I don’t know how widespread this trend is, but for months now I’ve been seeing articles about a so-called flip-phone (or sometimes dumb phone) revolution – people giving up their smart phones in an effort to break their cell-phone addiction.
It certainly doesn’t seem widespread yet. People staring at their tiny screens regardless of where they are is a feature of modern life. They’re really pocket computers, but we still use them for two-way communication, so we call them telephones. I doubt Alexander Graham Bell would recognize them.
You can date a lot of movies by the telephones they’re using, and viewers have to make allowance for plots that hinge on the difficulty of making a phone call or getting a message to someone. This obsolescence comes up occasionally in popular music, too. Smart phones have made some lyrics as outmoded as a one-horse open sleigh.
Consider “Telephone Line,” for example. The very term is obsolete in the wireless era. For generations who came of age after the turn of the millennium, the song requires annotation.
Listen up, kidz. Those sounds at the start of the record were a feature of landline phone systems in the U.S., which used tones as signals for routing calls. The ring tone was American, too. Lynne, who’s British, called an American number to record them because he was aiming at the American market. It worked – the single reached No. 7 on the Hot 100, one of ELO’s 20 Top 40 chart entries. (Trivia time: The band holds the record for most Top 40 hits without a No. 1).
As the second verse begins, the phone is still ringing – and back then, it would keep ringing until the caller gave up. When “Telephone Line” was released on ELO’s “New World Record” in 1976, answering machines barely existed, and they didn’t become cheap and common until the late ’80s. So if you called someone and they didn’t answer, they probably weren’t home. If they were dodging you they had to ignore all calls, not just yours, because caller ID didn’t exist either.
You get the idea. Jeff Lynne’s desperate situation couldn’t exist in the same form today. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter, because his heartbreak is timeless.
Most critical assessments place “Telephone Line” among Lynne’s best songs. He recorded an acoustic version with longtime ELO pianist Richard Tandy in 2012.
