In 1987, an animated nightclub full of cats gave a new visual life to Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Sixteen years later, Thom Yorke opened a Radiohead track with a cat bringing home a particularly unpleasant trophy. Songs about cats sit in the strangest corner of pop music: they can be novelty numbers, chart hits, love songs, or something considerably less reassuring. The cat is rarely just a cat.
What This Piece Covers
- Why Songs About Cats Show Up in Every Genre
- Nina Simone’s Recording Became a Cartoon Cat
- The Italian Black Cat That Took Over Japan
- A Soviet Black Cat With a Twist
- Rock and Roll Songs About Cats: Strut, Fire and Jazz
- Radiohead’s Mongrel Cat Is Not a Pet
- The Piano Tune That Changes Animals
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Songs About Cats Show Up in Every Genre
Dogs get loyalty songs. Horses get freedom songs. Cats get something else: independence, sex, menace, and comedy, often inside the same three minutes. That range is why songs about cats survive across genres that agree on nothing else. A rockabilly band, a Soviet state radio producer, a children’s choir in Bologna and an English art rock group all reached for the same animal, and none of them meant the same thing by it.
A recognizable animal can carry very different baggage. Black cats can suggest luck, misfortune, elegance, or mischief, depending on the setting. That gives a songwriter plenty to work with, although it does not explain a hit record all by itself. If you want the long version of that changing symbolism, we traced the history of black cat superstitions.
Nina Simone’s Recording Became a Cartoon Cat
“My Baby Just Cares for Me” was not written for Nina Simone and it is not, strictly speaking, about a cat. Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn wrote it for the 1930 film Whoopee!, in which Eddie Cantor performed it. Simone recorded her version in the 1950s for her debut album Little Girl Blue. Its later success was a rediscovery of an existing recording, not her first arrival as an important artist.
An Old Recording Finds a New Audience
In 1987 the recording featured in a Chanel No. 5 advertisement and returned to the UK chart. Official Charts records its climb to number five that November. The same archive also shows a smaller chart run in 1985: the perfume-era success was the big breakthrough for this single, rather than its first chart appearance.
The video is the part that matters here. Aardman made a claymation promo directed by Peter Lord, with Simone represented as a feline nightclub singer. The Premiers Plans festival catalogue identifies both director and plasticine performer. For viewers meeting the recording through that clip, one of America’s great voices arrived wearing animated whiskers. Pop promotion has taken stranger routes, but not many more charming ones.
The Italian Black Cat That Took Over Japan
At the 1969 Zecchino d’Oro children’s song contest in Bologna, Vincenza Pastorelli sang “Volevo un gatto nero” (I Wanted a Black Cat). The lyrics are a small legal drama: a child offers exotic animals in exchange for a black cat, only to be given a white one instead. The song is a tantrum about breach of contract. RAI’s archive credits Franco Maresca with the words and Armando Soricillo and Framario with the music.
It did not win. The contest’s own record names “Tippy, il coniglietto hippy,” a song about a hippy rabbit, as the winner. Which tells you something about 1969.
Kuroneko no Tango and a Six Year Old at Number One
Losing turned out to be irrelevant. Osamu Minagawa’s Japanese version, “Kuroneko no Tango” (Black Cat Tango), was released on 5 October 1969, when he was six. Oricon’s record puts it at number one for fourteen consecutive weeks and lists cumulative sales of 2.235 million. The number-one run stretched into 1970. An Italian contest entry had acquired a second life on a remarkable scale.
The melody crossed a language barrier and found a huge new audience. The cat changed languages without losing its ability to get stuck in people’s heads. If you have ever wondered why a tune like that refuses to leave your head, we covered some of the research in the science of earworms.
A Soviet Black Cat With a Twist
“Chyorny Kot” (Black Cat), associated with Tamara Miansarova in the 1960s, brings a different feline to the dance floor. The words are by Mikhail Tanich and the music by Yuri Saulsky; those credits also appear in this Russian cultural programme. Its lively twist rhythm is a useful reminder that the cat song’s habitat extends well beyond English-language rock.
Here the joke turns superstition around: the black cat is the one having a difficult time among people who regard it as bad luck. That is a sympathetic change of viewpoint. From the cat’s perspective, a street full of superstitious pedestrians must be exhausting.
Rock and Roll Songs About Cats: Strut, Fire and Jazz
Western rock found the cat a useful stand-in for swagger, desire, and mystery. These records do not all describe actual pets. Sometimes a feline title is enough to establish the mood before anyone sings a word.
