Will Toledo is a furry. He came out onstage in Brooklyn, dressed as Mortis Jackrabbit, a gasmasked mammal with a coat like an old fox. His eyes glowed, plucked from a Fallout dream. Limbering up to ‘Bodys’, one of the best songs by his quite good band, Car Seat Headrest – and we can only assume with a smirk beneath the mask – he looked as if he was just getting used to himself at last. “Do you realise,” he sang, “that our bodies could fall apart at any second?” With giant black paws, and rabbit ears hanging like a pair of tights trapped in a dumpster lid, he wiggled for the crowd, shook his tail, let a kick fly. “Those are you got some nice shoulders! I’d like to put my hands around them! I’d like to put my hands around them!” In the throes of a hymn to death and desire, he was undergoing a rebirth of sorts, proudly displaying his new body. Could we love it? Why shouldn’t we? They’re all the same, whether or not you would actually like to fuck a rabbit, claiming you took the wrong turn at Alberquerque.
It wasn’t the first time, though. Toledo debuted a prosaic version of Mortis at a show on 31st March: again in Brooklyn, somewhat less monstrously. Neither event should surprise you. The Car Seat fandom has been ahead of him forever. ‘Is Will Toledo a furry?’ has probably annoyed more hacks like me than we can comprehend; the backroom scribblers at Stereogum, Consequence of Sound, the Line of Best Fit, all tapping vapes in their pockets as the next SEO meeting comes around and they’re given topics to write about – the gunk to go with what they really want to write about – and ‘Will Toledo furry explain’ comes rolling out of the search-engine lottery that month, and they go, Jesus Christ, I don’t know, maybe? All while bands such as Squid and Spirit of the Beehive do better things like exist. So writers like me, they look at those keywords and the deep, ongoing speculation about whether a man wears a fur suit, draws the suit, and maybe finds it attractive, in fact likes it quite a bit, yet goes to great lengths to avoid the call of others like him – other furries – to just come out and admit it already because it’s good for them, it’ll dispel the nasty sex stuff, you know, all that mania about furries conked on nitrous oxide wandering the hall of a conference centre in nappies and waving to children who darkly and inevitably can’t eat Animal Crackers ever again – we look at the abiding interest in whether Will Toledo is a furry, and we go, Alright I’m going to move onto other material like 12 Reasons Why The Island Boys Are The Logical Conclusion Of Dada.
