Microsoft's slick expropriation of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" as the anthem for Windows 95 begs a nagging question: How come there are no great pop songs about PCs?
Practically every American mode of technology of note has been enshrined in song - folk, rock, or pop. You can be leaving on a jet plane or you can take the train they call The City of New Orleans. Time-Life could launch a dozen infomercials based on songs about cars and the metaphors they drive: the Little GTO; the Beach Boys cruising up and down that same old strip; the Beatles - beep beep'm beep beep, yeah!; the Eagles' life in the fast lane. There probably hasn't been a supergroup or Top 40 hitmaker in the last 30 years who doesn't have a four-wheeled chariot playing at least a cameo role in one of their songs.
Similarly, the telephone - and its touch tones - have been featured in more than a few successful musical numbers. Remember "867-5309"? How about Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You"? That one even got turned into a commercial. The old Bell System's "Reach Out and Touch Someone" was a superb bit of advertising schmaltz. But the best ditty the PC world could come up with was "How you gonna do it? PS/2 it." Painful. Jinglemeisters can write hummable songs about underarm deodorants, soap, and fast food. But digital products - be they Apples, Compaqs, IBMs, or HPs - completely elude their rhythms and rhyming dictionaries. What gives?
It's not as if computers haven't slipped into other segments of the pop culture mainstream. In the movies, there's Hackers, The Net, Street Fighter, and Colossus: The Forbin Project. Computers have been an integral part of every episode of Star Trek, Lost in Space, and CHiPs. Computers have figured in John Grisham thrillers and Danielle Steel romances. Yet, somehow, pop music alone has remained utterly immune to the blandishment of bits.
This is particularly shocking given that so many pop musicians - Todd Rundgren, Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Dolby - are clearly into what computers can do. Yet, somehow, their interests in and intuitions about the technology never find their way into these artists' songs. There are no Brian Wilsons of the World Wide Web, no Indigo Girls of the Internet ... but why not? Is the challenge of finding phonemes that rhyme with computer or http:// or autoexec.bat aesthetically insurmountable?
Perhaps the best reasons for pop's dismissal of PCs can be found in the medium's unique versatility and subculture. For one, geeks and nerds are not the stuff of either dreamy ballads or driving backbeats. This technology was not borne of romance. The computer's flexibility - number cruncher, word processor, Net surfer - has worked against its carving out a unique niche in either the heart or the musical zeitgeist. You write a song about getting a letter, not about Hammermill bond paper.
But the most obvious point is that - until very recently - PCs have been all about information and data, not people and relationships. The pop culture rise of e-mail romances, flaming, chat rooms, cruising the Net, and mocking the newbies is precisely the sort of material that ends up in pop songs. As PCs become more and more associated with personal communication, they inevitably will become a part of the lyrical vocabulary songwriters use to describe failed intimacy or consummated bliss. Technologies that somehow define relationships - airplanes, automobiles, telephones, drugs - are the winners in the battle of musical memes.
Consequently, song lyrics like "I met my belle on AOL" or "She had fun, fun, fun till her sysop took her e-mail away" may be what we all have to listen forward to. It's inevitable that any medium that does as much - and grows as pervasive - as the PC invariably becomes a fixture in the pop music landscape.
Prediction: There will be a Top 40 hit based on computerdom by the decade's end. We'll see commercial jingles for software and services - without the Stones - even sooner. But why do I think that Wired readers will gripe when that happens?
