File this post under "I am turning into my parents."
As we near the end of the second decade of the new millennium, it occurs to me that many of the songs I grew up on are meaningless to today's young people because they reference technology that has gone the way of the dinosaur.
Here are some that come to mind...
"THE LETTER"
Ah, the love letter. Brought to you by the USPS. Who remembers the last time they saw either of them?
"The Letter" was first recorded by the Box Tops, but it was stolen by English rock and soul singer Joe Cocker whose 1970 rendition
became his first top ten single in the U.S.
“My baby just sent me a text” just doesn’t have the same
ring.
“PHOTOGRAPH”
Remember when photographs cost money to develop and were precious?
"Photograph" was the
lead single from the band's third studio album (Pyromania), it reached No. 1 on
the Billboard Top Tracks chart and No. 12 on the Pop Singles chart.
Now, all the singer has is a .jpg on their phone.
“STAR 69”
Although it seems laughably low-tech these days, the pre-caller-ID world enjoyed a
powerful weapon in the battle against prank callers-the ability
to dial back whoever just called you by typing *69.
The chorus spells out this technological
wonder: “I know you called, I know you called / I know you hung up my line, star
69.”
“WESTERN UNION”
While it may still be possible to send a telegram, it’s
inconvenient and expensive, especially when compared to how cheap it is to give
someone else in the U.S. a call or send them an e-mail (or a Skype, a tweet, a Facebook post).
The Five Americans’ “Western Union” was all about reaching
the singer’s girl when a phone call just wouldn’t do, and was already charmingly
quaint by the early seventies.
“MIXTAPE”
It’s sad to think that today’s emo youth have never known
the joy of making an actual mix-tape (or a burned mix CD).
The tape medium was dead,
and CD’s were starting to gasp for breath, by the time Butch Walker released
this tune in 2005.
“You gave me a playlist” does not really tug at the heart strings the same way.
"BIG TEN INCH RECORD"
Some may argue that the record is alive, but CD's still outsell vinyl records by ten to one and everyone is calling the CD dead....
Of course, we all know this song isn't really about records anyway, right?
“THE ANSWERING MACHINE”
Marillion
released this tune in the late 1990’s, by which time answering machines were
already old news.
Now everyone
has multiple voice mail accounts (home, cellular, work), and pretty much does
all communicating via text or Twitter, so the concept of “my words were
absorbed
Into the
answering machine” is lost on today’s young people.
”UHF”
Here’s a history lesson, kids. The television dial used to
only have channels 2 to 13. Then, we got the mysterious “U” and explored the
wilderness of numbers from 14 through 69.
For most people, the
UHF band of the TV dial had only a handful of local stations, but for kids it meant going from three to seven channels AND cartoons after school.
And most of us were happy….continued below
“57 CHANNELS AND NOTHIN’
ON”
Most were happy but not Bruce.
Most would agree that the Boss lost his way with this one-can you
believe this was a single?
The lyric uses cable TV as a metaphor for the
emptiness of his newfound Hollywood lifestyle, although a cable package with
only 57 channels hardly seems luxurious enough for a man who “bought a
bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills with a truckload of
hundred-thousand-dollar bills.”
These days, you can scroll through 57 channels in less than ten
seconds, and you’d be able to upgrade your digital television package in about
the same amount of time.
“KODACHROME”
This song was an examination of the fallibility of memory, and
now Kodachrome is itself merely a memory, a relic of the era before hi-res cell phones.
I am getting nostalgic for the days when my view at a
concert was not blocked by a tapestry of iPhones.
“VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR”
And it did. This was the first video ever played on MTV, and radio started to die right about then.
For the next decade, we went from talking about records to talking about videos.
And then twenty years of generic music killed
the video star, and now streaming rules and it’s all pretty much electronica that’s being streamed.
“HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE”
I felt this Blondie tune was worth an honorable mention
since I always thought she was on a pay phone in this one…and when is the last
time you saw a pay phone?
"OLD RECORDS NEVER DIE"
It seemed appropriate to wrap it up with this Ian Hunter tune-since the title is correct-if it was a good song then, it's a good song now.
