The Adventures of MC Skat Cat and the Stray Mob
Boy, the early ’90s sure were adventurous times, weren’t they? We had Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer tearing up the charts, and just around the bend there would be Nirvana and the whole grunge scene. Alternative music was going to hit an unforeseen high in both sales and radio play. It felt like anything could happen.
And well, anything did happen.
As we all know, Paula Abdul once had a very profitable music career. She couldn’t sing to save her life, but like many other artists of the time, her videos sold her music. It was all about the image. And so, while she was riding one of her higher than high crests, she recorded a song with MC Skat Kat. That song was another big hit for Abdul. Of course, it was “Opposites Attract” and once again the video was eye candy for any MTV viewer. However, Paula was seen getting her groove on with an animated MC Skat Kat who was literally a feline. Was this the beginning of the downhill plunge, or was it when she had Keanu Reeves do his cameo bit in “Rush Rush”? It matters not.
The point is some record exec thought that MC Skat Kat could be the next big rap artist and went about getting the kitty his own recording contract and LP. It was 1991 and, well, this was no longer the days when something like Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers were tearing up the charts. A lot of changes were happening constantly, and needless to say an animated cat making a rap album wasn’t going to be taken any more seriously than Vanilla Ice.
But Ice sold a shitload of records. MC Skat Kat on the other hand sold…well, I’m thinking if I can’t remember, then it must not have been much. Of course with songs like “I Ain’t No Kitty,” “”No Dogs Allowed,” “On the Prowl,” and “Kat Stories” one begins to wonder if this damn thing wasn’t actually targeted at actual cats. Paula Abdul showed up rather expectedly to lend some “credence” to the project and duetted once again with Skat on “Skat Strut,” but no one really gave a shit (although the video was a hit on MTV). And if they did, surely they were kicking themselves sometime shortly afterward for actually buying the thing.
According to Skat Kat’s Wikipedia page, he later returned one more time in 1995 in a star-studded ad about recycling (the spot also featured such heavyweights as Kenny Loggins, Lita Ford, and Bugs Bunny), along with a new song called “Take it Back.” The song was released as a single. And once again, no once cared. Skat Kat has not been heard from since.
Now if his name had only been “MC Scat Cat” then the moniker would have gone along perfectly with the product. Ba-doom-ching.
