Hantavirus Meets the Song World: Four Songs and a News Cycle

Once upon a time five days ago, we were all learning a lot about hantavirus.

Of course, five days is not enough time to know something deeply. It is barely enough time for a news story to become recognizable. But it is more than enough time for a word to become searchable, alarming, singable, misheard, politicized, mocked, explained, and folded into pandemic memory.

So here we are in early May 2026, when hantavirus – we hope briefly! – became a live global news event. The immediate story centered on the MV Hondius, a cruise ship (yes, another cruise ship story) associated with an outbreak of the Andes strain of hantavirus. News stories breathlessly explored the deaths, the quarantines, the returning passengers, the national health agencies, the question of person-to-person transmission, and the repeated official reassurance that this was not another COVID-style pandemic. The public risk, experts said again and again, was low. But “low risk” is not the same thing as low affect. After COVID, outbreak language does not arrive neutrally. It comes already charged.

That charge can be seen in the data. Google Trends suggests that searches for “hantavirus” peaked around May 7–8. GDELT’s global news-volume curve rose across the same window and stayed elevated. Nexis Uni, meanwhile, shows indexed news stories continuing to accumulate through Monday, May 11, when the count reached its highest point in my search, after a lull over the weekend. So the three timelines do not line up neatly. Public searching crested before the archive of news coverage did. On May 7, “hantavirus” was not yet a retrospective topic. It was a live search object.

SONG 1

That matters because May 7 was also the upload date for Jonathan Mann’s “Look Out For The Hantavirus,” part of his long-running Song A Day project. (16 years is stick-to-it power writ large!) The song does not explain hantavirus. It does not tell us what the Andes strain is, how transmission works, or what public-health officials recommend. Instead, it catches the unstable middle of the news event: after the story has become recognizable, before it has settled into explanatory prose.

Mann’s song turns the pathogen’s name into a sound-world. Hantavirus becomes “haunter,” “hunter,” and finally something like “huntavirus.” The slippage matters. This is not just a song about a disease. It is a song about being pursued by disease news. The virus is named, misnamed, and renamed; it becomes a thing that hunts and haunts. The lyric fragments “each day is a year” and “no more parties” do a great deal of work. They return us to pandemic time: days stretched out beyond recognition, ordinary gathering suspended, the future both overfull and stalled.

The song’s images also move quickly beyond the cruise ship. “Guns and bombs,” “sun,” “dust,” “dinosaurs,” and an “imperial junkyard” pull hantavirus into a wider field of catastrophe. That may be scientifically excessive, but it is affectively precise. Pandemic memory doesn’t live inside tidy epidemiological categories. It links all sorts of things: virus, climate, war, misinformation, environmental ruin, and the loss of ordinary sociability. This song catches the moment when a new virus does not have to become a pandemic to actually wind up sounding like one.

SONG 2

The next song I found took the opposite route. Ginger J’s “Covid-19 Part 2 (Hantavirus song),” posted May 8, is comic, sing-songy, and almost Tom Lehrer-ish in its boom-chuck momentum. It gives the story a jaunty explanation: ship, route, rat, virus, deaths, release of passengers, possible spread. Its hook is blunt: “Covid 19 part two.” That title is the entire interpretive mechanism. It does not wait to ask whether hantavirus is like COVID. It hears the news through COVID before the comparison can be medically corrected.

What makes the Ginger J song useful is that its comedy is not simply dismissive. It is the comedy of recognition. Cruise ship? Quarantine? Passengers allowed to leave? Possible global spread? People already dead? The song turns those details into a familiar little panic machine. The phrase “lockdown soon” is funny because it is (may it ever be so) disproportionate; it is also funny because it remembers how quickly the disproportionate became ordinary back in 2020. The song does not need to be epidemiologically fair in order to be historically revealing. It shows how quickly a new outbreak story reactivates old behavioral scripts. (For that more lighthearted (?) take, see also Putnam Pig https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/satire-sound-and-swine-2009-flu.html or the Flying Fish Sailors Satire, Sound, and Swine: The 2009 Flu Pandemic Goes (Musically) Viral)

SONG 3

By May 10, the story had entered a different register. The Story of Things uploaded “Hantavirus, They’re Not Telling You The Truth,” a LEGO rap that had gathered far more views than the other songs I found. This one begins as an explainer and becomes a conspiracy narrative. Its opening promises what the news supposedly withholds: “what’s actually behind it” and “what comes next.” The song moves from symptoms to mortality, from cruise ship to flights, from public-health reassurance to political accusation, and then into a wider architecture of hidden power.

