FEATURE:
I Just WhatsApped to Say I Quite Like You…
PHOTO CREDIT: Umut Sarıalan/Pexels
The Changing Nature of Communication and Romance Through Songs
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I think less and less…
PHOTO CREDIT: Anton/Pexels
there are fewer decelerations of love and real affection in mainstream music. You have certain artists who are Singer-Songwriter and write ballads. Maybe Pop still has that oldskool romance, yet the nature of deceleration and affection has changed. What is most noticeable is how communication has evolved through the years. The title of this feature refers to Stevie Wonder’s 1984 song, I Just Called to Say I Love You. The idea of someone calling someone up to say they love them. The idea of someone calling another personal full stop! Although Pop and other genres does still bring in the telephone and sometimes you get songs were lovers or friends are speaking and having that conversation, things have become less personal and more free-flowing. Not that this is a fresh observation. I just miss a certain something that has gone from music. Think of all the old songs where a phone was used. That thing where we’d we hear lovers’ calls and chat through song. The nostalgic nature of either using a home phone or a public phone to make that call. There are articles that discuss songs that deal with telephone drama, though when we think of phones and Pop, it normally relates to fans using them at gigs. That debate as to whether they are spoiling live music or they are essential when capturing that unique moment. I am heartened that a new song by Wild Nothing, Dial Tone, is very much about a missed connection and a telephone’s dial tone. This a rarity in modern music.
I guess it is not only love songs that have that connection to phones. Through the years, a variety of moods and situations have been documented through the phone medium. It is on my mind now as, more and more, commercial music is talking more about modern communication rather than that traditional medium. This article spotlights telephone songs and lists some of the very best:
“Telephone Songs
Some of the best conversations happen over the phone. No matter what mood you are in, you can always talk to someone over the phone. When you call a loved one or receive a call from someone special, it just makes you happy.
Through songs, singers and songwriters have creatively brought to life different aspects associated with phone calls. The conversations and talks that take place over a telephone call are showcased in different ways to convey a message.
What Messages Do Songs About Calling Someone Convey?
A wide range of emotions are conveyed in songs about phone calls. While a number of songs describe positive emotions associated with making and receiving calls, certain songs portray dark sentiments. The feeling of warmth and tenderness that comes over when you talk to the one you love over the phone is exquisitely captured in certain lyrics. A number of songs showcase the eagerness, enthusiasm, and restlessness lovers feel as they wait for the phone to ring.
The thoughts that run through the mind of the person making a call or receiving a call are exhibited in a breathtakingly beautiful manner through a sequence of flashback events in certain songs. The negative thoughts that invade the mind when a person you love does not take your call are essayed with powerful words in lyrics. Intimate phone conversations associated with love, lust, and romance are aesthetically brought to life in lyrics.
In certain songs, the despair of parting ways after a breakup is expressed through pleading conversations on a phone call. The different aspects of dirty talk are highlighted in a confessional manner over the phone in certain songs.
What Do Phones and Phone Calls Symbolize in Songs?
In songs, the telephone call symbolizes communicating matters of the heart and mind. Both happy moments and sad moments are showcased through music videos that highlight relationships through telephonic conversations. In certain songs, thoughts are expressed in the form of questions that demand an explanation from a person. Such songs often showcase bittersweet moments of a failed relationship through vivid perspectives during a phone call. The sentiments associated with long-distance relationships are poetically described with endearing words on a call.
Certain songs in alternative genres describe the nostalgic feeling of leaving a message on the answering machine. The naughty murmurs in late-night calls and romantic texting on smartphones are thoughtfully presented through a series of events in songs. Different aspects of chatting on the phone with a special friend are highlighted with compliments, awe, and admiration. A number of songs intricately describe a shy person’s inability to express feelings in person but overcome their shy nature with the most heartwarming words over a phone call. Although a wide spectrum of attributes is conveyed with phones and phone calls, in songs, different aspects of making calls and receiving calls symbolize or denote
Love
Care
Affection
Warmth
Feelings
Passion
Lust
Communication
Heartache
Emotions
Conversation
Happiness
Romance
Breakup
Seduction
Flirting
Declaration
Problems
Relationships
Sadness
Infatuation
Desire
Judgment
Connection
Suspicion”.
