Satire, Sound, and Swine: The 2009 Flu Pandemic Goes (Musically) Viral

A pink pig puppet in a black and white striped hat with a bucolic background

News flash: “Swine flu breeds in pigs,” says announcer Anderson Cooper on CNN, and we flash through five flu alerts (including one interview with a masked couple) as we listen to the opening chords of “The Swine Flu Song,” posted to YouTube by PutnamPig in April 2009. Before we even make it to the first verse, we’re aware of the positionality of its creator. News anchors have been modified to judder, their mouths shaking in a visual equivalent of a musical trill, yet their anxious words proceed undoctored – except for the underscoring, of course. The news here is suspect, its narrative in question, the packaging of global media shown to be an artificial manipulation of reality. It is, in other words, an effective intro for a pop song about a problematic world event, written within a few days of the topic becoming international news.

And when we do get to the verse, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a satire, mocking the concept of Swine Flu as a whole and, even more, to the public narrative about the threat. The bulk of the text is delivered by a puppet pig wearing a black and white striped hat and an FBI shirt (! standing for “Bald Innocent” !), singing in a whiny and nasal Elmo-like voice, the timbre of which may haunt your dreams. That, coupled with the obsessive melodic repetition – relying on a pentatonic scale (degrees 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, a melodic language which avoids all the musically-directional half-steps) over and over and over again – creates a catchy-but-annoying landscape in which one’s brain knows exactly what to expect – and so slides its attention to the words.

Those words are quite remarkable too. From a textual standpoint, the song purports to be debunking the false claims leveled against the poor pig population. Pigs didn’t cause the swine flu, the song contends. It comes… from a lab. This is particularly funny if you happen to identify the musical inspiration behind the song – Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The claim here is much the same: if we’re culturally are not at fault for everything going wrong in society, well, pigs aren’t at fault for the swine flu either. The parallel is amusing.

PutnamPig’s version of the song has three verse sets, each of which includes four short quatrains linked together in a parallel structure (a1, a2; a1, a3). These, per standard pop-song format, alternate with a chorus. Structurally, after the beginning clips which orient us to the newsworthiness of the song, there are two more intercut news clips with continued harmonic underscore: one between the pairs of quatrains in the first set, and a much shorter one between the two pairs of the second set of verses. The overall structure is:

    News+Intro, Verse 1a, News, 1b, Chorus, 2a, News, 2b, Chorus, 3a, 3b, Chorus, Chorus, Outro

Image of Toot & Puddle

The first set of verses (1a through 1b) names a whole series of wholesome childrens’-book characters  as their images flash on screen; none, points out the song, have any symptoms:

Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffle,
neither has a little sniffle
Porky Pig and Pooh's Piglet,
No fever yet

Putnam, Gordy, Toot and Puddle,
Not contagious safe to snuggle
Ask Petunia Babe, Noelle
All of them feel well

The patter presentation, mostly presented recitationally, plus the regular rhyming and the attention-grabbing hiatus for Piglet at the cadential drop – “No fever yet” [pause] -- pulls us into children’s song landscape.

But we cut back to the news alert, “The World Health Organization says it appears to be spread from human to human.” That topic seems to inspire a shift of melodic structure, for the second pair of strophes of the first verse (1b) start out parallel to the first pair, but digress as the song starts to blame-storm. Instead of heading downward for the cadence as we did for Piglet, the melody (can we call the recited text a melody?) moves upwards to an anxious clangor: “Now it’s in the USA, No one's safe this day and age!” Hammered out in bad Elmo-esque whine with staccato 8th notes repeating the same pitch 14 times (with some intonation bending), we certainly get the idea of street-shouting, even though there is nominally only the single singer:

How it started I don't know
Stay away from Mexico
Now it's in the USA
No one's safe this day and age

Together, that verse 1 complex makes sense of an unfolding pandemic: everyone’s well, and when they’re not, well, perhaps intensification should be the go-to response:

But there is some relief, at least musically. That pentatonic melody from the beginning, that seemed really repetitive? By now we’re glad to have its multi-pitch variety return in as the music of the chorus. Having established a recitational style during the four quatrains of verse one, the contrast of style comes as a relief and enhances the chorus’s musical allure. 

