by Daniel Colussi | The other day I was listening to The Spinners’ funky soul classic “It’s A Shame,” in which the singer laments having to sit around by his telephone and wait for his girl to call him. I love this song and listening to it for the umpteenth time I realized how many telephone pop songs have been written over the years.

“It’s A Shame” is paradigmatic of the lovesick telephone song: the narrator helplessly waits for a call from his girl, in this case all the worse because the girl in question is a two-timer who’s messing around with other guys. Our Spinner knows this but she’s got him by the balls so bad that the only thing that he can do is wait for the telephone to ring and hear her voice on the other end of the line. The telephone is his lifeline but also a noose around his neck, and it’s such a shame. The Seatbelts’ “Call Me Call Me” tells the same story, though its way less funky. The Beatles and The Stones both vent their frustrations with waiting by the phone (“You Won’t See Me” and “Off The Hook,” respectively). But it’s The Cure who take it to a characteristically gloomy extreme on “10:15 Saturday Night” with the implication that the existential anxiousness of waiting for the phone to ring could lead to suicide. In all these cases the narrator is forced into passivity with the telephone being an instrument of domination. But how about when you try to be a little more pro-active?

On “Answering Machine,” Paul Westerberg is ready to dial the number except he’s stymied by the telephone’s wedged-in position between himself and the girl. She’s not picking up, so what’s he supposed to do – pour his heart out to an answering machine? The pain runs even deeper in Glen Campbell’s gloriously schmaltzy “Wichita Lineman” in which the brutal irony is that even though the guy’s out on the highway installing telephone lines, he still can’t get through to the girl! So close but so far, and all that’s left is the singing in the wire. An absolute classic is, of course, Blondie’s “Hanging On The Telephone,” in which Debbie Harry repeatedly phones her lover in an attempt to extricate him from his mother’s overly dominant grip on his love life (the prominence of the Oedipal complex in pop songs is a whole other matter). On these tunes the telephone can connect – but just as easily block – the transmission of love.

Other times, its not so bad. In “Memphis Tennesse“, Chuck Berry doesn’t really have it so rough. The song is basically about a guy who needs a phone number. Yes, it’s a drag to have to call the operator, and its annoying to be put on hold, but there’s nothing to suggest that he won’t get through to his lady. In The Band’s “Long Distance Operator“, Robbie Roberston is in pretty much the same boat as Chuck Berry, although Robertson’s way more dramatic about the situation (he’s on fire, he’s tangled in telephone lines, etc), and we’re less sure that he will indeed reach his lady. That Berry’s song conveys less of a sense of total hopelessness could be the fact that it arrived in sunny 1959, before the dark spectre of telephones fully inserting themselves into our love lives could be adequately grasped.

Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” is maybe the best telephone song ever written in that it ties together so many disparate facets of telephonic presence in our lives: the desire to ignore calls, particularly ones from your mother; the irritating faux-pleasantries of pre-recorded answering machine greetings; and ultimately the inextricable link between household technology and the military-industrial complex. That the song is performed by Anderson in her classic spoken word style, i.e. in the voice of an actual telephone conversation, only increases its genius.

All the aforementioned tunes deal specifically with the landline experience. It’s only logical that cellphones would beget different songs because of the unparalleled access that they afford. If someone’s got your cellphone number then there’s nowhere to hide. Lady GaGa’s “Telephone” best represents the cell phone experience of always being within communicable reach. Here, GaGa’s miffed at some guy and just wants to revel in the Dionysian ecstasy of dance and drink, but she can’t get into the moment because this guy keeps calling and texting her. Its distracting. Unlike Anderson, GaGa doesn’t probe into the deeper implications of the telephone’s (and thus technology’s) increasing presence in our lives. I have no idea if her depiction as a human/machine motor-booty hybrid on the cover of Born This Way betrays any of her feelings on the subject. On “Telephone,” GaGa just seems kinda pissy, so I think the track carries much weight in the lineage of telephone pop songs. But I know that, for sure, whenever I hear those bittersweet Spinners harmonies, I’m instantly right there with them, waiting by the telephone.

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.