Long time readers of this blog (not sure if that actually exists at this point, since i've dissapeared and returned so often i think people have forgotten this is here) may recall a fascination I have with songs about phone numbers. But i guess I've been thinking more recently about songs about telecommunication more broadly, and I'm struck in particular about songs about telecommunication's failure. A lot of these songs seem to come from Minneapolis for some reason. There's Soul Asylum's "Somebody to Shove," which I guess doesn't really count, because it's sanguine about the actual phone call, just frustrated by having to wait for it. The song itself feels now trite, too immersed in early 1990s para-grunge pop, Dave Pirner too ensconced in his penchant for elaborate but hollow rhymes ("a world frozen over with over exposure," etc.
) But the song that prompted this post is The Replacements' "Answering Machine." Here's a crappy live video of Paul Westerberg performing the song drunk during the band's twilight years,(and here's a decent cover i found on youtube.)Westerberg is a far more inventive and adventurous songwriter than Pirner, but let's leave aesthetic (or reified aesthetic) judgements behind for the moment. What i find gripping about this song is the melancholy resignation to the simultaneous indispensability and complete insufficiency of the answering machine, of canned, recorded voices and telephonic absences. What I find infuriating about the song is the racist and sexist assumptions based on the analogy which suggests that saying "I miss you" to an answering machine is as futile (or at least, as difficult) as if one should "try to free a slave of ignorance" or "try to teach a whore about romance." This suggests that Paul Westerberg doesn't know very much about slavery ("picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten" (from "Bastards of Young" pisses me off for similar reasons) and that his hopeless drunken romanticism bears a rather problematic relationship to the gendered service work performed not only by sex workers, but also by the "Waitress in the sky" he'd go on to mock on the next album. Is it that the whore cannot be "taught" about romance, or that it is in her labor that the ideological limits (and violence) of the construction of heterosexual romance become legible?

I'd be remiss too if I failed to mention Sheena Easton's "Telephone," and Easton's from Scottland, not Minnesota.


And then there's the Wowz's "LDL," a beautiful stripped down version of which (sans John Dydo) is embedded below.


And oh yeah, there's Blondie's cover of "Hanging on the Telephone"


And X's "Your Phone's off the hook, but you're not."