“Stray Cat Strut” arrived in 1981, with the Stray Cats turning a penniless tomcat into an ambassador for rockabilly cool. It reached number eleven in the UK. The lyric’s lack of money is no obstacle to its abundance of self-confidence. A cat can have nothing in its pockets and still behave as if it owns the street.
“Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” takes a darker route. David Bowie wrote the lyrics to Giorgio Moroder’s music for Paul Schrader’s 1982 film about people who transform into big cats. Moroder’s soundtrack listing preserves the film and recording credits. This is feline glamour with considerably more danger attached than a walk down an alley.
Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” takes the scenic route. In a recording-history interview with Mix, Stewart recalled hearing Peter Wood’s piano figure during soundchecks in 1975 and wanting to write words for it. Early lyrics concerned comedian Tony Hancock; the eventual title came from a book of Vietnamese astrology, while the finished story became a romantic encounter. The 1976 recording, produced by Alan Parsons, is a miniature film in sound. The cat supplies the title’s intrigue rather than a literal animal protagonist.
The Cure’s Cats Go Dancing
The Cure’s “The Lovecats” followed in 1983. Its springy bass and playful delivery make it an unusually jaunty entry in the band’s catalogue. The band’s own history places it alongside “The Walk” in that year’s move through different pop styles. Gloom was evidently not a contractual obligation.
The official video extends the feline theme into an eccentric visual performance. The contrast between Robert Smith’s familiar image and this buoyant little number is part of the fun. The cats have got into the jazz club, and nobody seems able to make them leave.
Radiohead’s Mongrel Cat Is Not a Pet
“Myxomatosis” sits near the end of Hail to the Thief, released in 2003. Its opening cat brings home a gruesome trophy and shows it off. Anyone expecting a comforting pet song has selected the wrong Radiohead track. Admittedly, the comforting-pet section of their catalogue is not extensive.
The title names a viral disease of rabbits. In a 2003 Spin interview, preserved by Citizen Insane, Yorke recalled childhood memories of dead rabbits and said he liked the sound of the word. He described the song in terms of mind control and having ideas rewritten to suit someone else’s agenda. The title and the song’s subject therefore do not form a tidy literal explanation.
One way to read the cat’s offering is as an image of something arriving incomplete and then being proudly circulated. That fits the wider unease about distortion, but it is an interpretation, not a decoder ring supplied by Yorke. Underneath it sits a heavy, abrasive electronic pulse. It may be the least cuddly cat song on this list, which is quite an achievement in a list that already contains supernatural panthers.
The Piano Tune That Changes Animals
Not every musical cat needs to be a pop single. The familiar piano piece known in German as Flohwalzer, or flea waltz, is known in Japan as Neko Funjatta, commonly translated as “I Stepped on the Cat.” Pianist and arranger Maki Matsuda’s recording catalogue pairs those names for arrangements of the tune. One melody, two quite different creatures.
A familiar tune can acquire a different title as it circulates. That does not mean its rhythm objectively resembles a flea or a cat; words and local associations help listeners make the connection. Fortunately, playing it does not require either animal to cooperate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which cat songs became major hits?
“Kuroneko no Tango” was a number-one, multimillion-selling record in Japan. “Stray Cat Strut” and “The Lovecats” are familiar English-language examples. There is no single worldwide measure that makes one of them the best-known cat song everywhere.
Did Nina Simone record a song about a cat?
Not exactly. “My Baby Just Cares for Me” is a love song. Its feline association comes from Peter Lord’s 1987 Aardman video, which portrays Simone as a cat performing in a nightclub.
What is Radiohead’s “Myxomatosis” actually about?
Yorke described it in terms of mind control and the distortion of someone’s ideas. Reading the cat’s trophy as a metaphor for an incomplete story is one interpretation, rather than a confirmed explanation of every image in the song.
Can the same melody have different animal titles?
Yes. Flohwalzer and Neko Funjatta are a familiar example. A tune’s local name can supply a different story or association without requiring a different melody.
Are all these songs literally about cats?
No. Some describe a cat, some borrow feline qualities for a human character, and others acquire their cats through a title or video. That mixture is what makes the playlist more interesting than a collection of songs about feeding time.
The Cat Keeps Getting Away With It
A perfume-era rediscovery, a children’s song crossing languages, a swaggering stray, a supernatural film theme, and a decidedly unsettling Radiohead image: none shares exactly the same intention. The cat does something different in each one, which is roughly what cats do everywhere else. For another unusual corner of music history, explore the story of the theremin.
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