“I Wanna See It Boil”: Satire as Eco-Political Performance in Talking Heads’s “(Nothing But) Flowers” (1988) and Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (2015)

Abstract

This article examines the use of satire in the song lyrics of two eco-themed pop songs: Talking Heads’s “(Nothing but) Flowers” (1988) and Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (2015). A close listening approach to these songs reveals ironic discrepancies between the experience produced by musical performance and the sentiments expressed in the song lyrics. A rhetorical framework informs how an examination of such discrepancies may enable new perceptions of the environmental theme to come to mind through what Charles A. Knight calls a satiric “frame of mind”. The satire in these songs not only targets attitudes to convey a moral judgment on them but also provokes audiences to undertake the task of self-examination. If successful, satire in popular song lyrics can contribute to the reconfiguration of listeners’ perceptions of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature.

1. Introduction

“And as things fell apart nobody paid much attention”.

(Talking Heads)

Overt environmentalism is rare in mainstream popular music. Song lyrics that thematize the relationship between humans and the nonhuman natural world often avoid a clear moral stance. A moral message may be concealed by irony, creating a space of ambiguity regarding environmentalism, but ambiguity in such cases is hardly neutral. Irony may be intentionally deployed to challenge perceptions of human attitudes towards the natural environment. Satirical songs set up dramatic personas to represent a moral outlook only to frustrate audience sympathies for such an outlook through exaggerated or subversive performances. The result is not an endorsement of an opposing moral outlook but rather a destabilization of any moral conclusion. Without providing a clear judgment on the attitudes being performed, satirical songs can provide an opportunity to reconfigure audience perceptions of the relationship between humans and their environment.

This article examines the song lyrics of two eco-conscious satirical songs: Talking Heads’s “(Nothing but) Flowers” Byrne et al. (1988) and Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (2015). These songs demonstrate two different approaches to satirical representation in song lyrics; each of them is appropriate to the environmental concerns of the time in which they were released. Talking Heads’s use of humor and carnivalesque intertextuality responding to naïve environmental discourse in the 1980s is contrasted with Anohni’s grave self-examination in the face of global warming politics in the 2010s. Informing my argument is a rhetorical framework in which these songs are viewed as directing listeners’ attention in a historical moment (Knight 2009; Eckstein 2010), where popular artists negotiate common perceptions of culturally significant events (e.g., climate change) to convey a critical outlook (Wodak 2018; Prior 2022). Meaning is not restricted to artistic intentions nor to initial receptions by fans. Songs take on a life separate to the context of their release, a process which is exacerbated through the fragmented consumption patterns of popular music in the streaming era. Contextual clues that guide interpretations at one historical moment may disappear over time, and developments in environmental and popular music discourses lead to new meanings being created. Therefore, satirical songs may hold the potential to develop contrary interpretations from their outset. Tellingly, the songs selected for analysis in this study have been perceived as both pro-environmental and anti-environmental statements by audiences and critics. For my analysis to be successful, I must reconcile such contradictory receptions. By applying close listening (cf. Bernstein 1998) to each of these songs, I consider how meaning on the isolated level of lyrics is altered in combination with musical performance. The fact that two such different approaches to environmental satire have yielded equally contradictory interpretations shows that the satirical form in popular music cannot be characterized by a simple binary of sincerity vs. irony, nor can it be considered to display moral univocality.

2. Popular Music and Satire

The listening experience is key to the creation of popular music. Artists must be attuned to their audiences’ perceptions in order to make songs that convey the right feeling (Moore 2012; BaileyShea 2021). Such attunement may be understood through an aesthetics of the performative. Artists composing music are aware that meaning is not ultimately determined on the level of the text but is rather the result of how performers and audiences connect in a shared engagement with a performance (Fischer-Lichte 2008; see also Small 1998 on the related concept of “musicking”). Recorded songs are adjusted across several stages, from the initial idea to the finished song, through processes of musical collaboration (with co-writers, bandmates, producers, and sound mixers, among others). Song lyrics must be understood not simply as an autonomous poetic expression of the main songwriter (Frith 1989; Negus 1996) but musically as a product of the complex processes of musical creation in social networks (Cohen 1993) and rhetorically as a communicative act connecting the artist and the audience through highly codified systems of meaning (Nattiez 1990; Middleton 1990; Hawkins 2002; Brackett 2016). Lyrics may be written by a single songwriter, but lyric words are generally polysemous. Complementarity and discrepancy between the levels of lyric words and musical performance may impose certain semantic connections in relation to some words while increasing the associative potential of others. Essentially, the meaning of song lyrics does not reside in the lyrics alone; rather, it resides on the level of the song. As observed by Simon Frith, “a song does not exist to convey the meaning of the words—rather, words exist to convey the meaning of the song” (Frith 1998, p. 166).

