ember's furry music blog

"Furry" is many things to many different people. Watch The Fandom documentary series on YouTube for a well-put together film covering various perspectives from furries in the US.

I think at it's core, the "furriness" of a musician comes down to community involvement.

Furry is already a pretty strongly established type of community, with many regional and internet-based communities that take on similar furry ideas. Anthropomorphic animals are ultimately a memetic idea that have arisen naturally, both in history and independently when it comes to the world of producing media.

So sure, anyone can be a furry. Anyone can call themselves a furry. And I don't think there's anything particular that should bar someone from adapting that label. They don't need a fursuit, a fursona, furry art on their albums, or to have played at cons. These are all indicators that a musician is in the furry community, sure. But I feel like gatekeeping furriness by an arbitrary metric short of saying "I am comfortable with being called a furry" is merely room for disagreement.

My goal with posing this question to people, "what is furry music", is to celebrate the unique, often overlooked creativity that comes out of the furry community, from the most popular convention acts to the newly-minted bandcamp pages.

I think furry music would be boring if it was entirely about appearances. I think fellow furries have overlooked the musicians in the fandom because it's easy to hear one song from a furry musician, and the novelty of "it's music but done by a furry" wears off.

What has ignited my interest in furry music is seeing people go above and beyond incorporating their sense of furry identity into the music. Here are some lyrical topics that I think furry musicians cover handily when compared with other non-furry artists.

• Queerness
• Therianthropy (being an animal)
• Long distance relationships
• Genuine feelings of community
• Celebration of kink communities
• Sexual liberation
• Feelings of otherness
• Familial/relationship trauma
• Social isolation

Not all furry music has to convey any of these feelings. In fact, most of it doesn't. A significant amount of furry music is instrumental, with song titles that don't evoke these above themes. But it's a really common element to the point where, after having studied over 700 furry musicians, I have subjectively found these topics come up often.

This is where my interest in indie furry music comes from, as it's most likely to be about these above feelings, and their many intersections when considered as one of hundreds of experiences lived through one's life.