A Review of “Mentions” by HTRK

Format: “A-side” of a digital single; Track Length: 6:19; Price: $4; Record Label: Ghostly; Country of Origin: Australia; Pronunciation Key: “Hate Rock”; Number of Publicists I Emailed Before Receiving a Download Link: Six; Representative Lyric: “Even with your soft obsession / It’s not enough attention for me / Even with another mention / You should have made a difference by now”

Central Question: How has social media changed the love song?

One of the more memorable moments from John Lennon’s famous Playboy interview with David Sheff comes when he explains the inspiration behind the Beatles song “No Reply”: “I had the image of walking down the street and seeing [someone] silhouetted in the window and not answering the phone,” he says. “Although I have never called a girl on the phone in my life! Because phones weren’t part of the English child’s life.”

Weirdly, this is not the only time Lennon felt the need to justify telephone references in early Beatles songs. He also said that “All I’ve Got to Do”, another early Beatles song that mentions the phone, was written “specifically for the American market.” And again, that “the idea of calling a girl on the telephone was unthinkable to a British youth in the 1960s.”

Imagining a world before pop songs mentioned the telephone is almost as difficult as imagining a world before pop music altogether. That calling someone was once a rarefied privilege of suburban American youth is all the more baffling when you consider that “the telephone” is one of the pop canon’s most prominent thematic hooks. This trend largely originated in the late ’50s and early ’60s (“Chantilly Lace”; the aforementioned Beatles songs), but technically begun much earlier: the first pop song to make mention of the telephone is the Tin Pan Alley rag “Hello! Ma Baby”, which is about a long-distance relationship between two people who have never seen each other. The song was written in 1899, when less than 10% of American families owned telephones.

The best songs about telephones were arguably produced in the ’70s and ’80s, with songs like The Nerves’ “Hanging on the Telephone” (which was later covered and made popular by Blondie), New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man”, and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Telephone Line”, just to name a few. There are newer pop songs about the telephone, too, like Adele’s “Hello” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”. But this motif is eroding into an anachronistic cliché, since actually talking on the telephone is becoming less and less common among the demographic that consumes pop music. For most of...