Paper short abstract

This paper explores how pop songs narrate nature through the elements of water and light. It examines how these elements activate emotions of hope and ambivalence, and how multimodal aesthetics of music, lyrics, and images shape elemental agency in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how popular music narrates nature through the elements of water and light, and how emotions are activated in this process. Elements have long served as mediators between humans and the more-than-human world, shaping cultural imaginaries of nature through symbolic, aesthetic, and affective associations. Among them, water and light occupy a particularly strong position: across cultural traditions they are linked to renewal, orientation, and hope, providing some of the most enduring metaphors of emotional experience. Popular music continues this tradition, but in ways that both reinforce and challenge inherited meanings.

In the context of the Anthropocene, these elemental associations become increasingly complex. Water emerges not only as a cleansing or flowing presence but also as flood, drought, or overwhelming ocean; light signifies not only guidance and awakening but also blinding intensity, artificial excess, or destructive heat. Through such shifting representations, pop songs produce ambivalent narratives of nature in which hope and crisis, orientation and disorientation, appear inseparably intertwined.

Popular music is a particularly productive site for this analysis because it enacts nature not solely through words but through multimodal narration: lyrics, sound, rhythm, performance, and visual layers such as album art and music videos. Within this interplay, water and light function not merely as metaphors but as elemental agents, shaping affective atmospheres and structuring experiences of nature.

Methodologically, the study combines metaphor, affective, and visual analysis. It shows how pop music mobilizes water and light to negotiate the emotional infrastructures of hope in times of ecological crisis.