This is where the news archive and the song archive start talking to each other. In my Nexis batch of news stories, 55 of 65 stories emphasized severity, death, hospitalization, or the lack of easy treatment. Forty-six carried reassurance as a major counter-frame: low risk, not COVID, not the next pandemic, do not panic. Thirty-two made explicit COVID or pandemic comparisons. This rap weaponizes precisely that gap between reassurance and history-that-bites. If officials say “low risk,” the song hears minimization. If experts say “not another COVID,” the song hears repetition. If the news explains, the song asks why the explanation is not enough.

The rap’s most revealing move is not that it becomes conspiratorial; that seems almost standard practice these days. No, it is that it makes conspiracy out of familiar pandemic ingredients: official statements, global travel, bodies on flights, absent vaccines, public-health infrastructure, political blame, and the suspicion that someone somewhere knows more than they said. Its refrain is epistemological: the problem is not only the virus, but the story around the virus. Who is telling it? Who refuses to tell it? Who profits from fear? Who gets to say “low risk”?

That is not my account of the outbreak, to be clear. It is the song’s account of mediated distrust. And that makes it inherently important. (I already mentioned Putnam Pig.) Pandemic culture did not produce only songs of comfort, solidarity, grief, and endurance. It also produced habits of suspicion. A new outbreak story, especially one involving a cruise ship, international travel, death, official reassurances, and no immediately available cure: we’ve got a hard-earned mechanism to hand to deal with that.

The echoes with COVID-19 are unmistakable. The rap’s most charged moments come when it treats official reassurance as repetition rather than information: “said don’t worry,” “said it’s fine,” “back in 2020.” That is where the song converts hantavirus into pandemic memory, textually and visually:

The issue is not only whether the Andes strain of hantavirus can spread between people, or whether passengers should have been quarantined longer, or whether the public risk really is low. The issue is that the phrases themselves have history. “Low risk” no longer sounds neutral; “don’t panic” no longer simply calms our fears. In the song’s logic, reassurance has become suspicious because it resembles earlier mistaken reassurances. The cruise ship, the scattered passengers, the absent vaccine, and the vulnerable lungs all become evidence in a larger story about institutions that fail, leaders who minimize, and publics across multiple continents being asked to trust too quickly. That makes the LEGO rap the darkest of the four examples: it shows how pandemic memory can become a hermeneutic of suspicion, turning every public-health statement into a possible cover story. It may not be medically true, but for many listeners, it is emotionally true. And that’s not a good thing.

SONG 4

The fourth song, Valtherion’s “Hantavirus: The Cruise Ship Killer Explained In A Song,” posted May 11, belongs to yet another mode: AI-assisted educational content. It’s my first knowingly consumed AI song, so let me dwell on this a moment. The channel is up-front about what it’s offering; the YouTube description announces that the music and vocals were generated using Suno AI, with audio and visuals also AI-generated, and that the facts were verified from CDC and WHO sources. This is not pandemic song as spontaneous response. It is pandemic song as content format: an explainer optimized for circulation, learning, and perhaps search.

Its title does a lot of work: “The Cruise Ship Killer Explained In A Song.” It promises drama and comprehension at once. The lyric fragments “No cure, no vaccine” and “know the science” make its double identity especially clear. It wants to be alarming enough to hold attention and responsible enough to count as educational. It turns the outbreak into a singable science brief.

That matters. Much of the news coverage did the same thing in prose. In the 65-story Nexis sample I reviewed, 61 stories functioned partly as mini-explainers. They defined hantavirus, described symptoms, explained transmission, named rodents, droppings, dust, lungs, kidneys, incubation periods, and risk. Sixty-three stories foregrounded rodents, dust, droppings, cleaning, or environmental exposure. Fifty-eight dealt with transmission uncertainty, especially the distinction between ordinary hantavirus transmission and the Andes strain’s capacity for person-to-person spread under conditions of close contact. The AI song does not depart from that archive. It condenses it into a content template.

The (problematic) news cycle and its song-based reflections

And then there is Jon Stewart. Love me some Jon Stewart.

