Think about it. Bats are generally considered icky (unless you’re Bruce Wayne) and have a certain independence because of this. People don’t *mess* with bats- they avoid them, if at all possible- but, if seen, they react to them intensely. “OH MY GOD, A BAT! LARRY, GET THE GUN!” While this attention is negative, it’s still attention, nonetheless. And bats, like a child acting out on purpose, may thrive on that negative attention because it’s the only kind they get. So they’re “playing” by popping up and getting people to yelp.

But then “the cats come out.” Even “scary” black cats get all kinds of love from people. Not everybody is a cat person, no, but there are a lot more cat people than there are bat people (have you ever seen a lolbat?). The cats take away the attention the bats had been seeking when they come out, too. “OH MY GOD, A BAT! LARRY GET THE- wait, there’s a cat! SAVE THE CAT, SAVE THE CAT!!!” So the bats’ fun is spoiled by the appearance of the cats. It forms jealousy, anger, bitterness. But the bats aren’t going to act out against the cats directly, since they know they can’t do anything about it. So they’re trapped in this sad state where the cats are walking around, strutting their stuff and flaunting it and pretending everything is peachy while really just rubbing the bats’ noses in it. (Again, to return to the child metaphor, the one that stole the attention may later seek to play with the sad one, and the sad one may interpret sincere sweetness as something much more vindictive- if it isn’t actually meant to be vindictive in the first place.)

Now men and women. The “play” is actually men having a good time. This doesn’t necessarily need to be hitting on women, per say, but how many other places have we seen the stereotype that “women ruin everything” in pop culture? An example straight from the video: Timbaland may not really *want* to protect the girl in the video, but, damnit, she’s so stupid, she ruins everything and he keeps having to save her ass, good *grief*, and any other woman is going to need the same kind of babying and guardianship.

So why would Timbaland really care about a woman if all she’s going to do is mess things up for him and her continued presence will be nothing more than a reminder of his loneliness? That’s why he’s so blase about it. Yeah, sure, he may be able to have a decent time in the moment, and he realizes that, but ultimately, having her around for anything else will just hurt more.

(I honestly don’t know if that made any sense whatsoever, I’m just throwing stuff out there.)

“When the cats come out the bats come out to play, yeah”

I choose to argue the “bats don’t chase cats point”. The structure of this sentence doesn’t suggest the the bats/vamps/whatever will be chasing cats. Firstly, they “come out to play” which really, could mean anything. In the most innocent terms, they just awaken/appear/are physically present and able to react to a given stimulus. Secondly, there isn’t even a definite “if/then” relationship. It could just be that when the cats come out, the bats also happen to come out at the same time. Two unrelated events occur at once and we are being informed of this more as background/setting than plot.

Ignoring that, we could launch into a complicated discussion on who holds the power in male-female interactions. Is there something to be said in the choice of animals assigned to genders? While men are doing the chasing, do women really hold the power? Certainly, they have the choice of rejecting those advances. In traditional animal courtship, in most cases a male has to impress the female because it is she who chooses the mate with which she will produce the offspring that she will have to carry.

“The dawn is here, be gone be on your way, yeah
(In the morning after)”

Maybe it’s that the vampire has to leave, because he’s a vampire, and this isn’t Twilight, but the woman also has to leave because her place in the night and why would she hang around while he wasn’t there? This either defines the woman entirely by her relationship to the vampire or because he is the one speaking, is naturally just concerned with her relationship to him seeing as it is a 4 minute song.

All in all though, this song confuses me and I can barely understand the lyrics when I listen to it. I commend you for trying to sort it out.

The Nellie Furtado verse leads me to believe that the vampirism metaphor is actually about being a party person who goes out clubbing, and then stays up all night having sex with a one night stand. When that is the metaphor, it becomes a little more clear why Timbaland blocks Mr. Metalocalypse: he is perceived as a predatory sort of party person, the guy who preys on the impaired judgement of intoxicated girls. Timbaland, though, is a GOOD vampire because not only is he ambivalent about whether he wants to go home with Soshy, but he is going to protect her from the bad vampires! He’s a white knight! (Ooo, more dichotomy!) And what more do you want in a guy? Except, you know, respecting you as a person who can take care of yourself. Maybe we should let the feminist line should form in parallel to everyone else getting in line…

What’s the difference between an Asian dude and a vampire?

When an asian dude surprises and sucks the life out of somebody at 3 am, he does it with a Zerg rush.

It’s funny because of time zones and Starcraft!

Asi-pwned!

I’ll bite.

What’s the difference between an Asian dude and a vampire?

One works at Goldman Sachs. The other works at JP Morgan Chase.

It’s funny ’cause banks sucked the life outta the economy, and Asian people work in finance! Wakka wakka wakka!

a ‘vamp’ can be femme fatale, which unfortunately doesn’t save your Denny’s joke. Unless it’s a really old vamp…? (I’ve no idea, we don’t have Denny’s in Australia… yet…)

I’d never watched the whole video for this before. I’ve seen the start a couple of times and changed the channel because it’s not really my kind of music, and I assumed it was going to be a boring clip… but I’m lovin’ them crazy eyes! That’s hilarious!

I thought about this a lot and went back and forth on it. The consensus on lyric sites seems to drift toward bats (although the lyric sites have a LOT of the lyrics wrong for this song — one of them had Nellie Furtado saying “I’m not Omarion,” rather than “I need some R.E.M.,” and sometimes it sounds like and sometimes sounds like the other. I wonder if sometimes he says bats and sometimes he says vamps.

I’m totally willing to admit I made the wrong call here. So the jazz musician/Denny’s joke doesn’t really play.

But I still don’t think the relationship between cats and vampires, men and women is made clear in the song. If anything, this just makes me more confused.

When the cats come out the VAMPS come out to play.

It’s clearest in the filler at the end.