Janis Joplin - “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV…”
Despite the fact that I love the song, I cringe with embarassment at how outdated that sounds every time I hear it.
This thread got me thinking about a now obsolete song that I really wish would have a “sequel” made for it. The song is “Nikita” by Elton John.
“…and if there comes a time
guns and gates no longer hold you in
and if you’re free to make a choice
just look towards the west and find a friend…”
Well the time that “guns and gates no longer hold you in” has come and passed. I would like to hear a follow-up song and it’s story.
According to this site that number actually existed, and to this day belongs to the Pennsylvania Hotel in NYC.
As for our main topic, I can think of quite a few songs from the 1960’s that use outmoded slang expressions. I don’t mean obvious words like groovy, but expressions that I think were already decades old and just then fading out. For instance there’s a late Love song called Abalony (not the real Love, but a later incarnation that ARthur Lee threw together), that uses the word Baloney, meaning basically crap. I remember people using that word in the '60s, but not after. Frank Zappa’s classic anti-broadcast-news polemic Trouble Every Day has a couple of standout examples. In one passage, FZ says, Well, you can cool it, you can heat it, cause, baby I don’t need it …using the word “baby” as an interjection like that seems to be classic 1960’s hipspeak, but is now pretty much passe.
And in the same song he refers to a photojournalist as some joker with a Brownie. I actually had to think about that one for a while before I remembered that there used to be “Brownie” cameras in the 60’s. Joker seems kind of outmoded as well, though not so much as brownie.
Yeah, but wouldn’t you have to punch in a bunch of area codes before you called the Hotel?
Anyhoo, what about Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire?” Well, it still stands, but it’s kind of dated now.
The whole song is a timeline of baby boomer history, it sounded dated the day it was recorded save for maybe the last line or two. I think he wrote the song by indexing all the answers in a Trivial Pursuit deck by date.
As for obsolete, maybe Simon & Garfunkle’s Kodachrome. It’s still the best transparency film you can get but not a lot of amateurs use it anymore.
Along the same lines, from “I’m Burnin’ for You” by Blue Oyster Cult:
“A time to play B-sides”
I imagine you’d get a puzzled look if you asked the average Brittney fan what a B-side is.
Hey! I still use “groovy”. And I was born in '67.
What a load of baloney. I heard it well through the '70’s.
You mean as in “Hit me, baby, one more time” or “Baby, please, don’t let me be the last to know”? “Baby” never went out of fashion as song filler; it’s just not used in conversation that much.
Okay, I’ll give you that one. 
BigStar303:
I heard a pop band use it the other day in an interview, and the term still appears on some CD singles. It just doesn’t mean anything.
pestie:
True – not many people buy black-and-white TVs anymore, although there are still a few out there. What I find more bemusing about the song is Mercedes using “Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” to sell their cars without a trace of irony.
Pay phones are still a quarter here.
My mom’s family owns a business in Manhasset on Long Island. You’ll still occasionally see business phone numbers that have the original MA7 (627) exchange (for “MAnhasset”) advertised that way.
Obsolete songs:
Pennies from Heaven - In these days of $80 million Powerball jackpots, wouldn’t a steady rain of pennies be more of an annoyance these days than an answer to somebody’s prayers?
Juke Box Hero (Foreigner) - “Standing in the rain, with his head hung low/Couldn’t get a ticket, it was a sold out show.” Who the heck goes to a show anymore without first reserving tickets? Hasn’t this guy heard of a ticket broker? Is he too incompetent to find a scalper?
By the same token, we can write off one of my all-time sing-along favourites, “Jenny/867-5309” by Tommy Tutone:
Not any more, Tommy.
Pete
Take off every .sig for great justice!!
Sam Cooke’s “(What A) Wonderful World” for the line “Don’t know what a slide rule is for.” In these days, that’s no longer an admission of ignorance.
I agree that baby frequently appears in songs that have a romantic focus, but I felt that in the context of Frank Zappa’s song, he was using it as a vague interjection, sort of like “What’s happening, baby”.
Along the lines of previously posted songs:
Fourteen Days by Steve Goodman
Two-song Set by Loudon Wainwright III
1982 by Randy Travis. It’s a good song, but I always wondered why the song writer never thought about it being out of date. It’s now a classic song, which means it will be played for years.
Happy Together by the Turtles. Same dime for a phone call thing. You know, “if I should call you up, invest a dime”?
obscure-Speed Trap by Hoyt Axton. It’s a song about a crooked traffic cop. It’s on an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, and Boss Hogg and Roscoe think it’s about them. Anyway, one part goes, “for a high school dropout, I’m doin’ fine, I’m makin’ more than the president now, ('course he’s honest!)”. Obsolete from- well, always.
my son got a dr. demento cd set for his birthday.(he’s a different sort of kid-i don’t know where he could of got that from-his father , i guess)
anyway, one of the songs (i remember it from when i was in school) is “the homecoming queen’s got a gun”.
when that came out, it was so totally outlandish and unthinkable that it was funny. now, it is almost scary to hear.
my 17 year old daughter refuses to listen to it.
[nitpick]
From this website: "Some concern was expressed over the lyrics to “Mellow Yellow”: they were interpreted as being in
praise of the smoking of banana skins. The state of California actually went so far as to ban the sale of this evil fruit. Doubtless these concerned parties would have been relieved to learn that the true subject of the song was a vibrator.
[/quote]
I went to a Donovan concert in about '84 or '85, and this was his rendition of the meaning, as well.
[/nitpick]
Buckner and Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever is totally obsolete and more than a bit out dated.
Darlington County by Bruce Springsteen, in light of recent events.
I think the more obsolete line in Janis’s song is:
“Dialing for Dollars, is trying to reach me”…
That had actually been out of date for some time. Unless some stations somewhere still has their version of it going.
And in Elvis’ “Return to Sender” the line:
“no such number, no such zone” was obsolete since zip codes were introduced in the 60’s. Zones being the predecessor to zip code’s in some cities.
I heard “Things that make you go hmmm…” the other day, which was a reference to a television show that no one really remembers anymore.