The May 11 Daily Show segment is not one of the four songs, but it is too useful to ignore because he names the media structure that surrounds them. Stewart’s central joke is that hantavirus is not, in fact, the next COVID, but “try telling that to the news media.” The segment repeatedly stages a contest between expert reassurance and media panic. Experts say the public risk is low; the news asks whether this could be “the next pandemic.” Experts answer no, and yet the question returns, and returns again. The bit is funny because the loop is recognizable.

That loop also helps explain these songs. Mann catches the haunted atmosphere before it hardens. Ginger J turns the story into comic COVID déjà vu. The LEGO rap converts the reassurance/panic gap into conspiracy. Valtherion packages the outbreak as AI-assisted science education. Stewart then satirizes the very media system that makes all four responses legible: a system in which expert calm and headline panic can coexist indefinitely, each feeding the other.

The cruise ship is crucial here. News stories repeatedly made the MV Hondius into an outbreak-container: sealed, mobile, socially dense, nationally complicated, and easy to visualize. In my archive, 64 of 65 stories kept the cruise ship at the center. Sixty-two emphasized global movement: passengers, flights, ports, repatriations, returning travelers, national agencies. Forty-eight foregrounded quarantine, isolation, evacuation, docking, monitoring, or contact tracing. Even when the articles insisted that hantavirus was not COVID, the vocabulary revived COVID-era habits of reading. Who is exposed? Who can move? Who is isolated? Who decides? Who is reassured? Who remains afraid?

This is why the songs are not just a novelty response to a weird news story. They are small experiments in post-COVID hearing. They show what happens when a new outbreak enters a culture trained by pandemic experience to listen closely for signals of danger, denial, containment, mobility, and blame. We’re on heightened alert, and this news story -- in any format, from any media outlet -- delivers.

Of course, the four songs don’t agree with each other. Mann’s song is atmospheric and unstable. Ginger J’s is comic and immediate. The Story of Things is suspicious and accusatory. Valtherion is explanatory and machinic. But together, they form a tiny musical news cycle all their own: dread, joke, conspiracy, pedagogy. In less than a week, hantavirus passed from live-news object to singable object, from search term to content format.

To be honest, I do not think these songs tell us much about hantavirus as a disease. The news stories and public-health sources are better for that. But they do tell us a great deal about pandemic memory. They show that after COVID, outbreak news does not have to become pandemic reality in order to activate our latent pandemic feeling. A virus can be rare, contained, and low-risk to the general public, and still enter public imagination through the old portals: cruise ships, quarantine, no cure, no vaccine, passengers flying home, experts repeating themselves, news anchors asking whether we should panic, and people searching up scary terms late at night.

On May 7, hantavirus was not yet settled knowledge. It was still becoming a story. And that’s where music enters the interpretive field, explaining, expounding, riffing on the news of the day.

Because pandemic music does not only show us what people remembered. It also shows us how quickly those memories starts working again.

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Related Pandemic Music Posts

• Pandemic music: Collective memory
• Pandemic music: Cultural amnesia 
• Pandemic music: Humor trending into sarcasm 
• Pandemic music: Music as distraction 

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Tools Assessment

TL/DR on tools: 

1) for a fast-moving news-and-music project, use GDELT for the shape of the media event and public search attention summaries; Nexis Uni for the archival story set, and transcript tools for first-pass access to video text. Use Google News and its ilk as little as humanly possible. Double emphasis on "humanly."

2) To my jaundiced eye, the tool failure is part of the story: the same information environment that makes outbreak news instantly searchable also makes it harder to know what appeared when. There’s a reason that Lego song got so many hits.

Tool assessment, or how I spent Tuesday morning:

To be honest, this morning project also turned into a useful test of research tools for very recent news stories. And I wasn't entirely happy with what I learned.

GDELT Summary was new to me and genuinely useful. It was slow, and it took some fiddling, but it gave me the best visual sense of when the hantavirus story “popped” globally. Its value was not in giving me a final archive, but in showing the shape of the news event: early rise, spike, sustained attention. It also surfaced related stories, including an earlier Taiwanese outbreak and reminders of spring cleaning protocols, that helped me see that the cruise-ship outbreak did not emerge from nowhere. This site also contains a snapshot of Google Trends, which was useful for a different question. Instead of “how many stories were published?” it answers “when did people search?” That distinction matters. Search interest peaked around May 7–8, while Nexis coverage continued to build into Monday, May 11. This helped me place Jonathan Mann’s May 7 song at the hinge between public curiosity and institutional narration. https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary

Nexis Uni, through Vanderbilt’s library subscription, was the most useful tool for building a clean story archive. It let me run day-by-day searches, count stories, download batches, and identify the recurring emphases that make this story special. It was not perfect, and the Monday peak almost certainly reflects weekend publication, syndication, and indexing patterns as well as actual public attention. But as a source for dated, citable news items, it worked. (subscription based; sorry, general user...)