If modern songs are more about texting, I wonder how many tracks from recent times keep alive that dying art of speaking to a friend or lover on the phone. There has been debate through the years. The once go-to way of discussing connection between sweethearts, has Pop fallen out of love with the telephone? Back in 2009, The Guardian asked whether the phone has been replaced and updated. Whilst there were modern examples, in the fourteen years since, has the telephone become even rarer and more unusual?
“Songwriters have long used the telephone as a subject to express a multitude of emotions – the frustration in the so-near-and-yet-so-far conversations between long-distance lovers, the joy of running downstairs and hearing that special someone's voice, the anxiety of waiting for a call that may never come, or the despair brought on by the line that rings and ring to no reply.
Pop music had already been singing about the telephone 20 years before Debbie Harry stood in that phone booth, the one across the hall, saying to herself: "If you don't answer, I'll rip it off the wall." In the 50s, the lead singer of the Four Top Hatters had a handful of nickels and a heart full of loving, but he couldn't ring his sweetheart because of the 45 men taking up room in the telephone booth, while in 1964 the Beatles bemoaned "I tried to telephone / They said you were not home / That's a lie" in No Reply.
But now that we all carry mobiles, it's rare for anyone to be inaccessible for anything longer than the duration of a tube journey. These days we have a choice of text, picture or video messaging, not to mention voicemail or email, so has a certain romance in conducting relationships over the telephone been killed off for modern musicians?
Debbie Harry could quite happily shop in Tesco's while waiting for her lover to answer. Gallagher wouldn't have to sit alone indoors waiting for that tormenting phonecall, he could just put his mobile on vibrate and watch Man City at the boozer. Meanwhile, the fact Soulja Boy even knows the number of his "future wifey" by heart seems remarkable given that we rely on our mobiles to do all the memorising for us. Besides, doesn't Johnny Borrell crooning "The girls are on their mobiles trying to get reception" just seem too prosaic?”.
To counter my argument, another article from The Guardian, this time from 2018, asked why there were so few songs about texting. I think that WhatsApp messages are coming into music now. In the five years since this article was published, artists have changed their tone. There is a bit of a delay now, as I do not think we are hearing too many songs about the telephone. For a generation that are sending WhatsApp messages and speaking less than they text, has Pop music undergone another shift? Perhaps. It did seem, in 2018, the telephone was in no real danger of hanging up:
“It’s a grand tradition. From Glenn Miller’s Pennsylvania 6-5000 to Drake’s Hotline Bling, pop’s obsession with telecommunications is long and glorious; Lady Gaga committed to the theme so strongly she wore a phone on her head. Phone songs have taken in anticipation (Abba’s Ring Ring), spontaneity (Call Me Maybe), popular hobbies (Village People’s Sex Over the Phone) and smartphones’ woeful battery life (Maroon 5’s Payphone). And that’s before you consider phones’ real-world connections to pop. Decades before Spotify, the nearest teenage fans got to “on-demand” was Dial-a-Disc, where you would phone a number and listen to music looping on reel-to-reel tape machines. Mobile phones made their own impact: from the ringtone boom of the 2000s to the way the Walkman of the past is now built into all handsets, and even the way songwriters’ melody ideas are stored first as voicenotes. In the studio vocal booth, lyrics are read off a phone screen.
“Phones are a very powerful trope,” acknowledges songwriter Jack Lee – and he should know. In the 1970s, he was a struggling musician in San Francisco. One afternoon, he received a call informing him that his phone line was about to be disconnected. However, there was time for one more incoming call, which informed him that a band were interested in covering one of his songs. The band were Blondie, the song was Hanging on the Telephone. From his home in Los Angeles, the 2018 version of Lee tells the Guide: “It changed my life, and it saved my life.”
The song came about when Lee was a busker in need of original songs. Reading an illustrated book of Beatles lyrics, he saw that All I’ve Got to Do (“ … is call you on the phone”) was accompanied by a picture of a girl entwined in a telephone cord. “Don’t ask me the psychological implications, but two days later I was messing around on the guitar and I got the lightning bolt. Over the next year I put everything I had into writing that song.”
Twelve months well spent: Hanging on the Telephone has since been covered by everyone from Def Leppard to Girls Aloud. In the 2012 movie Electrick Children, Julia Garner’s character experiences what she believes is a virgin birth as a result of hearing the song. “What the song captures,” Lee adds, “is the desire for connection and the frustration when you can’t make the connection. The intensity. The high stakes.” Beyond the drama, Lee says there’s something more subtle at play: “When young people got together in that period, there were things you could say on the telephone that you couldn’t say face to face. You could be more vulnerable. And that period lasted from the 1920s to the early 90s – a long time for the telephone to influence people’s lives.”
