[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21st century life!]
On five
pop songs that call upon this technology.
1)
“Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (1972):
One of the more interesting lost elements of telephone technology is the role of
the switchboard operator, that unseen middle person on whom callers
relied for decades to make their connections. While I believe that role had significantly
lessened by the 1970s (I certainly never had to speak to an
operator to make a phone call), both of my first two songs use it in a
compelling symbolic way, with Jim Croce’s 1972 ballad featuring a speaker who
spills his emotions over a breakup to an apparently quite sympathetic operator.
2)
“Switchboard Susan” (1979):
Nick Lowe’s speaker addresses the switchboard operator even more directly and
spills some emotions as well, but in a quite different tone than that of
Croce’s ballad. In an attempt to pick up this “greater little operator” with
whose “ringing tone” he “fell in love” immediately, that speaker resorts to a
series of increasingly desperate telephonic double entendres, including
(apropros of the week’s inspiration) “When I’m near you girl I get an
extension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.” What more is
there to say about that?
3)
“867-5309/Jenny” (1981):
As operators faded away, wannabe callers could dial their desired numbers
directly—but this former teenage dialer can confirm that it’s not always easy
to go through with the call. That’s one telephonic lesson of one-hit wonder
Tommy Tutone’s 1980s smash: with the line “I tried to call you before but I
lose my nerve” he succinctly sums up that painful experience of ending a call
mid-dial. But Tutone’s song also illustrates another side to the topic I talked
about with Scream yesterday—the way
the phone can connect us to strangers. In horror films that’s a threatening
proposition, but as “number[s] on the wall” like Jenny’s suggest, it can be an
enticing one as well.
4)
“Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth
with Money in My Hand” (1996): Sometimes the phone lets us down,
though. I’m sure there are other pop songs which also use the distinctive (if
perhaps now outdated) sounds of telephone calls falling to connect, but I don’t
know of any off-hand. And in any case, this Primitive Radio Gods track with one
of the longest titles in pop music history is a true original, in sound and
sound effects as well as in lyrics.
5)
“Telephone” (2009):
Music videos were of course already a thing in 1996 (and even in 1981), but
over the subsequent decades they’ve become more and more fully a genre unto
themselves, as illustrated by that hyperlinked short film for Lady Gaga and
Beyoncé’s “Telephone.” To be honest, that video is far more interesting than
(and quite fully distinct from) the song. But I did want to note that even in
our cell phone/smartphone age, the trope of a phone call (answered or
unanswered) to represent the highs and lows of a romantic relationship remains
very much in force in pop music.
Next
famous phone call tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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