Google News and regular Google Search were together the least useful tool on the block, and I no longer will recommend either for this kind of work. They no longer behave like a reliable date-linked news archive. Even with date-range searching and AI-mitigated practices (shift of browser or &udm=14), each surfaced recent AI-curated or misdated material as though it belonged to earlier points in the story. For scholarly or semi-scholarly reconstruction, that is catastrophic. Take-away: Google is not a trustworthy way to reconstruct a news cycle. (Here’s my data notebook assessment from Coffee-O’clock this morning on the two googles: “Date range constrained searches were functionally meaningless from a scholarly point of view.” Not gonna link because, bah.)

NoteGPT’s "free YouTube transcript generator" was quick, easy, and helpful. It was especially useful for grabbing rough text from the YouTube songs and comedy segment. Caveat: song lyrics and auto-transcribed texts still need checking by ear. Puns, repeated choruses, proper names, and sung words are exactly where transcript tools tend to wobble. (https://notegpt.io/)

Music as Distraction: Pandemic Coping from Boccaccio to TikTok

If you think about it, pandemic music is not always about remembering. Sometimes it is about not remembering. Or at least not staring straight at the thing that threatens to take over the entire field of vision.

In my last post on pandemic music, I wrote about “We Don’t Talk About COVID” as cultural amnesia set to music: a funny song about the strange collective work of not talking about the very thing everyone was living through. This post sits beside that one, but I wanted to shift the emphasis from forgetting to distraction.

Distraction has a bad reputation. We tend to treat it as avoidance, superficiality, scattered attention, or moral failure. But in pandemic culture, distraction can also be care. It can create connection across distance. It can give people a way to process fear without naming fear directly. It can make time pass. It can keep the mind from circling endlessly around death, exposure, testing, transmission, quarantine, hospitalization, and all the ordinary logistics of trying to live through a crisis.

That does not mean distraction is innocent. It can help people survive. But on the flip side, it can also help societies stop noticing what they have decided not to change. That double function is what makes pandemic music interesting to me.

Humor is a way of making contact

One of the great early-pandemic genres was the parody song. Not polished comedy, exactly. More like: a familiar song, a shared situation, a webcam, a kitchen, a window, a joke about toilet paper or quarantine hair or the sudden weirdness of homebound life.

Chris Mann’s “Hello (from the Inside),” an Adele parody, is such a good example because its joke is structurally simple. Everyone already knows the emotional architecture of Adele’s “Hello”: distance, longing, melodrama, the impossible reach across separation. The parody barely needs to do anything before the old emotional machinery starts running in a new key. “Hello from the inside” is funny because it is obvious, and it is obvious because everyone suddenly understood the inside as a shared condition.

That kind of humor depends on recognizability. The viewer needs to know the original song, but also the situation: the isolation, the screen-mediated social life, the newly theatrical domestic interior. The window is not just scenery. It is the pandemic stage.

The Kiffness’s “Tequila,” redone by saying “Corona” instead, works differently. It is almost aggressively minimal. How little does a parody need in order to become funny? Apparently, not much. A single word-substitution can be enough when the cultural context does the rest of the work.

This is one of the strange efficiencies of pandemic humor. A song can be very small because the shared world is doing so much of the setup.

Thank you to my students for surfacing these particular examples, but as most of us remember, such parodies exist by the hundreds, and were broadly circulated, and “good ones” got hundreds of thousands of views, if not always the millions of Shirley Șerban or the Marsh family’s take on “One Day More.” “One more day all on my phone; one more selfie of me glaring.” Indeed.

Humor helps process fear, but it does not remove it

There is a reason so many of these songs hover near anxiety. “My Corona Home,” “Anti-bacterial Girl,” “Stayin’ Inside,” “Quarantine” parodies (like this or this or this), TikTok dances, handwashing songs, and endlessly circulated musical jokes all belong to a world in which people were trying to keep fear at a livable distance.

Humor did not mean people were not afraid. It meant fear had found a social form.

