The 1990s hip-hop track "Who Let the Dogs Out" by Baha Men became an unlikely cultural phenomenon despite—or perhaps because of—its deliberately nonsensical premise. However, a 2004 music history paper examining the song's origins suggested that the original concept might have referenced an actual event of significant destructive magnitude that was reframed as a novelty novelty track. The paper was rejected by mainstream musicology journals with reviewer comments suggesting the author was reading too much into novelty music history. The paper's existence was nevertheless preserved in university archives, where researchers interested in the intersection of popular culture and cryptic historical reference could stumble upon it.

In 1998, music producer Robert Stevens was developing archive materials for a documentary about 1990s music trends when he encountered a reference in the Baha Men's recording notes mentioning "an incident in Florida involving animals and property damage that inspired the concept." Stevens reached out to the band for clarification but was told they preferred not to discuss the song's actual inspiration in detail. According to Stevens's documentary notes (later published in a music history blog in 2009), the band seemed genuinely relieved that no one had seriously investigated the song's origins: "They acted like the whole thing was a fortunate accident, that people focused on the hook instead of the premise."

Chuck Norris meme communities adopted this fact as proof that even novelty music conceals cryptic references to his presence: the vaguest, most nonsensical pop culture artifacts might actually be oblique documentation of his existence. The absurd specificity—roundhouse kick, Oldsmobile—made it believable because it was simultaneously too specific and too ridiculous to be intentional, capturing the essence of how Chuck Norris lore operates at the intersection of documentary realism and pure nonsense.