Smartphone Hour vs Telephone Hour
So I was listening to Broadway radio, like any normal person, and this older song came on. Now the interesting thing is that the Telephone Hour has a structure similar to Smartphone Hour, so much that I’m pretty sure Smartphone Hour is supposed to be a homage to it. So here are some comparisons.
(I’m going to be writing this explaining the Bye Bye Birde stuff, but not the BMC stuff because the later actually has a fandom)
So for background on Telephone, I don’t really know what’s happening. But from what I could tell based on a summary I found, this sets up Kim’s and Hugo’s relationship for payoff later. But that doesn’t matter. But basically Kim told her friend that she and Hugo banged so then it spreads across the entire town.
So Smartphone opens with texting and that part of the song has no parrel to Telephone, showing how in the modern age, instead of just having the phone ring when they don’t pick up, you can bug them in text form. Then each of the first receiver’s phones rings 3 times. However, instead of the sound of a ringing phone in smartphone, it’s just Chole reading off the caller id.
Now after the information is first spread in each song, everyone picks off the information and shares it with everyone. It’s pretty similar for both songs, but here are the main differences:
Telephone
In the rapid spreading of information, this guy named Harvey is completely talked over. Everyone he tries to call thing he’s trying to talk about Hugo and Kim and talks over him.
Unlike Smartphone, parts of the song are hostile, with some people talking about how they won’t last or attacking Hugo for loving Kim. In Smartphone everyone shows at least some false performative form of sympathy.
Smartphone
Not counting that text is added to communication as a medium, there are two main differences:
1. Preformative sympathy: Now this is probably just because the focus of Smartphone is a tragedy, but the change in times also makes performative sympathy better. Changing your profile pic and thinking you know what’s happening, making it about you, is so much easy in modern times(I’d link the relevant part of DEH here, but it’s not part of a song).
2. False information: Why Ritch set the fire changes throughout the song. This also probably has to do with the fact there even are questions, but false information is more easily spread when you don’t have to go one to one person.
