Musings on MC Skat Kat

A few days ago I received a text from a friend regarding the fictional 1980's anthropomorphic singer MC Skat Kat. Said text made my day, as "Skat Kat" was a name I hadn't heard in a long time...a long time indeed. Which is tragic because well, c'mon...it's MC Skat Kat!

While MC Skat Kat made his debut in 1989, my first encounter with the feline wasn't 'til just a few years ago. I first laid my eyes on the Kat whilst doing some late night browsing on the cultural abyss known as Youtube. I came across Paul Abdul's "Opposites Attract" video and my heart burst with a love and nostalgia for the 1980's, a decade I never even lived through. The video, which features a cartoon cat rapping badly over a cheesy and dated pop song, is a perfect example of crass commercialism. And I love it! Commercial products have historically led to a high output of crap, but sometimes that crappy output hits that sweet spot of "so wrong it's right!" MC Skat Kat did that for me. The Kat's image, voice, and dance seemed to have been engineered by a committee devoid of creativity and out of touch with their real target audience. And while this type of thing normally produces dull results, here the product is so surreal and strange that you just gotta love it.

There's also the delight of randomly stumbling upon a semi-forgotten cultural artifact from a bygone decade by accident. Like Wall-E cruisin' about the ruins of a lost civilization, the Internet is a treasure trove of bygone pieces of culture for those willing to explore it.

If my psudeo-philosophical musings on a 20+ year-old Paula Abdul music video are a little too much for your taste, then consider this: it's an '80's pop video in which it is implied that Paula Abdul is involved in a sexual relationship with an animated anthropomorphized cat rapper. How can you not love that? Pure comedy gold.