Rhetorically, song lyrics may be regarded as having an epideictic function. Inherent in the lyric form is an invitation to partake in the lyrical address and thus to co-inhabit the space of a lyrical sentiment (Rabaté 2017). Musical performance has the potential to align the perceptions of an artist and their audience via parallel framing of the listening experience. It is this way of conveying meaning through a framework of experience that makes popular song lyrics a viable framework for satire. Satire’s epideictic function and the epideictic form of song lyrics converge in environmental songs. In both cases, epideixis seeks to connect the values of the speaker and their audience (whether the connection results in the convergence of values or critical confrontation). It is this engagement that separates satire from the various techniques that may be applied to it, such as humor, caricature, or parody (see Gilmore 2018). When successful, investment in the satirical framework compels audiences to reconsider their own attitudes regarding the satirical object.

The epideictic function takes its most extreme form in the context of popular music when it makes listeners sing along. The catchy rhythms and simple melodies of popular songs comprise a powerful impetus for singing along, and this often happens without paying attention to the meaning of the words at all (Kramer 2002; Bamle 2024). It is clearly not the case that singing along is an endorsement of a song’s meaning (Whiteley 1992; Negus 2007), but the musical incitement to participate provides an opportunity for satirical engagement. Some satirical characters may simultaneously appeal to us and make us want to keep our distance. Sometimes, we start to sing along before we realize that we do not support the message expressed in the lyrics, and we may continue to sing along even after we have realized our mistake. The practice of singing along can detach lyrics from their semantic meaning, but, in turn, the practice can also affirm the relationship between the audience and the artist. Participation in the act of singing is related to dancing in that it lets listeners partake not only in the articulation of words but also in the emotive movement of the song. The implications of this include a subversive potential that may be utilized in satirical songs.

Traditionally, satire has been conceived in terms of a narrow understanding of its rhetorical function, as the moral indignation of a clearly targeted person, institution, or attitude through humor and irony. But rhetoric does not need to be conceived only in terms of persuasion. Dustin Griffin (1994) argues against conventional conceptions of satire as a clearly articulated and targeted moral judgment, suggesting instead that satire serves to provide inquiry and provocation rather than moral instruction and punishment. In moral discourse, good and bad are simple, but this is not always what we see in satire (Griffin 1994, p. 37). Rather, satire can be conceived as a dialectical process of representation and counter representation as a means for detecting errors and finding truth.

Griffin’s account of satire draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose study of Menippean satire as a precursor to the modern novel highlights the distinction between “monologic” works, which “pretend to possess a ready-made truth”, and “dialogical” works, which involve “searching for truth” in a process of “dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin [1929] 1984, p. 110). In tying the search for truth to a dialogical process of interaction, Griffin shows how even the lyric satires of Horace may be considered dialogic through a strategy of moral “bracketing”: “Horace proceeds by constructing a strongly moralized discourse but then “brackets” it by placing it in the mouth of an interlocutor” (Griffin 1994, p. 43). The speaker in a lyric verse may be considered to be a fictional character, represented by but not to be identified with the artist. Such a bracketing strategy creates two simultaneous and contradictory possible meanings, enabling a “polyphony” of voices that may participate in a dialogical exchange. As I will show, polyphony in a strictly musical sense (i.e., having several melodic, rhythmic, and vocal movements occurring at the same time) supports this Bakhtinian concept of polyphony. The ambiguous embodiment of a character through performance is easily recognizable in the theatrical performance style of Talking Heads, whereas the moral bracketing of a fictional speaker is less clear in the case of Anohni due to her insistence that the speaker of her lyrics is in effect the product of self-examination.

