I found myself in a high school gym this week, sweating alongside dozens of others and shifting in my folding chair to keep my ass from going numb. We were there to hear my nephew and his classmates strut their musical stuff for family and friends after a year of practice and school competitions. The setting could have been my own high school 40 years ago on just such a June evening. One of the pieces they played was even a song I massacred as third trumpet in Grade 11.
Unlike me, these kids had a ton of talent. So much so, the young, enthusiastic music teacher included a series of solo and smaller group performances chosen by the kids themselves. A classical guitar student played a song from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A makeshift band played Nirvana’s In Bloom. A shy-looking young man crouched behind the microphone with his guitar and began to play a song called, Bless the Telephone. It’s a folky ballad from the early ‘70s by British singer Labi Siffre. Labi who? you might be asking. Me too, when my daughter started playing the same song a few months ago. Siffre was by no means an unknown in his day, but his song Bless the Telephone wasn’t even released as a single. And yet it has enjoyed a resurgence lately, enjoying a popularity it never had half a century ago. It’s been viewed millions of times on YouTube and streamed almost a million times (800,000-plus) on Spotify. It’s not hard to see why it resonates today. Bless the Telephone is a beautifully simple song that recalls the magic of summoning a lover’s voice in the middle of a normal day. It’s a quaint notion from a time when we weren’t living in a constant state of FOMO and texting each other continuously under the desk during meetings and classes. The song’s lyrics themselves have an awkward and vulnerable side in the way that he rushes out the words “I love you,” contrary to the song’s breezy pace.
It made me think of a book written by Chuck Klosterman a few years ago called, “But What if We’re Wrong?” It takes the reader on a journey far into the future, only to look back on our own time: what assumptions are we making now that will seem absurd to our great, great grandkids. It’s a fun exercise in the world of pop culture. How will Michael Jackson be viewed by those who were born long after he died, for example? We’re getting a hint of it right now.
It’s also a valuable exercise in maintaining perspective. We live in a time when moral and ethical norms have been uprooted and sent floating down the raging river of social media. Polarized groups are yelling at each other from the opposing banks.
Here’s a less histrionic example. Reading LinkedIn posts, there is no shortage of advice on how to view and deal with AI. Imagine what those pearls of wisdom will look like a century from now – even a decade from now? (“Grandma, can you tell me the story of the crusade against the em-dash back in the ‘20s again? I love that one.”) Some of the so-called advice sounds more like repurposed pitches from the Gold Rush era. Just replace the words “AI” with “McGillicuddy’s Miraculous Tonic” on some posts and you’ll see what I mean. Others look more like posters from the early 1800s warning of the perils of power looms and knitting frames. We are living in a dizzying, laugh-and-cry hysterical time.
Which brings me back to Chuck Klosterman’s thought experiment and the high school concert. Even 20 years ago, I would have thought Stairway to Heaven would forever be a perennial favourite for a young guitar player. Instead, a quiet, beautiful song – a song harkening to a time when, in the UK at least, even a local call to your lover was still charged by the minute – floated back to the surface. A young man with his messy hair and slept-in looking school uniform, stood in front of a gymnasium full of his all-boys school, testosterone-soaked peers, his parents and strangers like me and sang to us the words that will always make someone’s day brighter, no matter what the medium is, or how complicated things get:
It’s nice to hear you say “hello”
And how are things with you?
I love you
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