The text context of the chorus, however, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy: “Pigs didn’t start the swine flu / Blame the laboratory / For this awful Story // Pigs didn't start the swine flu / No we've been betrayed /The strain appears man-made… “ With the punchline rhymes of “betrayed” and “manmade,” the song posits a nefarious origin rather than a porcine one.

The second set of verses also starts by shaping the melody to descend at the end of each quatrain, but as we approach the next blame-topic, we again elevate the pitch as we escalate the claims, again with the shouty reciting: “Run a temp and get the chills / Everyone run for the hills.” There’s truth buried in the text – no-one blames dogs, for instance. (That’s actually for good reason, though. For swine flu (H1N1), the transmission chain was human to dog, rather than the reverse, and normal canine influenzas, HDN8 and H3N2, don’t typically infect humans.)

The third set of strophes actually starts at the escalated and elevated pitch as if shouting rejection to its claims; instead of viewing pigs as “clean and pink,” the association of name with virus sticks in the mind. Of course, the same was true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968; there is a reason we have moved from location-based naming of diseases. As it happens, the World Health Organization’s guidance in 2015 – six years after the 2009 Swine Flu – suggested avoiding associative terms for new diseases, in part because they triggered the needless slaughter of food animals. The world is counseled to avoid:

    • geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever),
    • people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease),
    • species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox),
    • cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and
    • terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).

Putnam’s recommendations, it seems, were culturally resonant, and eventually acted upon!

As we move toward the end of the song, the third strophe’s second half follows the more familiar shape. It offers a lower first quatrain first, and then the by-now-familiar escalation, this time for the climax: “This disease it needs a name / Which animals should we defame / Nobody will likely mind / If we named it for an ugly swine.”

The song ends with two full statements of the chorus, and a long instrumental outro. Over the first part of the outro, Putnam speaks his final lines, which are, curiously, non-rhyming, conveying both a sense of intimate conversation (just him as speaker and the solitary listener listening to confidences that just happen to be picked up by microphone), and an authentic perspective after the highly stylized and structured main body:

The pigs are innocent I tell you / We didn't do anything wrong
We didn't start this disease / But we're taking all the blame.

With all that, have a listen to the whole song: 

PutnamPig, “The Swine Flu Song,” April 30, 2009

 

ORIGINS AND CONTEXT

PutnamPig (who goes only by that cognomen, even on Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving his/her/their actual identity private) is primarily a Minecraft account, and was set up a year before the swine flu pandemic. Even though coming to health commentary as a sidelight to their normal offerings, their swine flu song is remarkably well-aligned with sentiments of the time, and perhaps even prescient.

Two things strike me as particularly insightful.  First, the timeline of events, traced by Paul Shapshak et al. (2011) and Smallman (2015), shows that Putnam’s creator was actually quite forward-looking, writing about the flu before it was considered a global pandemic. The lyrics early on in the song point out that cases were now being found in the United States. This is a remarkably quick capture of the event that had actually justified the change of the disease’s status to stage 5, as the timeline shows. The song was posted just 8 days after the first national alert, and only four after the US declaration of a public health emergency:

• March 24-April 24, 2009: influenza infections in Mexico
• April 22: the Mexican government issues a national alert
• April 23: the US government announces 7 cases across Texas and California
• April 25: the Mexican government declares a public health emergency
• April 26: The US government declares a public health emergency
• April 27: H1N1 found in Europe
• April 29: WHO raises pandemic alert level to “phase 5” (with outbreaks at least two countries in one WHO region)
• April 30: Egypt announces a cull of pig herds
• APRIL 30: PutnamPig’s Swine Flu Song
• May 2, 2009 China suspended flights to Mexico
• June 12, 2009: WHO announces a full “phase 6” pandemic alert level
• August 10, 2010, the WHO declared an end to the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic

