunes than the bellbird’s. It’s a little ridiculous to make that kind of sound no matter what species you are.

Tagged , ,
Comments Off on The Loudest Bird in the World

Hands Off Melodies

7 April 2025, 12:44 pm

Whenever the people sing in the streets, Los Doggies Dot Com is there to investigate. Years ago we covered the Occupy protests and the Women’s March. Recently, our intrepid musicologists went down to the City (what people from New York call “Manhattan”) to cover the Hands Off protest—a giant parade where you could get your kum-ba-ya-yas out.

For weeks the NGOs put out the call to action, calling for all arrhythmic people to show up armed with the loudest percussion instruments—tambourines, shakers, cowbells—and play them out of time. As usual there was no hand-clapping, not on the ones or any beat, because clapping is ableist and above all, drummist.

Despite the lack of a definite beat, there were plenty of melodies in the air, including the old standbys like “Hey-Ho” and “The People United.” An indie anarchist polka band farted around Madison Square Park (masked up of course). One particular song stood out to us, the popular call-and-answer, “Shut it Down.”

“Shut it Down” goes to half-time feel on the 3rd bar, which is very hardcore. Even without a beat, you can imagine how a metal drummer would feel it—crash cymbals and all.

The key is probably supposed to be F# minor pentatonic (F# A B C# E), but the minor third from the root is so irresistible that the singer hits the D# (borrowed from Dorian), which is pure fusion to our ears. It would sound good over a i IV chord progression. Real trap shit.

Minor thirds are the go-to interval for sports chants and playground teasers. If you want to bridge the gap between the spoken word (or shouted word) and what could reasonably considered a melody, the minor third is the way to go.

Stay tuned for more protest coverage from the street team here at Los Doggies Dot Com.

Tagged , , , ,
Comments Off on Hands Off Melodies

Yankees Melodies

4 June 2024, 11:01 pm

I recently attended a sportsball game for the first time in years and it was quite the hypersensory experience. Yankee Stadium hit different. The musical score of the game wasn’t limited to a Hammond organ played live from the organist’s nest (right beside the sniper’s nest). Now the Yankees music director has a whole soundboard full of samples at his disposal.

There were the old standbys like “Charge!” and “De-fense!”, the familiar “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y” claps and “We Will Rock You” stomps, but most of the soundtrack was filled out with 15-second clips of modern pop music, as if controlled by an iPad kid on shuffle mode. The stadium volume, like modern movie theaters, was tinnitus-inducing.

One particular melody stuck out, an ancient earworm from Long Island.

The P.C. Richards “Whistle” is played for every away team strike-out. It brings a smile to us Gen X boomers in the stands. We can’t help but think of the jingle, subvocalizing the lyrics, “At P.C. Richards.” I’m not sure if this store chain even exists, but the posthumous jingle plays on, a bluesy mix of thirds that resolves on a G.

When the Yankees strike out however, there is only silence and despair. Fathers cry into helmets filled with melted cheese. Mothers clutch their jersey-swaddled infants. Zoomers hold their broccoli heads and ask God, “Why, dawg?”

The “Whistle” was written by VO artist Leer Leary. How nice it must be to have written an immortal melody! The Mets started copying the Yankees and using the whistle for their strike-outs. On a long enough timeline, nobody will remember the lyrics to P.C. Richards, and the whistle will be associated with scalawags whiffing.

So here’s to you, Leer Leary, my king. As jingles go, the whistle is nonpareil. It’s right up there with “Take Me Out to The Ballgame” and Mattingly’s moustache.

Leer Leary
Tagged 
Comments Off on Yankees Melodies

Emergency Broadcast System

5 April 2024, 2:20 pm

Today my whole dwelling shook like a bowl full of Mexican jumping beans, which I assumed was a hallucination until I heard the belated tones of the the Emergency Alert System.

Did we just get HAARP’d? Have the Nephilim returned? No, it was just a rare and mild New York earthquake that got us Yankees shook.

The Attention Signal used to be played on late-night television. A mysterious man with a transatlantic accent would explain, “This is a test…this is only a test.” There was even a jingle. The Cold War was raging and we expected the Russkies to invade us at any moment, parachuting down like Tetris pieces as seen in the movie Red Dawn.

The EBS is now called the Emergency Alert System because no one watches TV anymore. That name doesn’t sound quite as good, but nothing does. Thanks, Biden. At least they kept the same tones.

Two sine waves sounding together make up the Attention Signal—853 hz and 960 hz. The interval was chosen for how annoying it is, so Americans would take heed. Click on the score and despair!

Just look at that mess of accidentals, markings, and noteheads. I tried to make it as annoying to look at as it sounds. The Attention Signal is two tones, roughly a half-flat A and a half-flat B, creating a dissonant whole tone interval.

Forgoing the alarm bells and war horns of the previous ages, the Attention Signal heralded the electronic age with its pure sinusoidal waveforms. Now that Cold War 2.0 is back in full swing, I expect we’ll be hearing more of these dreadful tones. Time to break out my schoolboy desk, so I can scurry underneath and hide from the Soviet tetrominos.

Comments Off on Emergency Broadcast System

Vanilla Video

24 October 2023, 10:17 am

We’ve finally caught up with the times and turned overwrought bloggies into easily digestible videos. Here’s the latest on the age-old Vanilla Ice vs. Queen controversy. We, of course, side with the former.

Comments Off on Vanilla Video

Tyson Video

13 October 2023, 9:20 pm
Comments Off on Tyson Video
« Older Entries