That distinction matters. In a crisis, funny songs are not just relief from seriousness. They are one way seriousness becomes shareable. A joke makes the feeling portable. A parody turns a private panic into something one can send to a friend. “This is us,” the link says. Or, “I hate that this is us.” Or, “I cannot believe this is us, but here we are.”

That is why pandemic humor often feels both silly and documentary. The joke records the room. The joke captures the mood of the room. Sometimes the joke is the room: the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the inside of a house suddenly forced to contain school, work, exercise, entertainment, worship, boredom, fear, family life, and the news.

Boccaccio already knew this

None of this is as new as it felt.

The Decameron is one of the great literary monuments to plague distraction. Its frame is familiar: seven young women and three young men flee plague-stricken Florence and pass the time with stories, songs, dances, conversation, gardens, meals, and a carefully organized social world. Boccaccio’s young people are not pretending plague does not exist. The frame depends on plague. But within that frame, they build a life where the mind can do something other than remain fixed on sickness and death.

What strikes me now is how musical that life is. The frame does not merely say, “They told stories.” It gives us a world of canzonets sung for delectation, dances after meals, songs with instruments, walking, gardens, games, and the rituals of taking turns. Music appears not as a decorative extra, but as part of the structure by which a small group preserves itself.

One could describe that as escapism. But that seems too thin. It is also social regulation. It is affective hygiene. It is time management. It is community-making. It is a way of keeping fear from becoming the only available form of attention.

Read carefully, the pattern hard to miss: in the Decameron, entertainments outnumber explicit disease references. There are songs, dances, walks, instruments, prayers, games, and repeated gestures of sociability; plague is the enclosing condition, but not always the named content. The disaster is everywhere, which is precisely why it does not have to be mentioned every minute.

Medieval doctors also knew this, which is frankly unnerving

Medieval and early modern plague advice often recommended what we might now call mood management. Don’t dwell on death. Avoid melancholy. Seek pleasant company. Hear pleasant things. Spend time in gardens. Use songs, stories, and delightful things that bring comfort.

That advice can sound absurd from a modern medical perspective. Songs do not stop Yersinia pestis. Pleasant stories do not replace public health. But the underlying observation is not foolish: fear is not neutral. Attention is not neutral. Sound is not neutral. A world saturated with death bells, offices for the dead, sickbed reports, rumors, and morbid talk can become its own kind of environment.

When a fourteenth-century physician recommends songs and minstrelsy, he is not inventing Spotify’s “calm” playlists, exactly. But he is recognizing a problem modern listeners know very well: when the mind is trapped in a loop, sound can help change the loop.

During COVID, many people did something similar with the tools at hand. They made playlists for baking, cleaning, work-from-home, sleep, calm, sadness, and background companionship. They learned TikTok dances. They layered up sea shanties (or even better the Wellerman version with Kermit the Frog). They joined virtual ensembles. They watched people they did not know make music from bedrooms and kitchens and stairwells. The point was not always aesthetic excellence. Often the point was, simply, to make time habitable.

Distraction as musicking

Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” is useful here because it shifts attention away from music as an object and toward music as relationship. Music is not only organized sound. It is also the people taking part, the social arrangements, the imagined relationships, the model of the world the performance proposes.

That helps explain why so many pandemic musical artifacts are not especially interesting if treated only as compositions. A TikTok dance with a parent in the kitchen is not analytically rich because of harmonic invention. Sea Shanty TikTok is not interesting only because of the tune. A virtual orchestra is not moving only because of repertoire.

They matter because of the relationships they stage.

A family learns a dance together. A stranger adds a bass line to another stranger’s melody. Cellists clap three times to synchronize their separate rooms into one performance. A parody singer turns isolation into a joke thousands of people recognize. A country singer names what it feels like to be “six feet apart.” A joke song about quarantine becomes a tiny public square.

Distraction, in this sense, is not solitary. Even when it happens alone, it imagines a set of relationships.

Comfort, memory, and the danger of moving on

But here is the problem: the same musical forms that help people endure crisis can also help them move past it too quickly.

That was the tension in “We Don’t Talk About COVID.” The song was funny because it captured exactly how adaptation felt from the inside. But it was unsettling because adaptation also meant normalization. Half the school has COVID, so pack the lunch. Guidelines changed, so keep moving. Exposure became ordinary. Confusion became ordinary. The song made that weirdness audible.