Or maybe that’s easier to see in the calendrical view – here, yellow is outbreak, blue is government action, and pink is the song’s debut:

A little more than a week from first government action to the song's debut

Likewise, the themes of the chorus – the purported laboratory origins and man-made release of the disease – align with many of the conspiracy theories Smallman (2015) was able to trace, including a cluster which called out Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s long-term involvement with Gilead Laboratories as a potential beneficiary of a global pandemic. They were, after all, the ones who owned TamiFlu. As they say, “Information” doesn’t have to be true to circulate widely on the internet. Smallman also implicates YouTube as a news source, finding that more than 15% of the 142 “news” videos examined from that first few months of the swine flu epidemic “called the outbreak a man-made conspiracy.”

PutnamPig’s “Swine Flu Song” stands as both a time capsule and a cultural artifact. Although it shares the relentlessly upbeat idiom of the Flying Fish Sailor’s confrontation with the past in “The Flu Pandemic Song” (which I wrote about last month), it differs in important ways, since the “Swine Flu Song” captures the anxieties, misinformation, and conspiratorial currents that swirled around the 2009 pandemic as it was happening. It is reportage, but reportage with a difference. Its rapid creation and viral spread underscore the speed with which music, satire, and digital media can shape public perception, particularly in moments of crisis. By setting news clips against an intentionally grating yet catchy melody, the song exposes the performative aspects of media-driven panic while, ironically, simultaneously participating in the same ecosystem of viral information. 

 

A decade and a half later, the song’s themes remain strikingly relevant, reminding us that the ways we frame disease – whether through news narratives or pop-cultural satire – carry real consequences for how societies respond to outbreaks, assign blame, and remember pandemics.

WORKS CITED:

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” from the album Storm Front (1989), with the chorus “We didn't start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire  / No, we didn't light it / But we tried to fight it...” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Billy Joel, mocking his own melody for “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3T8pbDcms 

Cynthia Cyrus, “Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor” [Blog Post], Silences and Sounds, Feb 26, 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/02/flu-music-as-mockery-flying-fish.html
 

History of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) outbreak of 2009:

• McCauley, M., Minsky, S. & Viswanath, K. The H1N1 pandemic: media frames, stigmatization and coping. BMC Public Health 13, 1116 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116; https://rdcu.be/eckME
• Shapshak, P., Chiappelli, F., Somboonwit, C. et al. The Influenza Pandemic of 2009. Mol Diag Ther 15, 63–81 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03256397, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03256397
• Smallman, Shawn C. “Whom do you trust? Doubt and conspiracy theories in the 2009 influenza pandemic.” Journal of International and Global Studies 6.2 (2015): article 1. https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=jigs

Phases of Pandemics explained: “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response: A WHO Guidance Document,” National Library of Medicine, NIH, from Pandemic Infleunza Preparedness and Response, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/

Visualizing Pandemics: “A visual history of pandemics,” World Economic Forum, Mar 15, 2020  https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/a-visual-history-of-pandemics/

WHO disease-naming guidelines: “WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases.” [Note for Media]. 8 May 2015.
https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases

 

Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor

Image from 1919 of three men in hospital beds, two with a head bandages

Music is a multi-purpose tool, and I appreciate its role in public health as a vehicle for advocacy and education. But it also has a sharp edge, one that mocks, satirizes, and even ridicules. Today, I want to explore this opposite side, in which music pokes fun – at public health efforts, at public concern, even at the sufferers of the illness themselves – as a potent human response to pandemics. And the flu in particular has drawn the attention of some deeply creative individuals as a topic for mockery. (So did COVID, but that’s a different discussion).