We arrive at the assessment of the effect that satire has in the context of song lyric performance on the perception of environmental themes through what Charles A. Knight (2009) calls a satiric “frame of mind”. Directing the attention of the listener towards the object of satire entails a framing of the perception of this object. Satire seeks to reveal the qualities of its object in a way so skewed that it forces a new judgment on it (Knight 2009, p. 3). However, due to the dialogical effect of its representation, the correction of perception by way of satire can only result in the generation of a new unstable ground, where the correction itself is ultimately offset. The songwriter’s framing of ideas through representation in the context of musical performance allows listeners to assimilate the attitudes represented. But this effect is not an equivocal judgment of the attitude as inherently good or evil. The representation may be too complex or overlapping in part with the attitudes held by the audience themselves to wholeheartedly embrace or reject. Instead, engagement with these representations serves to put the audience in a satirical frame of mind, from which further engagement with the target attitude can lead to either criticism or recognition.

3. Polyphonic Satire in Talking Heads’s “(Nothing But) Flowers” (1988)

The musical composition of Talking Heads’s “(Nothing but) Flowers” (1988) appears to be at odds with the song’s articulated content. Its playful worldbeat rhythms and lighthearted melody contrast with the lyrical representation of anti-environmental discontent. The lyrics establish a fictional futuristic setting, in which the speaker decries nature’s reclamation of urban civilization. Countering the environmentalist message of Joni Mitchell’s (1970) “Big Yellow Taxi”, the speaker’s lamentation of natural flourish is exemplified in sloganistic lines: “Once there were parking lots/Now it’s a peaceful oasis”, or as reformulated by Phil Adams, “They pulled down the parking lot and put up a paradise. (Apologies to Joni Mitchell)” (Adams 2015). The lyrics are clearly expressive of an anti-environmentalist sentiment. Against this, the persisting jollity of the music suggests that the dramatic persona in “(Nothing but) Flowers” is incongruous with the overall message of the song. We cannot conclude that the song endorses the position of its speaker.

Talking Heads’s lead man and lyricist David Byrne is known to be an environmentalist. There have been images in the media of Byrne riding his bicycle through New York City since the early 1980s, and he even arrived at the prestigious Met Gala on his bicycle in 2023 (Langkjær-Bain 2024). Although, as he writes in his book Bicycle Diaries, he does not ride his bicycle for the sake of green posturing, it does fit into a list of individual acts with admittedly small but clear environmental benefits (Byrne 2009, p. 276). In a recent interview with Imagine5 Magazine, Byrne expresses hope that humanity can adapt to ecological living: “Long term, I see hope in the fact that humans, maybe more than most animals, can change their behavior […] One hopes our lifestyles can change and we can abandon high-energy products (crypto! AI!) and fossil fuels.” (Langkjær-Bain 2024). Familiarity with Byrne’s position supports an ironic reading of the song’s lyrics. On the other hand, Byrne is also known to take on skewed values in his songs, obscuring his own meanings through characters. The light melodies and polyrhythms that indicatively subvert the speaker’s position are not ideologically clear nor are they particularly imposing on the listener. Suggesting a morally ambiguous background against which the speaker raises his own concerns, it is the speaker’s raising of their voice to be heard that appears ridiculous, not the music itself. In fact, the musical performance is a moral buffer zone, allowing for environmental as well as anti-environmental interpretations to be made.

There are plentiful discussions online as to whether the lyrics of “(Nothing but) Flowers” are in fact ironic. In the comments section of the song lyric database Genius.com (2014), user “ThinWhiteDuke” writes the following:

“I don’t believe that the lyricss [sic] are ironic in any way. Perhaps it goes hand in hand with growing up in a city, but seeing the beauty of urbanization is something Byrne was blessed with. Many people long for “natural” life, not realizing that the world we have is more beautiful than anything. Perhaps it is a form of ongoing nostalgia, but I could never enjoy living in nature; Mcdonald’s 7–11 and subways are more beautiful than any meadow or pond.”

Another user, called “pjhenry”, expresses a pessimistic outlook on the tension between environmental and anti-environmental meaning in the song:

“I think it mocks the popular fad about going back to nature, healthy lifestyle, etc. but at the same time, there remains a tension which is articulated by the fact that in the end we depend [on] nature and that our lifestyle, lifestyle maintained by the “nature” people not excluded, will ultimately lead to our own destruction as a civilization, because given our numbers, we will ultimately destroy every natural resource from long-term perspective. There is no ideal state of affair we can build, nor one we can return to. If we would really think things to their consequence, we would affirmatively sing togher [sic]: “If this is paradise I wish I had a lawn mower”.”

