Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 34
Abstracts
Panel 2: PAW-litics
12:10 – 12:25
“They’re Eating the
Cats”
Music, Humour, and the Nonhuman Animal
in
The
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
Kiffness’s Response to Trump Vs Harris consectetur adipiscing elit.
Jack Harrison / University of Warsaw
This paper offers a critical analysis of South
African musician The Kiffness’s viral music video
“Eating the Cats ft. Donald Trump.” The song’s
chorus samples Trump’s comments made during a
televised presidential campaign debate against the
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on September
10, 2024, in which he alleged that Haitian people
had been stealing and eating the pets of residents
in Springfield, Ohio. The second verse, as if
responding to these claims, samples the sound and
video of an anxiously howling dog and meowing
cat. All three vocalizations have been processed
through a vocoder to create a more conventionally
melodious song.
It fails to amplify Haitian voices and
perspectives in more radical forms of
resistance and relies on the nationalist
exclusion of Haitians to achieve its vision of a
(musically)
harmonious
political
unity.
Indeed,
through
The
Kiffness’s
instrumentalization
of
a
human–music
tautology (one that constructs the alterities of
the Haitian and the pet as “dangerous” and
“loveable,” respectively), what emerges is a
music
video
that
serves
the
Trump
administration’s further marginalization of
Haitians in the United States.
In a television interview for France 24, The
Kiffness claimed that, rather than clearly
satirizing Trump, his track brings people together
from both sides of American politics: for the South
African, music, dogs, and cats offer a means
through which social harmony can be achieved.
However, this paper argues that, because of both
the ambiguity of its satirical target and its lack of
Haitian representation, “Eating the Cats” does
little to unite people in the fight against the
criminalization and racialization of the U.S.’s
Haitian community. Drawing on scholarship at the
intersection of music and animal studies (Mundy
2018; Steingo 2024) and animal and humour
studies (Mills 2023), this paper shows how “Eating
the Cats” is merely a salve for divided Americans.
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