Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 47
Abstracts
Panel 7: Gender
17:45 – 18:00
“I Am a Kitten” Married
and Managed
Momus, Kahimi Karie, and Personal Ownership
Contra Authorship in 1990s Cosmopolitan Pop
Davindar Singh / Harvard University
This paper examines how artists and authors
variably become pets to some, owners to others.
Japanese singer Kahimi Karie’s 1995 EP release of
“I Am a Kitten” vaulted her onto the global stage
as an icon of the particularly cosmopolitan,
pastiche-oriented
Japanese
pop
subgenre
Shibuya-Kei. Composed by Nick Currie, the lyrics
voice a feline narrator whose unconsummatable
affection for its human owner is rendered in
Karie’s uncomfortably childlike whisper. The
bossa nova setting of the half-French lyrics adds
discomfort by intertextually linking “I Am a
Kitten” to 1960s French Yé-Yé songs, which set
teen female singers with childlike voices over
bossa nova and double entendre’d verses. Such
pastiche
was
omnipresent
in
1990s
avant-cosmopolitan pop. Like other composers,
Currie
skirted
legal
and
gender-ethical
controversy with intertextual compositional
pastiche, whether in the uncomfortably sexual
undertones
of
“Kitten,”
or
in
Currie’s
sexualization of the Michelin Man and Wendy
Carlos in songs garnering big-ticket and
high-profile
intellectual
property
lawsuits.
Through these and other such lawsuits, sampling
and brand-as-property became well-documented
artistic fodder for would-be-cosmopolitan musical
sophisticates.
However, subsequently Currie tellingly lamented
that Karie’s Japanese-language Wikipedia page no
longer mentioned him as a collaborator, and
speculated that either Karie’s management or label
obscured his involvement “to make [Karie] look
like a more autonomous and serious artist.”
The idea of artistic autonomy when proposed
by an oft-sued specialist in sampling and
genre interplay is not werktreue hypocrisy (at
least,
not
only),
but
evinces
what
linguistic-semiotic anthropologists consider
to be the natures of authorship, ownership,
and personhood: unfixed, invariably disputed
in political-ideological projects. This case
displays how those professing such ideologies
of authorship and personhood shift positions
for personal gain, from author to owner to
exploited pet, and how (here, conspicuously
gendered) models of personhood (and
pet-hood) both join and transmute models of
artistic and human ownership.
Merlin
45
