Saturday, April 29, 2006

Cultural Losses

Driving to visit the folks in Corpus this morning, I listened to a song from the early 80s.

The omnipresence of cell phones as resulted in certain losses. For example, this great lyrics from the song "You Win Again" no longer have the same significance:

"I'm standing here freezing at a phone booth baby,
In the middle of God knows where
I got one quarter left, your machine picks up
But baby, I know you're there.
And I just start crying cause it makes no sense
To waste these words and twenty-five cents."

It just doesn't have the same meaning. I suppose you could rewrite in terms of wasting these "anytime minutes", but it lacks something. That song couldn't be written today, not as it is. The opening line is all about struggling and searching for some desperate means to contact the one you love. We don't have an analogue to standing in a gas station in the freezing cold--cell phones work in many forms of shelter.

Oh well.

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