Distraction songs can do something similar. They help us survive the immediate moment, but they may also document the moment when survival quietly becomes “normal.” Baking playlists. Cleaning playlists. Work-from-home playlists. Family dances. Sea shanties. Quarantine parody. These are not trivial artifacts. They show how quickly people began building livable routines inside unlivable conditions.

That is not a criticism. It may even be the most human thing about them. I don’t know about you, but distraction songs were certainly part of my email economy during the height of “safer at home.” And I looked forward to them, and even contributed to a Pomona College glee-club reunion Danny Boy. (Nostalgia for Covid quarantine, now that’s a weirdness!)

But it is worth asking what happened to those routines afterward. Did they become memory? Nostalgia? Embarrassment? Digital clutter? Evidence? Did they help us process what we were living through, or did they help us defer processing it?

The joke is also an archive

One reason I keep circling pandemic humor is that it preserves things official records do not. Public health documents tell us about policies, recommendations, mortality, testing, quarantine, and institutional response. Parody songs tell us how those policies felt in the kitchen.

They record the absurdity of insufficient information. They record the pressure to remain cheerful. They record the mismatch between official guidance and lived reality. They record the shrinking of the world to a house, a screen, a delivery box, a phone notification, a playlist, a meme, a family video, a familiar song rewritten for unfamiliar circumstances.

This is also why pandemic humor should not be dismissed as mere distraction. “Mere” is doing too much work there. Distraction may be one of the ways in which a culture documents crisis without becoming overwhelmed by it. The joke allows us to approach the scary thing. The parody creates sufficient distance. The borrowed tune holds the feeling steady long enough to look at it.

Or, to put it another way: sometimes the way we avoid looking directly at something becomes the best evidence of what we could not bear to see.

What distraction knows

Pandemic distraction knows that fear is exhausting.

It knows that people need rhythm, repetition, jokes, songs, stories, dances, gardens, windows, screens, and other people.

It knows that the mind cannot live indefinitely at the pitch of emergency.

It knows that music is not always memorial, protest, worship, or art. Sometimes music is a pressure valve. Sometimes it is a bridge. Sometimes it is the thing you send to someone else because you cannot quite say, “I am scared,” but you can say, “This made me laugh.”

That does not make it less serious. It may make it more so.

Because in the end, pandemic music does not only show us what people remembered. It also shows us how they got through the long, liminal hours in the shade of crisis.

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Some examples of medieval medical advice in the face of plague:

• Listen to "songs, stories, and melodies" (Anon 5: 390)
• Listen to "comforting talk, pleasing songs, and sweetly harmonious sounds"; (Anon 6: 322, 336)
• “Hear pleasant things and attractive stories” (Giovanni di Donde, ca. 1350)
• “…make use of songs and minstrelsy and other pleasurable tales without tiring yourselves out, and all the delightful things that bring anyone comfort…” (Tommaso di Dino del Garbo, d. 1370)
• “Let us rejoice and delight in melodies, songs, stories and similar delights.“ (Salamanca, 1515)

We Don’t Talk About COVID”: Cultural Amnesia, Set to Music

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.

COVID’s Musical Humor: The Toilet Paper Chronicles

3 rolls of TP and a Coronavirus meme

Remember when the world shut down and all those folks panic-bought toilet paper like it was currency? Well, musicians noticed – and they didn’t miss a beat. (Puns in a humor column, be warned.)

Okay, okay, what follows isn’t really a chronicle. But the references to the repeated runs on toilet paper were a source of much musical and artistic mirth during COVID, with examples between March and June 2020.

First, a historical reminder of where we were (and also where we weren’t):

March 2020 marked the global realization that COVID-19 was not containable, leading to lockdowns, panic-buying (hello, toilet paper), and a sharp halt to public life. Even our local park was shuttered.

April and May brought a surreal new normal: stay-at-home orders, Zoom everything (sooooo much Zoom), homemade masks, and a flood of online creativity as people sought connection and levity amidst uncertainty.

By June 2020, public health messages competed with rising restlessness, cautious reopenings began in some places, and it became clear the pandemic wasn’t a sprint, but rather a marathon.

And in response? We did that very human thing, and drew on humor as a way of coping, critiquing, and commenting on the world around us.

Some of that humor was visual… 

Next, we have the “ridiculous uses of toilet paper” category, with freelance cellist Rylie Corral of Austin, Texas, participating in the toilet paper challenge. I know about it from the news story, but by March 20, 2020, her facebook video of the unconventional performance of Saint-Saëns “The Swan” (from The Carnival of the Animals) had already drawn 700K views and generated its own hashtag.

