Tim Curry’s “I Do The Rock” name-checks everyone from “John and Yoko”, through “Carter, Begin, and Sadat”, to “Idi Amin and the Shah” to place it squarely in the late 1970s.
Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime has plenty of solidly 1987 lyrics:
“They keep selling me on T.V., about the communist plan
And all the shady preachers
Begging for my cash
Swiss bank accounts while giving their secretaries the slam”
Black Flag’s “TV Party” references all sorts of 1981-1982 TV shows, although Monday Night Football is still around.
“On the road today I saw a DeadHead sticker on a Cadillac.”
At the time, the Caddy was the premier auto for the upper middle class and lower upper class. However, Cadillac lost their way (for awhile - I LIKE the new ones) and their wheels became more representative of the inner city, while BMW and Mercedes became the car the former hippies might drive.
I was thinking about this just the other day when Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” came on the radio. The singer compares his psychic link with his girlfriend to a “cable coming in from above” and says “we don’t need no phone at all”. The former is dated in and of itself, because hardly anyone ever sends cables anymore. Although people do still use phones, the latter seems dated because in the context of the song a phone apparently cannot be used to contact someone anywhere, even when they’re on the road, via a “a line in the sky”. A modern cellphone works at least as well as this mystical “radar love”.
A more recent example is in Pearl Jam’s 1998 song “Do the Evolution”, which contains the line “2010 [twenty ten], watch it go to fire.” That’s not quite dated yet, but it’s got just a few more months. Although just listening to the song it’s not totally clear that the singer is referring to the year, it could be understood as “20, 10, watch it go to fire” with the numbers either being some kind of countdown or meaningless numbers like in a cheer. Had to year been 2009 [two thousand and nine] or 2011 [twenty eleven] it would have been pretty clearly just a year.
He’s asking the operator for help because he’s not sure of the number (the writing is “worn and faded”), not because he can’t call people directly. Or do you mean most people would just look the number up online now?
Yes. I’ve never lived anyplace where it was necessary to dial the area code for local calls. I live in a small town these days, but 2-3 years ago I was in a city of about 300,000 and never needed to add the area code.
Well I’ve never called the operator for a phone number, I used to call 411. I didn’t know you would call the operator to get a number. And yes now most people would look the number up online and not bother to call anyone for help.
That reminds me of “I Knew The Bride” by Nick Lowe. In the original version, written in about 1977, it goes: “I can see her now with her headphones on/hopping up and down to her favorite song”. In a later recording he updated it by substituting “Walkman” for “headphones”. Nowadays people still use headphones, but what is a Walkman?
In my case about an hour and an half ago, actually. I bought an house that’s had revolving-door tenants for over a decade, and a year later I’m still getting mail for people who haven’t lived there in the present century.
You beat me to it with that one, but I also wanted to point out that, as it was a hit in about 1978, it became badly dated within just a couple of years.
But that is a song about the past. That is not the same as being out of date. A history book is not out-of-date simply because it is about history. So far as I can recall, it does not include any references to early '70s culture (i.e., the period when it came out) at all, let alone dated ones.
On the other hand, he’s singing about his own generation and how it looks back on Buddy Holly’s death as the “Day the Music Died,” along with all the stuff that came after. It sounds a little dated to me in that it’s going over shared experiences that post-baby-boomers don’t share.
I suppose “we didn’t start the fire” would be sort of the same, by that definition, though.
Dean Friedman’s Ariel is the first thing that came to mind, for me:
‘I took her home with me, we watched some TV
Annette Funicello and some guy going steady
I started fooling around with the vertical hold
We got the munchies so I made some spaghetti
We sat and we talked into the night
While channel 2 was signing off the air
I found the softness of her mouth
We made love, the bombs bursting in air’
These days, the ideas of ‘vertical hold’, as well as a TV station signing off the air (as opposed to just switching over to infomercials ) is alien.
Recently we found a piece of the Berlin Wall in a museum and when we tried to explain the wall to my nephew he thought it was one of the most bizarre things he’d ever heard of.
) is alien.