Animal Motifs / Music

• Babymetal has taken to using foxes as their motif coming from when their manager, Koba-metal, tried to teach the girls the metal horns, but they came up with the fox sign instead. In the band's backstory, they're chosen by the Fox God to unite the world through music. It's also become a catchphrase for the group, "Only the Fox God Knows."
• Clazziquai Project has pigs in all of its artwork, and they are also seen extensively in the video for "Sweety"; additionally, their debut album was named Instant Pig.
• Singer Christopher Cross has a flamingo featured in the artwork for all of his albums in some form. His logo also depicts a flamingo indented in the "O" in "Cross".
• Cormorant (unsurprisingly) have a lot of bird imagery, although serpents occasionally pop into their lyrics. The album Metazoa also mentions at least one animal in each song, but this was unintentional on their end.
• DMX's X persona constantly refers to himself and his gang as dogs, as well as barking and growling throughout his songs.
• Ariana Grande originally held cats as her motif, likely stemming from her work as Cat Valentine, but has adopted rabbits in her work, especially in the music video of "Dangerous Woman". The bunny-ears mask is particularly associated with her.
• Swedish group Katatonia has a lot of bird imagery in their album artwork and music videos.
• Each of the twelve LOONA members is assigned a representative animal that appears in her own solo music video. A map appears in the Girl Front music video decorated with animal stickers to represent the members and foreshadow unrevealed members. Yves plays with a claw machine in New that is filled with animal plushies, with the most focus on her own swan and YeoJin's frog. Go Won's animal is a butterfly, which reappears in the group's 2019 single, Butterfly, in various forms.
• Lovebites has a wolf that appears on all their album covers as their Metal Band Mascot.
• Mack the Knife is compared to a shark a few times in his song.
• Speaking of insect motifs, Papa Roach was known for its use of cockroaches in the cover for Infest, as well as their music videos, most notably "Between Angels and Insects", in which cockroaches come out of Jacoby Shaddix's mouth.
• Pink Floyd: Animals, taking inspiration from Animal Farm, uses different animals to represent different social castes in mid-'70s Britain. Dogs represent exploitative capitalist bigwigs, pigs represent corrupt politicians, and sheep represent the complacent masses, who will eventually rise up and overthrow the dogs (though conspicuously leaving the pigs alone, with the ending of "Sheep" implying that this leads to a Full-Circle Revolution).
• The music video for PSY's "Gangnam Style" has horses in it, most likely because it's funny.
• Radiohead came to adopt a stylized "Modified Bear" character as their mascot with the promotion for and release of Kid A in 2000; the character would reappear throughout the rest of the band's lifetime and act as a constant visual motif for them.
• Suede had quite a bit of animal imagery in their lyrics and music videos, with songs like "Animal Lover", "Animal Nitrate", "We are the Pigs", "Where the Pigs Don't Fly", etc.
• As of her reputation album, Taylor Swift seems to have adopted snakes as her animal of choice.
• Tears for Fears: Horses are prominent in the "No Small Thing" music video; the wild ones embody personal liberty whereas the domesticated ones embody social responsibility.
• Blue Butterfly by Violet UK uses the Butterfly of Death and Rebirth as its symbolism. An insect motif, but as there's no separate trope for insects yet...
• Roger Waters: In Amused to Death, the "What God Wants" trilogy uses a variety of animals to represent the audiences and allies of corrupt churches, with a monkey being common among them as "a symbol for anyone who's been sitting with his mouth open in front of the network and cable news for the last 10 years." The monkey also carries over to "Perfect Sense, Part I" and the album cover (where it's portrayed by a chimpanzee, an ape). In order, the trilogy also mentions beetles, springboks, jackasses, hyenas, vultures, magpies, raccoons, and groundhogs (the last four of which represent those who use organized religion as a means of generating profit).
• YUP's 1994 story album Toppatakkeja ja Toledon Terästä has a main character detective Henri Blavatsky with a mole motif, presenting the character as an one-man underground army on the second song of the album, Minä olen myyrä (I am a mole).
• Butterflies have been synonymous with Mariah Carey since the release of her album of the same name.

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