But how true is this in the era of Generation Mute? In 2015, it was reported that phone use among young people had dropped by almost a quarter in just three years. Calling someone unannounced – or, God forbid, leaving a voicemail – is now an egregious attack on privacy. Let’s pick up the phone to Emily Warren, the co-writer of Dua Lipa’s New Rules. “Agreed!” she declares. “It’s a violation!” New Rules, she says, was inspired by the real-life predicament of co-writer Caroline Ailin, who was fielding texts and phonecalls from an ex. “We sat down to write a song that was a guidebook to ending that situation.”
Over at Little Mix’s label Syco, A&R manager Guy Langley remembers being at a house party with colleague Anya. Both sets of ears pricked up when someone put on Curiosity Killed the Cat’s late-80s answerphone banger Name and Number. A short while later, the song had become a Little Mix single, How Ya Doin?. Langley says there were no worries about the concept of answerphones seeming outmoded. Actually, they embraced it: “The girls’ mantra from the start has been about referencing harmonies of bands like En Vogue; the idea of answering machines felt knowingly throwback.”
In fact, Langley says, there’s a risk in trying to make songs too up-to-date. “We try to make lyrical content conversational but whenever you get too specific it starts to sound very ‘now’.” And not in a good way. “There was a time when the One Direction songs were being written and it was all ‘LOL’, ‘Message me back’, ‘BBM me this’, and it felt like an older generation trying really hard to connect with a young generation, and getting it wrong.” (Jax Jones concurs: “There is no room at all to talk about dating apps – that’s going too far. Something like: ‘You are the love of my life, for you I will swipe right’ – terrible. It’s Vengaboys territory.”)
Langley adds that he has seen an increase in submissions whose lyrics dwell on phone addiction, reflecting Gen Z’s love/hate relationship with nearly every smartphone app except the phone function. It’s the topic of another of Emily Warren’s songs, Phone Down. “I’m obsessed with phones in songs, actually,” she admits. “In the two years I’ve become really bothered by and aware of phone use and social media use. Phone Down is specifically about a phone ruining an intimate moment. It feels like there’s a disconnect.”
Explaining this disconnect (also referenced in the Clean Bandit and Marina single, er, Disconnect), Paul Lee, who conducts research into phone use in his role as global head of research at Deloitte, says that while people of pop-consuming age aren’t falling out of love with handsets, they are definitely moving away from voice-only communication. “But any text-based message is a simplification, stripped of emotion,” he explains. “For instance, ‘hello’ is five letters in an anonymous font when conveyed by text message. But when spoken it can convey an entire universe of emotions: curt, chirpy, angry, delighted … ” Or, in the case of Adele’s phone song Hello, it feels like a hundred emotions at once. No wonder she chose a pre-smartphone-era flip-phone for the song’s video. As for what might constitute a 2018 version of Hanging on the Telephone? Paul Lee has a plan. “It would be a song about a WhatsApp interaction that shows as being delivered and read – with two ticks – but is not responded to”.
I’d like to hear people’s views regarding modern music and communication. I cannot bring to mind many songs from the past five years or so that mention the telephone. There are few about texting and WhatsApp either. It makes me wonder whether artists are more direct in a way. Forgoing forms of communication as a tool or way of framing love and conversation. A lot of classic songs and some slightly old Pop is played on radio where you get this romance and interaction via phone. Even though there is some more modern-day forms of communication discussed in music – like texting, social media and WhatsApp -, I do think that this whole model and nature of conversation is dying away. People are more and more reliant on quicker communication and that stream of messages rather than a longer conversation. Perhaps less focused and with shorter attention spans, there are avenues and corners of music where the phone call remains. Less about landlines now, the smartphone and mobile has replaced that. This is tragic in its own way. The scene has gone from people at home on this fixed line to people being on the move. A sense of romance and intimacy gets lost when you move from the landline to mobiles. Once a staple for love songs and capturing either intimacy or tension, with it, there has been a loss of that openness and closeness. If the Internet and social media has perhaps replaced the telephone and text conversations, even that seems to be less common than you’d think. Have phone calls and conversation become less important regarding inspiration? Are we more disconnected? Rather than committing to a full conversation or composing long-form messages, most modern artists are…
KEEPING it brief.