I’m listening to the superb 1998 Belle And Sebastian EP “This Is Just A Modern Rock Song”. In “I Know Where The Summer Goes”, Stuart Murdoch sings:
I know, you can tell me again
I’ve got my mobile phone
It’s full of silicon chips
So I thought to myself “That’s a very early occurrence of a mobile phone in a song”. Surely not the first, but I can’t think of an earlier example off the top of my head. What have you?
The earliest mention would probably be a song about a rich douchebag sort, with owning a car phone being a sign of how self-important he is. But I don’t know what song specifically that would be.
I thought as much myself, or maybe a rapper boasting about his status symbols, which a cell phone in the early 90s surely was.
This is such a great question, I’m mainly posting so I get some notifications about it. I can’t think of anything earlier than the OP example.
From 1993, Ice Cube’s song “What Can I Do?” has the line “Police are tappin’ my mobile phone”
The earliest example I am aware of is all the way back to 1902: “By Wireless Telephone”
Helluva question. Googling has a poor information to noise ratio, but you can do it (cheating - sorry), and I can get back to 1988. Spoilered because it is, as I said cheating.
Joe Ely, Jazz Street
j
ETA: And from the same year Ice T High Rollers
Not claiming it’s the earliest, but here’s Roger McGuinn from 1991:
Only dates from 1990 but funny as hell-
CMIIW, but the earliest things were mobile phones, not cell phones per se. I think they were 2 way radios working with landlines. The giant whip antennas were pretty cool on cars with phones.
You can see a pretty early car phone in the 1973 movie Save The Tiger with Jack Lemmon.
Earliest example of a car phone I’ve seen in a movie. He uses it and the girl he is with comments on how cool it is that he has one.
Definitely not cellular.
I never knew that there was a difference in the meaning of “cell phone” and “mobile phone”, I just assumed that the former was more common in American English and the latter in British, for the same thing we Germans so conveniently call “Handy”. Was a car phone of the 70s and early 80s, which was not really mobile, but too heavy to be taken around outside the car, already called a mobile phone?
The Beastie Boys famously rhymed ‘talking on the cellular’ with ‘yea, the hell you were’ in High Plains Drifter, 1989. Line is ~40s.
1987 DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Parents Just Don’t Understand:
“Pay attention, here’s the thick of the plot
I pulled up to the corner at the end of my block
That’s when I saw this beautiful girlie girl walking
I picked up my car phone to perpetrate like I was talking”
Here’s an early mention…
Steely Dan’s Gaucho album came out in 1980 and the song “Glamour Profession” has the line “When it’s all over we’ll make some calls from my car” so not cell but mobile phone.
It’s been a long time since I saw it, but I remember a car phone in the 1954 film Sabrina.