If you think about it, the 2020 pandemic gave us a rare opportunity to watch cultural amnesia in action. What was a moment of total shut-down in one season became, almost unbelievably, an “eh, meh, keep going” in another.
Kim and Penn Holderness combined that seeming illogic in “We don’t talk about COVID,” based on the rampaging hit from Encanto. It’s one of my favorite pandemic artifacts, part musical parody, part documentary. The video layers six tracks of self-harmonized vocals (including the cheek-popping “bongo” slap-track), interspersed with conversational fragments that are just as revealing as the lyrics themselves.
What they’re documenting isn’t just confusion; it’s adaptation. Or maybe something stranger.
Kim: “Half the school has COVID.”
Penn: “So I guess we’re just sending them to school?”
Kim: “That’s what it says.”
Penn - “So I guess that's what we're doing.”
That’s not denial, exactly. It’s not ignorance either. It’s something like… functional forgetting.
The weirdness of living through it
Puzzling and changeable guidelines, the loss of a million tests to poor inventory management, worries about exposure, and the incredible numbers of repeat cases: all of these are part of the pandemic experience.
And yet you pack a lunch for your kids and send them off to school while trying to manage the chat stream of who has come down with it. Contagion has become an everyday commonplace, not something to react to.
The song captures that dissonance:
“We don’t know how to act
’Cuz they say the strain’s not as bad
So we just all kind of move along…”
There’s a truth in that. The world blows up; we all just kind of move along. Apparently, the 2020s are just that way.
Cultural amnesia as a historical force
Everyone kept saying that we were living in unprecedented times, but actually, there’s precedent floating out there.
After the 1918 influenza pandemic—one of the deadliest events in modern history—public memory faded with astonishing speed. Historians have called it “America’s forgotten pandemic.” It took a century—a CENTURY—for Philadelphia to memorialize the dead. (The outcome of that memorial initiative was lovely, though—go listen to David Lang’s “Protect Yourself from Infectionm” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejY4xvJQxtU)
The same thing happened, in a different way, during the Black Death. Cultural production—music, manuscripts, daily routines—continued with an eerie sense of continuity, as if the catastrophe could be bracketed off from ordinary life.
Even medical advice at the time went to the ostrich place: don’t dwell on death, surround yourself with pleasant things, keep your mind occupied.
In other words, don’t talk about it.
What we choose not to notice
Jenny Odell writes that “patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves.”
By 2022 (and even more so by 2024 and beyond), COVID didn’t disappear. The data didn’t vanish. In fact, excess deaths and undercounted mortality suggest the opposite—that the pandemic’s impact remained both real and, in some ways, uncalculated.
What changed was attention. Dashboards moved. Color codes softened. Testing declined. The signals were still there, but harder—or less socially necessary—to see.
We adapted our perception in a reversion to the mean. We wanted normal back. So we re-created normal.
The mechanics of forgetting
It turns out that there is a cluster of “amnesogenic practices”—ways cultures actively produce forgetting:
Ignoring (we stop talking about it)
Functional replacement (we replace one meaning with another)
Hyperstimulation (we fixate so intensely that meaning collapses)
To my eye, “We don’t talk about COVID” actually employ all three amnesogenic practices at once. Working backwards through the list, I find the song to be a kind of hyperstimulation—fast, funny, and dense with references and knowing “a-ha” moments. Its narrative shows functional replacement in action: COVID shifts from existential threat to background condition; it has been reclassified as the new normal. And, of course, the song refrain is all about silence. Our complicit, somewhat bewildered silence.
Is forgetting a problem?
Nietzsche argued that forgetting isn’t just inevitable—it’s necessary. A healthy individual (or culture) needs both memory and the ability to let things recede.
There’s even an argument that forgetting helps us function: it allows us to move forward, to act, to live.
And you can hear that in the Holdernesses’ closing conversation:
“We’re doing the best we can… but isn’t it weird?”
It is weird. But it’s also survivable.
Nostalgia, a so-weird nostalgia
What surprises me most, watching this now, is the feeling it produces.
The upbeat tempo. The tight harmonies. The shared confusion.
It’s… nostalgic.
