Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 42
Abstracts
Panel 5: Meme Culture
15:30 – 15:45
To Purr-tect and Serve
Online Cat Videos, Music, and Copaganda
Michael Austin / Edge Hill University
This
paper
explores
the
emergent
yet
underexamined relationship between online cat
videos, music, and the dissemination of copaganda
—media content that portrays police in an overly
positive or apolitical light, often to obscure
systemic violence or institutional critique. While
cat videos are typically regarded as apolitical
digital ephemera, this paper argues that their
increasing presence in official police department
social
media
feeds
serves
a
strategic
communicative
function:
softening
public
perception of law enforcement and diverting
attention from contentious practices.
music video with clips of Nimis and stock
footage of the Amsterdam police. Sometimes
the music that accompanies many of these
viral videos include pro-police messaging,
such as those that use the song “Bad Boys”
(1987) by Inner Circle (the theme song of the
television series COPS) with images of cats
wearing
police
hats,
mustaches,
and
Aviator-style sunglasses while riding in
children’s toy cars or curiously inspecting
someone’s meal. Other times, songs such as
KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” are used as a
counter-narrative.
This paper also explores the participatory
dimension of these videos, noting how audiences
become complicit in the reproduction of sanitized
police imagery. For example, Nimis, a black cat
that lives on a houseboat in Amsterdam jokingly
became known as “police cat” due to the bright
yellow life preserver he wore. Fans of the cat used
AI to create a song called “Police Cat Amsterdam”
which recounts how Nimis protects the city with
his “sharp eyes and quick paws,” and created a
Drawing
from
media
analysis,
digital
ethnography, and cultural studies, this paper
situates this trend within the logic of platform
capitalism, where virality and emotional
appeal often override critical discourse. While
cat videos may appear politically neutral, their
deployment by police institutions represents a
calculated form of soft power—rendering
copaganda not only more palatable but also
more pervasive.
AI
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