Others agree that there is a tint to the environmentalism offered in the song, that the song subverts the vision of an ecological utopia (Beviglia 2024), and that it lacks resolution, because although the speaker is in a sense ridiculous; his nostalgia for the comforts of urban life reminds us that the utopic vision of a return to nature may not be so attractive (Glickman 2017).

Ambiguities in song lyrics are simultaneously reinforced and made increasingly complex in a polyphonic composition. “(Nothing but) Flowers” is a collaborative effort. Byrne sings the lyric words. In addition to his bandmates who co-wrote the song (Chris Frantz on drums, Jerry Harrison on keyboard and guitar, and Tina Weymouth on bass) and co-producer Steve Lillywhite, there are several featured artists: Cameroonian guitarist Yves N’Djock and Cameroonian and Senegalian percussionists Brice Wassy and Abdou M’Boup, respectively, contribute to the African polyrhythmic style present in the song. The 12-string guitar of Johnny Marr (best known as the guitarist and co-songwriter of The Smiths) and singer Kirsty MacColl as a backup vocalist contribute a British New Wave influence to the song. Each member of the ensemble takes part in a musical negotiation surrounding the performance of the song. The overall sound of the recorded song is ultimately decided by the band and Lillywhite, but in this case, they have embraced an eclectic style, allowing for a plurality of sounds, rhythms, and voices to be heard.

The carefree funk rock atmosphere and benign melody in the key of C-major underscores the idyllic natural landscapes of the proposed setting. The opening words of the song describe a paradisal state of innocence: “Here we stand/like an Adam and Eve/Waterfalls/Garden of Eden”. The benevolence of nature continues for a few lines. A momentary melodic contrast occurs with the introduction of a B-major chord when the speaker introduces the concept of fossil fuels, in a line that reveals that the speaker’s attitude towards the natural environment may not be favorable after all: “From the age of the dinosaurs cars have run on gasoline”. By stating such an easily discredited fact, it becomes clear that the speaker is not entirely rational. In fact, he is overcome with emotion at the replacement of urban scenery with one dominated by nature: “where, where have they gone now?/There’s nothing but flowers”. The emphatic articulation of “where” and immediate repetition of the same word express fervency, suggesting a desperate outlook on the situation. The negative perspective of “nothing but” signals that the flowers are indeed something to be considered, but they are also the negation of everything else that the speaker values.

In the second verse, the speaker’s identification with urban civilization borders on the absurd: “Years ago/I was an angry young man/I’d pretend/that I was a billboard”. His fanciful deliberation turns into an infatuation with infrastructure: “I fell in love/with a beautiful highway”. The powerful emotion of romantic love is the position from which the speaker considers nature’s imposition as a threat to be resisted: “If this is paradise/I wish I had a lawnmower”. The animosity is emotional yet superficial. Reflecting on the landscape, the speaker polemically deems agriculture to belong to nature rather than civilization: “The highways and cars/were sacrificed for agriculture”. From an ecocritical perspective, this grouping together of agricultural and wild landscapes is dubious. Nevertheless, the image of cornfields serves metonymically as an image of life in close connection with the earth, contrasted with the comforts of industrialized society represented by pubs, fast food, and convenience stores: “I miss the Honky Tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-Elevens”.

The constant contrast between convenient utilities (“shopping mall”, “discount store”, and “microwaves”) and processed foods (“cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies”) with functional but unsatisfactory replacements from the natural world (“nuts and berries”, “flowers”, and “daisies”) throughout the song serves to establish the reclamation of society by natural elements as undesirable. The lines “we caught a rattle snake/now we got something for dinner” may be considered the speaker’s attempt to mock the situation, but the attempt is ultimately unconvincing as the persistent chanting of “you’ve got it/you’ve got it” in the background between each line is an exhausting display of counter-mockery. The chant becomes an increasingly unbearable friction against the position of the speaker until his final desperate proclamation: “Don’t leave me stranded here/I can’t get used to this lifestyle”.

Byrne’s vocal act is characteristic of Talking Heads’s career-defining take on reality as perceptual, as something that can be seen from multiple sides (Ellis 2008, pp. 160–65). The song may be seen as a comedic takedown of an anti-environmental position. However, it is not evident that it concludes with a simple environmentalist sentiment. The song holds up a mirror to contemporary life and shows that the comforts of industrialized society cannot be abandoned so easily. Western culture would have a hard time adapting to a post-urban ecological state. The ending of the song thus leaves us with an uneasy feeling. This denial of catharsis prefigures later eco-political responses in popular music. Western culture’s destructive habits continue to be a precious feature of our society, even in a time when ecological issues seem closer and more urgent than ever before.

