You've overlooked a very important incidence of furries in popular music videos: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's wonderful single, Higher Than The Stars. Rather than buying cheap animal costumes and hiring extras, the producers of this video reached out to various groups of "real" furries and asked them to participate in the shoot. (The suiter who initially grabs the protagonist's hand used to be a friend of mine, hence how I got the full story.) Whereas Ylvis' video uses department store animal costumes and Capital Cities' uses professional prosthetics, the suits used in this video are entirely the creation and property of the suiters themselves--a good demonstration of authenticity in a debate about what constitutes the term.
The thematic content of the song strikes a chord as well. The lyrics are about a girl falling in love with another girl and having to hide her affections from the world at large. In this way, the furries in this video are an obvious metaphor for self-acceptance; the video switches to bright, happy colors as soon as the protagonist leaves her black-and-white world of denial.
The examples you've presented in the article, as well as the MC Crumbsnatcher video, are good examples of furry visibility, but they all seem to focus around using animal suits either for shock value or to set up a narrative. This single, however, establishes "real" furries as a welcoming and accepting group in a video for a wildly popular song. I think this is the sort of visibility that has real value.
You've overlooked a very important incidence of furries in popular music videos: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's wonderful single, Higher Than The Stars. Rather than buying cheap animal costumes and hiring extras, the producers of this video reached out to various groups of "real" furries and asked them to participate in the shoot. (The suiter who initially grabs the protagonist's hand used to be a friend of mine, hence how I got the full story.) Whereas Ylvis' video uses department store animal costumes and Capital Cities' uses professional prosthetics, the suits used in this video are entirely the creation and property of the suiters themselves--a good demonstration of authenticity in a debate about what constitutes the term.
The thematic content of the song strikes a chord as well. The lyrics are about a girl falling in love with another girl and having to hide her affections from the world at large. In this way, the furries in this video are an obvious metaphor for self-acceptance; the video switches to bright, happy colors as soon as the protagonist leaves her black-and-white world of denial.
The examples you've presented in the article, as well as the MC Crumbsnatcher video, are good examples of furry visibility, but they all seem to focus around using animal suits either for shock value or to set up a narrative. This single, however, establishes "real" furries as a welcoming and accepting group in a video for a wildly popular song. I think this is the sort of visibility that has real value.