Which is a strange thing to feel about a global crisis that, in many ways, hasn’t cleanly ended. Long Covid is still a thing; my students suffer from brain fog; we check the wastewater measures regularly to decide whether or not we’re comfortable eating out; we wear masks to concerts and the theatre, and on and on and on.
In that way, 2022 seems cleaner. At that point, we still had a working public health system that informed us about Covid spikes, and it was considered okay to be Covid-cautious. And it wasn’t the firehose of 2026, which has been, shall we just call it “a period of higher crisis density.” And yes, we do still have Covid and flu and brain-fog concerns—my students were chatting about those things just yesterday. But we talk as if Covid has gone away. No, we’ve just adapted to a higher level of “background deaths.” This isn’t the post-pandemic I had hoped for.
Talking about not talking
The song ends with a joke, but also with a paradox:
“Our three-minute song about not talking about COVID… that was about COVID.”
Maybe that’s where we are culturally.
We don’t talk about COVID.
Except sometimes, even now, we still do.
And when we do, it’s often through humor, music, or fragments—forms that let us approach the thing without fully confronting it.
Which might not be denial.
It might just be how cultural memory works.
TRANSCRIPT: “We don’t talk about COVID,” Holderness Family Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf-8rEK63eg Post of Jan 12,
2022, #encanto #parody #bruno
(man
harmonizing)
Kim - Hey did you see half the school has
COVID.
Penn - So I guess we're just sending them to school?
Kim
- That's what it says.
Penn - So I guess that's what we're
doing.
We don’t talk about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk about COVID, BUT
We were online tonight (We were online tonight)
Saw that the cases spiked
Like way off the page, that seems wrong (That does seem so very wrong)
We don’t know how to act
Cuz they say the strain’s not as bad
So we just all kind of move along (Should we really move along?)
Now we have zero clue what’s next (What comes after Omicron?)
Where can you even find a test? (In a warehouse in Florida)
And so I guess we think it’s best (It’s the elephant in the room)
That we don’t talk about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk about COVID
So many debates about vaxxin’ and maskin’
We just trying to shorten how long this is lastin’
Never knew how good we had it before (Shh shh)
And all the new guidelines
Seem kinda puzzling
People don’t care
I don’t know if that’s troubling
We are all trying just to do the best we can
Isn’t everyone, man?
Kim - We're doing the best we can. But isn't is weird everybody's getting it but we're like "Eh. Keep on moving"?
Six feet away, I was talking to a dad
And now he has a cold
And he’s coughing really bad
We were outside, not enclosed
But was I exposed?
Who knows?
We don’t talk about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk about COVID
Our friends went to New York
The next day, COVID
Another friend has not gone anywhere
But COVID detected
So many friends got COVID last year
And they got it again
I’m at the point where I just don’t understand
C – D – C, they told us recently
To shorten isolation time
If ya not super sick or you been on a ship
After 5 days I guess you are fine
Then our kids went to school
And I guess that it’s all cool
Half their friends are out sick
But they don’t close the school
Like they used to do
They just kind of don’t talk about it…
Kim - And scene!
Penn - Yes.
Kim - So that's our song, our three-minute song about not talking about COVID that was about COVID.
Penn - But like we have to talk about this a little bit; isn't it weird?
Kim - It is weird that in 2020 there was one case in our county and we shut everything down.
Penn - Right.
Kim - And then now, like most of the kids, like we're getting just like blown up.
Penn - Everyday.
Kim - With alerts from our kids' school about teachers and students that are sick. And we're just like "We're gonna, okay, here's your lunch. I guess we're just doing this".
Penn - And I guess the vaccines help but it makes it easier to go there. But isn't it weird how different.
Kim - And we're just not talking about it. And we're just going on with life.
Penn – Under the rug.
Kim - I get it, look, I'm sick of talking about it.
Penn - Anyway, the moral of this song is watch Encanto.
Kim - No.
Penn - It's really good. Well, I'm just, sorry. Watch Encanto.
Kim - No, now you sound like a white guy trying to say.
(popping)
Penn - I'm gonna just. I'm gonna loop this.
Producer- Yeah, I was like "Do we need to" (laughs).
Penn - No, it's starting to hurt.
Producer- Yeah, like you're slapping yourself.
Penn - But it does sound like bongos.
Producer - It does.
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