4. Unstable Irony in Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (2016)

Anohni’s song “4 Degrees” is received by most as an environmental protest song, released as a single in connection with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris on 30 November 2015. The lyrics of this song do not condemn but rather embrace ecological disaster, expressing a desire to witness species extinction on account of global warming. The mismatch between lyric words and the commonly held interpretation of the song implies the use of irony. However, the simplistic view that the lyrics are not to be taken at face value conflicts with statements made by the artist, as well as critical interpretations of the song. In an interview with Jon Pareles of The New York Times, Anohni states the following:

“My idea with ‘4 Degrees’ was to articulate for a minute, not my ideal vision of how I wanted to perceive my relationship to nature, but the reality […] If I could give a voice to my behavior, what would that voice be? Taking planes, enjoying first-world fossil fuel, an addict of first-world comfort. So it’s not entirely ironic. There’s actually something kind of desperate about it, too.”

(Pareles 2016)

Referring to this quote and the effects of Anohni’s vocal performance, Tore Størvold argues that the song “unsettles any ironic reading of the lyrics” (Størvold 2025, p. 599). Without attributing the lyrics with irony, the song stands as a non-ironic statement of ecological antagonism that nevertheless serves environmental protest in the historical context of its release. I do not think, however, that the unsettling nature of ironic readings entirely disqualifies the common interpretation of the song. It may not be an insincere representation of the artist, but the use of satirical irony can be identified in the performance of an emotionally exaggerated dramatic persona.

Formerly known as Antony Hegarty (2015), fronting the chamber pop group Antony and the Johnsons, “4 Degrees” was the first single from Anohni’s solo debut album Hopelessness (2016), which signaled an artistic transformation towards a more confrontational pop sound, as well as a call to realign audience perceptions with Anohni’s own identity. A doubled electronic drum with a gated reverb effect opens what soon explodes into a symphonic synth pop track, complete with synthetic strings and fanfaring horns to highlight an emotively charged vocal. “4 Degrees” is not a polyphonic song. Although Anohni collaborated with producers Daniel Lopatin (also known as Oneohtrix Point Never) and Ross Brichard (also known as Hudson Mohawke), the resulting track is musically coherent. Satirical irony in this song does not lie in a discrepancy between lyric words and musical performance but rather in a subversion of expectations entirely focused on the level of performance. In contrast to “(Nothing but) Flowers”, the music of “4 Degrees” supports the lyrical celebration of species extinction, but few people would endorse such a sentiment, and especially not environmentalists. The song is a challenge to the moral reality of contemporary climate politics because it invites listeners to identify, through a coherent musical structure, with a perverse lyrical sentiment.

The most important element of the musical performance is Anohni’s unique vocal quality, which is characterized by the continuous use of vibrato, a rapid and “continuous trembling of the voice in a somewhat strained oscillation of pitch and loudness that appears to render audible pervasive variations in subglottal pressure” (Muchitsch 2023, p. 71). This style of vibrato carries connotations of artificiality in classical music theory but is more ambiguous in the context of popular music. Veronika Muchitsch (2023) has surveyed how this vocal technique has been conceived in popular music journalism. One particularly influential idea, which has its roots in Roland Barthes’s ([1972] 1977) influential essay “The Grain of the Voice”, is that the voice carries traces of the material body, which, in Anohni’s case, refers to her identity as transgender. Muchitsch argues that with this biologist assumption, Anohni’s “vocal figurations” become politicized in terms of gendered listening practices that have “discursively disembodied and dehumanized Anohni’s voice, and sexually and gendered other voices more broadly” (Muchitsch 2023, p. 71). Critics have described Anohni’s voice as too masculine to be female, too feminine to be male, as the vocal embodiment of human vulnerability, and as angelic or otherworldly. Anohni’s vocal is thus perceived to signal emotion with an ambiguous attitude towards material conditions, and such signals may be applied with purpose. The instrumental context obliges us to take the words of the speaker seriously. Every pathos-enabling use of “vocal figurations” must be considered a deliberate artistic choice with thematic importance.

