Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 35
Abstracts
Panel 2: PAW-litics
12:25 – 12:40
“Cats for Trump”
The Dark Side of Musicalization and Ailurophilia in
Audiovisual Online Content
Ed Katrak Spencer / Utrecht University
This paper considers the phenomenon of
musicalized “internet cats” with reference to the
final stages of the 2024 US Presidential Race
following Donald Trump’s infamous “…They’re
Eating the Cats” pronouncement (10 September
2024). Building on but departing from previous
work that analyses the use of “centipede” music as
right-wing political propaganda during the
2015-2016 US Presidential Race (Spencer 2025), it
discusses feline-centered musical remixes of
Trump’s soundbite (which was in tune with
anti-immigrant “Great Replacement” conspiracy
theory and white supremacism). Engaging with
one of the web’s core cultural emblems—pet cats
—these online music clips problematize the
metaphor of weaponization that has previously
been used to theorize audiovisual propaganda in
the age of social media.
The paper begins by considering the Web 2.0
history of musicalized “internet cats” and critical
insights from recent monographs on the cultural
significance of “internet cats” more broadly
(Maddox 2023; White 2020). The middle part of the
paper presents an analysis of two key case
studies from September 2024: the first is a
musical response to Trump’s pronouncement
by the prominent cat remixer and YouTube
musician The Kiffness; the second is a quasi—
“MAGA Rap” track that became a musical
meme in pro-Trump content (TMR 2024). The
online opinion data relating to these uploads is
collected using Rieder’s (2015) data tools and
analyzed by mixing distant reading and word
tree visualization (Wattenburg & Viégas 2007)
with close reading (e.g. Herrnstein Smith
2016).
The paper closes by reflecting on the broader
significance of the research with regard to
loving music and loving people (cf. Cheng
2019) as well as loving cats (ailurophilia). To
what extent did the pairing of musical
entrainment and feline affect encourage web
users to prioritize spurious concerns for pet
cats and to demonize human immigrants at an
important moment in world history?
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