Wednesday 25 July 2018

Outdated Song Lyrics

When Communism fell in 1991 it not only bought about wide scale changes on the international stage but it consigned anyone under 30 to wonder what the hell was the USSR that the Beatles were singing about.
Also consigned to the historical dustbin by the flourish of Mikhail Gorbachev's pen was Billy Joel's song 'Leningrad' as they changed the name and replaced the road sign at the entrance of the city with ones which read 'Welcome To St Petersburg'.
A third victim of the changing of the socioeconomic order in Eastern Europe was The Sex Pistols and their song 'Holiday In The Sun' with it's references to the Berlin Wall which judging by the amount of people who own a 'real piece' must have stretched to the moon and back.
I still hear songs from the 90s which mention pagers which mostly belonged to medical staff and for typing the numbers 8008, 5318008, 55378008, 315537 and then turning the pager upside down which never got old to male pager owners it seems.
Even further back Bow Wow Wow sang about 'C30 C60 C90' which were cassette tapes and the number after the C was the length of the tape which determined how many songs that you nicked off the radio for your mix-tape. 
The Woolworth's in the X-Ray Spex song 'Warrior in Woolworth's' was a shop back in the day which you could walk in one end and back out the other with a pocketful of nicked pick 'n' mix.    
Blondie sang about something called a 'phone booth', which when you explain to teenagers was somewhere where you would insert money into them in order to call somebody, they laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion as they also do at the Beastie Boys '(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right To Party' song and the line about 'your mom threw away your best porno mag' because now rather than
a suspiciously crumpled magazine being passed around the whole school, now it's all at the click of a suspiciously sticky mobile phone button.

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