The refrain “it’s only 4 degrees” refers to a threshold for global warming leading to worldwide ecological collapse, including high levels of food insecurity and half of all plant and animal species being at risk of extinction (IPCC 2014). In 2015, four degrees of warming since the pre-industrial era was predicted to be exceeded between 2080 and 2100 unless policies were implemented to reduce the rate of carbon emissions (ibid.). As the worst-case scenario, 4 degrees of global warming would lead to a tipping point, a situation in which adaptation is no longer possible (ibid.). It is a scientifically supported prospect of apocalypse. The sentiment of this lyric is tantamount to a millennial form of secular apocalypticism (Garrard 2023, p. 97). Instead of warning against the end of the world, the speaker is cheering it on. In its epideictic appeal to the listener, there is something highly uncomfortable. The song is a powerfully engaging dance track, but audiences who sing along become complicit in the impulse to see the destruction of the natural world. To Anohni, this reflects a symptom of Western culture. Ecological destruction is a truth we do not like to admit yet enthusiastically participate in bringing into being.

The song’s speaker is devoid of empathy for the natural world. The speaker establishes nature as other through the impersonal pronoun when referring to animals: “those lemurs”; “those tiny creatures”; “those rhinos”; and “those big mammals”. The musical performance underscores the distance between animals and the speaker. Anohni’s vocal in the second verse is harmonious, seemingly effortless in its transitions between high and low registers. There is a sense of purity in this performance. However, lyrically, it may be the most distressing verse of all, as it describes the graphic suffering of helpless animals: “I wanna hear the dogs crying for water/I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea/And all those lemurs and all those tiny creatures/I wanna see them burn, it’s only 4 degrees”. The final verse dispenses with the passivity of the observation and takes a proactive role in encouraging destruction: “I wanna burn them”; “let’s go, let’s go, it’s only 4 degrees!”. By this point, the attentive listener will surely have caught onto the irony of the performance. But taking the song as an exaggerated statement based on self-examination, listeners may also find that the song reveals a carefully concealed truth about themselves: their own behaviors entail a practical agreement with nature’s destruction.

Recalling Griffin (1994), satire serves a rhetoric of inquiry and provocation, leading the audience to raise questions rather than simply arrive at a predetermined endpoint. In traditional theory, satirists use irony as a weapon, but Griffin counters this view and states that irony is not a binary switch. It is not a question of whether or not irony figures in a satirical text but rather the degree to which it does (Griffin 1994, pp. 64–65). Furthermore, artists are not entirely in control of satiric irony. In some cases, listeners may be so enamored with a song that they overlook ironic intentions and endorse the wrong conclusion. This is why morally charged song lyrics can be performed with intensity and yet must retain a degree of moral ambiguity. The lyrical sentiment in “4 Degrees” is expressive of a deliberate and convinced dogmatic. There is irony in this expression, but it is unstable. Likewise, any degree of sincerity on the part of the artist is also unstable. The listener who is engaged in the construal of meaning via participation in the lyrical address must put the speaker of the lyrics in brackets, holding on to multiple possible interpretations in a satiric frame of mind. The enabled engagement thus allows the listener to take a critical view of themself by imagining themselves in the place of the speaker, entertaining the values represented by the speaker, and ultimately, hopefully, rejecting them. The truth about our practical impact on the environment is hidden from view in daily life. In a recent interview with Hrishikesh Hirway on the podcast Song Exploder, Anohni states the following:

“Because of the firewalls of capitalism, I’ve been shielded from the impacts of my daily footprint, in every seamless meal that I eat, in every distance that I travel”.

(Hegarty 2025)

It is a culturally pervasive denial that must be exposed by breaking down the walls of ordinary perception. Behavioral change based on self-examination ultimately depends on a desire to distance ourselves from our current habits. Satire does not simply result in behavioral change, but it may be able to help us take the initial steps towards a reconfiguration of perception.

5. Conclusions

Satirical songs encompass various attitudes. The songs examined in this article attack our perceptions through the representation of an attitude towards the natural world that is mismatched with our ordinary self-perceptions. In “(Nothing but) Flowers”, satire is performed in a way that ironizes the speech of a representative modern man through polyphonic musical performance. “4 Degrees” exhibits a clearly moral outlook, but one that is based on unstable irony. Listeners are inclined to perceive the lyrical sentiment as disingenuous, but as they engage with the song critically, prompted by participation in the vocal movements of the performance, they are challenged to examine their own lives in relation to the lyrics. Ideally, the discrepancy between the experience produced by musical performance and the sentiments expressed in song lyrics leads to a reconfiguration of the perceptions of the relationship between the people listening to these songs and the natural environment.