If unconventional or extreme uses of toilet paper aren’t quite your thing, you could go for the whole toilet paper in a comedy sketch usage, this one dated March 19, 2020. The “queue the toilet rolls” remark comes in later, after the introduction of the premise – British conductor/comedian Rainer Hersch running a rehearsal of The Coronavirus Concerto (“which is due to be canceled in two days time”) – along with its follow up about the musicians getting paid (ha ha, no). A chipper upbeat string melody together with a variety of body noises (coughing, wheezing, spitting, and so on) are the lighthearted backdrop to our view of Hersch as conductor, pelted by toilet paper rolls at the 1:16 mark…

There’s the obsessively questioning “Where’s My Toilet Paper,” the minimalist contribution by Tokyo-based Zombi-Chang (the composer Meirin’s solo project). This contribution to the “please stay home!” narrative for Japan was offered up on April 6, 2020, and – implicitly – reminds the viewer that shopping is not worth dying for.

There are also laments for the losses, such as the amusingly named “Ode de Toillette” [sic] subtitled “The Great COVID19 Walmart Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020- Bagpipe Tribute.” (Happy, this is not a smell-track, the ode/eau de pun not withstanding). This amazing (see what I did there?) tribute of “Amazing Grace” performed to the empty shelves by The New Hampshire Police Association Pipes & Drums had me in stitches back in the day – the video was posted on March 13, 2020, the date of the U.S. declaration of a national emergency for COVID.

Irreverent? Yes. Funny? Also yes, both for incongruity, and through inversion of expectation. We *would* come to need those bagpipe bands, and too many of them, alas. But a moment of levity in an empty Walmart aisle doesn’t preclude the subsequent serious mourning of real and tangible losses in those early days of the pandemic. Both responses, levity and lament, speak to the human condition.

Sometimes, toilet paper is just part of the bigger picture, as with rapper Todrick Hall’s “Mask, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs” (Apr 29, 2020), that humorous parody of the oh-so-popular “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels” of just one year before. In Corona times, the iterations of daily life are a bit different than they were in more sociable days-of-yore:

Left, right, left, right swiping on Tinder / What was life like? I can't remember / Need my haircut, somebody shave her / Where is all of the toilet paper?

Then there’s the incorporation of toilet paper as a focus of social dismay. “We’ve all seen the pictures of people online who seem to think they’re invincible,” starts the video by the technical death metal band Cattle Decapitation from April 1, 2020. “Well you’re not. Enough is enough. Go home and stay home.” And then the angry guitars start for “Bring Back the Plague.”

Here, toilet paper isn’t part of the lyrics, but it appears repeatedly as a visual signal of the “new normal” of extraordinary times – clutched on shopping sprees, rolling down the staircase, focus of a tug-of-war, an emptied roll in the bathroom. Bits and bobs of pandemic life are like the “where’s Waldo” of the COVID first wave. Tiger King and hand sanitizer, Spring break and lying on your couch with the TV remote: can you spot these details? Life was hard.

The energy and frustration at society’s glib and sometimes ridiculous responses – fighting over toilet paper packages, people, for real??? – brings the question of a lack of social accountability into juxtaposition with the unsettling idea that the “bacillus countless” are going to have their way with us whether we choose to accept that infectious reality or not.

Bring back the plague / Delete those that threaten a whole new world
Start today / Dig their graves, they'll find a way
To rid the world of finding new tomorrows 

If you aren’t part of the solution, suggests Cattle Decapitation you ARE the problem.

And perhaps the best of the best is the use of toilet paper rolls as found instruments. So I leave you with Netherlandish "designer and maker" Ruben Stelli’s June 2020 remake of the “Popcorn Song,” originally by Gershon Kingsley from his Music to Moog By album. You’ve heard it done by electronic instruments, now hear it performed by … toilet paper and its cardboard innards, used as found sounds.

Some days I think to myself, I just can’t make this stuff up; I’m not that creative!

Looking back, I actually think that these musical moments were more than just goofy distractions. Rather, these small acts of creativity in the midst of chaos made a claim to both artist and audience’s very own personal survivability. If you can laugh, you can cope. Whether through parody, protest, or bagpipe-laced lament, these songs and memes reminded us that we weren’t alone – even if the store shelves were empty.

Hope you got some joy from these samples from the past – and maybe a reminder for your next shopping list, just in case?