What is the greatest use of “woo” in popular music?
Writing decent lyrics is hard. The words that form the backbone of a song can make or break it, and subpar lyricism has caused the demise of countless artists over the years. What’s more, the language you sing in can alienate entire countries of potential listeners, who are left unable to understand whatever you are saying in the song. Thus, artists are left with the tricky task of writing something that has a broad appeal while still saying something new and interesting. Failing that, they can always just chuck in a “woo” and be done with it.
The exact origins of “woo” are strangely disputed. “Woo”, meaning to court or impress somebody, has origins going back centuries, but most often, musicians use the word as an expression of excitement or as a shortened form of “woo hoo”. The first recorded use of “woo hoo” goes all the way back to the 17th century but witnessed an uptake in popularity during the latter part of the 20th century. As a result, multiple different musical artists began to substitute lyrics for “woo”, with some results that were more endearing than others.
Of course, nonsensical or non-word-based lyricism has a long and varied history. Particularly during the 1960s, thanks to tracks like The Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ or Manfred Mann’s ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, these gibberish lyrics became something of a craze. Soul music seemed to be a particularly fitting home for “woops” and “wows”, spearheaded by the likes of James Brown, but “woo” is a much more specific sound than either of those.
One of the earliest and most prominent examples of “woo” in popular music came in 1959 with the release of ‘Woo-Hoo’ by The Rock-A-Teens – later to be covered by multiple other groups, including The 5.6.7.8’s and The Rezillos. The song itself is made up entirely of the repeated phrase “woo-hoo”, but it does not appear to be used in the same excitable way that we have come to expect from the phrase in the modern day. The song seems to use the phrase to create a track from sounds instead of lyrics, a common trope in early rockabilly tracks.
Take The Rolling Stones’ 1968 masterpiece ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ as another example. The song is punctuated by a continuous background noise of the band, along with Marianne Faithful, Anita Pallenberg, and photographer Michael Cooper chanting “woo-woo”. Reportedly, this chant originally began life as “who-who”, which likely explains why it came so long before most other popular uses of “woo” in music.
Strangely, the use of “woo hoo” witnessed a sharp increase during the 1990s, as the animated sitcom The Simpsons helped to repopularise the phrase by making it one of Homer Simpson’s catchphrases. As a result, multiple musicians began to incorporate the phrase into their songwriting – often to their own detriment. However, the greatest use of “woo” in music came as something of an accident, as Britpop giants Blur were messing around in the studio.
Initially, their incredibly popular track ‘Song 2’ began life as an acoustic number, with Damon Albarn wolf-whistling over it. However, as the band decided to amp the song up into a chaotic inferno of abrasive rock, the whistle could no longer be heard, so Albarn had to vocalise the sound, which came out as “woo hoo” in the end.
It might have been an accident, but ‘Song 2’ quickly became one of Blur’s most popular tracks and also potentially the most famous use of “woo” in music. The word-come-sound-effect had been used by various artists before and has certainly been employed by many artists since, but the euphoric sounds of Blur and Albarn are still the first that spring to mind upon hearing someone exclaim “woo-hoo”.
