Contributors:

The Big Steamy Thing

Jonathan Chaffer

Virgil Mullins

Aaron T Porter

Pygmy@ic.net

First, a little background on this song. It was recorded at the Edison Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey on an Edison wax cylinder recorder. This was one of Edison's own machines (about 100 years old). No electricity was used in the recording process until it came time to transfer the music from the wax cylinder to tape.

Each verse of this song is an example of a dialogue in which it is difficult to hear the person on the other end of the conversation. The situations described are a car alarm, a cellular phone on a plane, a front door apartment intercom, and a fast food ordering intercom.

The song, taken as a whole, seems to criticize technology. First of all, there is the observation that the situations described all involve relatively sophisticated technological innovations, but none sound any better than this recording done using hundred-year-old equipment without electricity. The question is raised: what is the point of all this technology? This idea is reinforced by the lyrics in the two middle verses, in which not only is the communication medium low-fidelity, but the message is useless or confusing. In one case, a man calls from the plane for the sake of doing so; he's going to call again once he is on the ground. In the other, the apartment resident "buzzes someone in" when the system involves no buzzing sound whatsoever.