ATLANTA, GA—29-year-old hip-hop legend Bow Wow announced this week that he will be retiring after the release of his upcoming album, NYLTH. This came as a shock to the music industry as well as society at large, which up until this week had assumed the artist retired ten years ago.

"Literally no one knew he was still rapping," said a source close to Mr. Wow. "I think even Bow Wow was surprised to discover he was still performing."

"Honestly, I thought he had retired in 2003," said record producer Dave Davis. "But apparently I have a producer credit on 2008's Half Man, Half Dog Vol 1."

At a press conference Tuesday, members of Bow Wow's entourage, "The Dawg Pound", insisted the artist has been quite prolific throughout his 15-year-long songwriting career. However, when asked to name any track other than the 2000 hit Bow Wow (That's My Name), they were unable.

"He was in that movie about basketball shoes with the Jerry Maguire kid," said Peter "Rough Ruff" Jones, the entourage's style expert. "Did he write a song for that? I don't remember."

"I think he had one called Basketball (These Are My Shoes)," said Doug "Lil Woofy" Brown, more as a question than a statement. "He for sure had one about puppy love. Right? Didn't he?"

Reporters asked Lil Woofy to hum a few bars of Puppy Love for context, which caused the Dawg Pound member to grow frustrated and cut the press conference short.

While most critics debate whether Bow Wow had a music career at all, hip hop columnist and Lil' Bow Wow historian Andrea Shepherd offers an explanation about the missing years of music.

"At the height of his powers, he was the number one teen hip hop artist whose rhymes were almost exclusively dog puns," Shepherd explains. She suggests perhaps Mr. Wow had stopped writing about dogs, and started performing to them.

"Maybe at a certain point he began releasing his songs at a frequency humans could not hear. Like a dog whistle."

The retirement announcement follows a similar declaration by the virtuoso in 2009, where the artist said he would no longer be performing because he had "accomplished everything he could accomplish in life." He was 22 years old at the time.

Shepherd advises us not to take declarations like these too lightly.

"As of today, if Bow Wow were actually a dog, he would have been rapping for 105 years. That's a lot of experience," Shepherd said. "It's time for this Old Bow Wow to learn some new tricks."