Adele has been trying to reach you. The Weeknd will only call before six. Your cellphone hasn’t shown up on Drake’s caller ID in weeks, and he won’t stop singing – and dancing – about it. And we shouldn’t be surprised by any of it.
In pop music, phone calls have always been a lyrical staple. As the lyrics of Hello, The Hills and Hotline Bling – right now, three of the biggest hits in the world – make all too clear, a call can be emotional, meaningful and (sometimes) even sexy. From Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s booty call Person to Person to Carly Rae Jepson’s uber-hit Call Me Maybe and beyond, whispering sweet nothings into the mouthpiece an essential element of pop’s romantic currency.
Naturally in the real world, most of us respond to a ringing cellphone by tossing it out of the window of a moving car – or at the very least turning it to silent and letting it go to voicemail. We live in the age of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger; phone calls are for emergencies or telling telemarketers never to call again. If somebody calls us unannounced, it’s safe to assume they’re deranged or time travelling from the 1990s. There’s a taco emoji now, and a plate of spaghetti. And if you can’t say it with those, why say it at all?
Yet there are still times when you need to hear someone’s voice – in matters of life, death or love. Which is why 2015’s biggest hits don’t feel too anachronistic. Furthermore, they’re in a grand pop tradition. As Vulture recently pointed out, the Big Bopper’s 1958 single Chantilly Lace set the bar for jams like Hotline Bling. In it, the libidinous singer spends the duration of the song on the telephone, complimenting a woman on her physical assets and peppering the chat with pet names.
In 1979’s Love on the Telephone, Foreigner sang about the perils of long-distance relationships (which in those pre-Skype days depended on how good the participants were at romantic chat). In 1984, Stevie Wonder Just Called to Say I Love You (probably interrupting whatever “you” were up to). Cellphones made calls more intimate – at last, you didn’t have to conduct your affair tethered to a wire in the middle of the living room. And unlike texts, which can be screen-capped, read aloud and sent to everyone, a phone call stays in the moment. (Unless, of course, you’re recording your calls. And if that’s the case, what is wrong with you?)
A call carries an emotional charge which social media will never replicate. If a boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with you via DM, you’d be humiliated – for them. And an important conversation via text will always come across as lazy, especially if you’ve shared something more special than the casual “u up?” exchange. This was proved comically last week when a woman texted the lyrics to Adele’s Hello to her ex-boyfriend as a joke. Also, texts could technically be sent or written by anyone with access to a cellphone. So despite our world having drastically changed since the days of Big Bopper, we still crave the confirmation that the person contacting us is emotionally engaged. Phone calls provide that. Texting and social media, not so much.
Plus, nobody wants to hear about Drake wishing an ex would text him. If Hotline Bling was about that, we’d roll our eyes and wish he would just text her himself so that she could either write back something dismissive or ignore him completely. Phone calls take time and allude to a relationship in which at least one party is emotionally invested. In fact, songs about phone calls immediately establish a mental picture: if the Weeknd replaced “I only call you when it’s half past five” with “Cool I’ll message you later”, the song would wilt. Instead, we know he obviously cares because he’s bothering to tune out the rest of the world and pick up his phone.
So it’s not that phone calls are making a comeback in 2015, or that our favourite pop stars have abandoned social media in lieu of flip phones. (Although if you’re a pop star who uses a flip phone, hit me up.) Instead, the phone represents something in music that helps paint a bigger picture: intimacy, heart and genuine feelings that necessitate a private moment between the caller and recipient. These songs mean something because the singer didn’t just receive texts, letters, notes or an apathetic wave. They’re the post-5.30 phone call, or the reason Drake dances the way he does, or why Adele retreats to an abandoned house to revisit the ghost of her old relationships. Like us, pop’s still hung up on the phone call – and always will be.