Why? In part, I think that this kind of “humorous take” is a form of catharsis. People process fear and loss in different ways, and graveyard humor is a useful presence in our lives. Musical humor is also, trenchantly, a tool for criticism, including political and social criticism. Through laughter (or at least inner grins), it gives us a space to contemplate the otherwise unthinkable. That people or policies were in fact horrid. That wisdom is not always the guiding hand on the decision tiller. That casual cruelty is sanctioned, and even rewarded. That suffering has been ignored – or even dismissed. “We sing about what we cannot talk about,” say the AIDS educators (McNeil). The same seems to be true in the context of other major medical disasters as well. We sing when we cannot agree. We also sing when we wish to revisit that which we wish to forget.

These humorous takes can have a strong downside, of course. They can reinforce stigma or ridicule those suffering, trivializing real harm. That they do so with a wink and a nod makes us complicit; as viewers, we give mental real-estate to the position that these songs take. And thus, we join the jeering crowds. Miguel Mera argues that “For an audience to find something funny, they must be complicit in this anticipation; they must expect what you predict them to expect.” As we take pleasure in the subversion – anticipation followed by the twist, the dislocation, the joy of the unexpected – we move beyond our own moral narratives to join in the fun. Until we don’t, or at least, until we wish we hadn’t. The line between satire and insensitivity is always thin, especially when illness is involved. Yet clearly “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they said that” can go hand in hand with our urge to share. (Waves hand broadly at the internet.)

I offer these observations with direct knowledge aforethought that I am about to partake consciously and deliberately in that ambiguous space of sharing the uncomfortable. I disapprove of the happy message, for instance, of “The Flu Pandemic Song,” a song written and performed by The Flying Fish Sailors from Houston, TX. The repeated cheery refrain, “And they died, died, died” should be nothing to smile at. Yet die they did, those victims of the 1918-19 flu in its various waves. (Old estimates of 20 million dead have been updated since the time that Greg Henkel wrote the song to reflect more geographically diverse parameters; current consensus suggests that the death count was closer to 50 Million dead.)

This song partakes fully in the Flying Fish Sailors’ motto "Happy Music For Happy People," unless, of course, one actually attends to the lyrics. Why am I smiling about millions of deaths? Ugh, but ugh with a guilty sense of pleasure. Warning: it’s an earworm... 

That jaunty chorus may well haunt me forever. The major key and simple harmonic structures, the plain and singable melody with its high sense of motivic unity, all combine to make for a kiddy-song feel far removed from the actual meaning of the chorus:

It was the flu pandemic
And it swept the whole world wide
It caught soldiers and civilians
And they died, died, died!
Whether they’re lying in the trenches
Or lying in their beds
Twenty million of them got it
And they’re dead, dead, dead!

Once you’ve heard it, you’re stuck with it, complicit in its knowledge, and complicit in enjoying the receipt of this knowledge. (“The Flu Pandemic Song” is “Infuriatingly catchy,” as Mera once said of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers). Here we are together, grinning about the horrors of the past. And here I am, laughing along. Why?

I think that the very moment of discomfort that we experience in such songs is asking us to ask an important question. Why is it that we haven’t thought so much about the nature of this historical crisis? I mean, whether it was 20 million or 50 million dead, it isn’t the sort of thing we should go around forgetting, right? So the song serves yet another function beyond critique or catharsis: it reminds us that we need to be witness to the full scope of human experience, including the deaths – in the hospitals, the trenches, and the far reaches of the globe.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate function of songs like this: not just critique, not just catharsis, but confrontation with the past. These songs refuse to let us look away. To me, the persistence of musical mockery in times of sickness suggests that humor, even in its most irreverent forms, is a deeply human response to the chaos of disease. Whether it’s a medieval plague song, a 20th-century blues lament, or a 21st-century viral TikTok, music helps us laugh—even when (especially when?) we probably shouldn’t. 

WORKS CITED: 

• Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York : Viking, 2004. 
• Marrin, Albert. Very, very, very dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
• McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 
• Mera, Miguel. “Is Funny Music Funny? Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113. 
• The Flying Fish Sailors [Website.] https://www.flyingfishsailors.com/, consulted 2/26/25.