Self-Expression in 20-Second Increments
Remembering how we revealed ourselves to the world by choosing a song for when our phones rang
Apparently the first ringtone was “My Gift to You” by the Japanese band Chemistry. I learned this from Wikipedia.
It wasn’t my first ringtone. Just the first ringtone.
I had never heard that song. Here it is if you’ve never heard it either. Imagine it means your friend is calling you. Nice way to link a song to an emotion, huh? Novel at the time.
I remember my first ringtone was “American Idiot,” but it was the part where Billie Joe sings the verse line but the drums are different in anticipation for the big last chorus, where it already sounds like it’s being sung through a Walkie Talkie, and on whatever phone I had in 2006 it was even worse.
Weird choice for a ringtone from both the ringtone makers and also weird choice for me. I was 14, though — the ultimate “what the fuck are you thinking?” age.
You can’t really hear good audio fidelity, much less something as nuanced as snare tone through a Motorola Razr that gets dropped on a regular basis. The speakers just are not there. But the point wasn’t audio fidelity. The point was telling people who we were without saying anything else at all. We let someone else do that talking for us.
We used roughly 20-second clips of a song to convey our inner life. Our feelings. Our desires. These snippets that would repeat if you didn’t pick up your phone in time before sending our moms to voicemail said everything we needed to say about the kind of person we were.
And I wanted people to know that I was going to stay inside. I was going to stay inside for good.
“Agoraphobia” is not the best song on Incubus’s 2004 “A Crow Left of the Murder” – the album of theirs that I will go to bat for as their best, and one that remains very important to me 21 years later. It’s not even my favorite song on the album. But it’s the one that heralded the news that one of my friends or perhaps one of my parents were trying to reach me.
The verse is a wonky, uneven hike of bass and guitar playing off of each other before meeting somewhere together for the chorus, glued together by one definitive THWACK of the snare.
I wanna stay inside
I wanna stay inside for good
I wanna stay inside
For good
for good
for good
for good
for good
for good
for good
for good
Here’s the thing. When I was 15 or so and bought this ringtone for 99 cents, I did not want to stay inside for good. I had gone from a small Catholic middle school that I didn’t particularly love to now the big public school with friends that I felt got me and, more importantly, hundreds of people who I didn’t know. A fresh start. That ever-illusive thing that kids dreamed of. You could be anyone you want. The mildly embarrassing sins of your previous scholastic life are – for the most part – mostly forgiven. And what I wanted to convey at the time, I guess, was that despite being desperate to be seen and liked and laughed with not at and admired was that inside I contained the … I don’t know, “intellect” (in the very 15-year-old sense of the word) to want to be left alone. To be dissatisfied with the world in which I was very actively participating.
Kids are dumb as hell and not to be trusted.
I love “A Crow Left of the Murder” very much. The drums especially. José Pasillas’ drumming has always been inspirational to me. Copeland-esque in his use of cymbals. Simple when he has to be, flashy when it calls for it, complementary of the rest of the band, technical, melodic. Just really good, man.
Incubus is a good album for a certain type of teenager. The type who is smart and knows they’re smart but doesn’t know they’re not that smart, so smart-sounding things that aren’t actually that smart sound a lot smarter than they are. Intricate enough for someone who wants to feel superior to others for their musical taste, but it’s typically in 4/4.
I want to underscore here that I still love Incubus and this album quite a bit as an adult.
Eventually I changed my ringtone from “Agoraphobia.” I couldn’t tell you what I changed it to or what prompted the change, but I know I did. I know I didn’t graduate high school with “Agoraphobia” as my ringtone.
When I hear the song to this day, and that chorus kicks in with the THWACK, I still have a Pavlovian response somewhere deep down that someone is calling me.
My strongest sense memory of this album isn’t my phone ringing and getting excited about the prospect of making plans with my friends, though. It’s at about 3 AM in the back of my friend’s mom’s SUV en route to Myrtle Beach for Senior Week.
Myrtle Beach - the Monaco of the Southeastern US.
About a 9 or so hour drive if you do it in a straight shot, the four of us in the car each brought two CD’s. I know I brought “A Crow Left of the Murder.” I think the other CD was actually New Radicals. You know the one. The one with that one song. Another song that namedrops Jehovah, which is weird.
But I know we listened to “A Crow Left of the Murder” while it was still dark as we passed through various Pennsylvanian burgs — Dillsburg, Heidlersburg, Gettysburg — and headed south. The same song that I thought could paint a succinct enough picture of me as a deep emotional being when I started this phase of my life, now much louder and on better speakers, celebrating the end of that phase. The same friends that I started it with, too, I luckily ended it with. Happy in that moment, but looking back on it sort of sad about just how blissfully unaware we were, or at least neglectful, the fact that we won’t all live in the same place, let alone pile ourselves into a car together, for much longer. Like every kid, who I have to remind you are stupid as hell, we thought we were different and immune to time. We’re lucky that we avoided a lot of the pitfalls of time’s march forward, but we weren’t immune. No one and nothing is. Things just change.
Ringtones at their height were a $4 billion industry in 2004 – the same album that “A Crow Left of the Murder” came out. With the growing ease of music piracy and evolving technology, eventually people could make their own ringtones. Then, for some reason, we all decided we didn’t want them at all. We had the most technologically advanced personal computer imaginable in our pockets, capable of playing music to surprisingly high fidelity, and instead we went with the stock ringers or – more commonly – no ringers at all. Just vibrations.
What does that convey? What does that tell the world about yourself and your inner life? Maybe that you’re growing up and that there’s no more time for silly things like that. There’s a time and a place for merriment and it’s not when you’re answering the phone. Answering the phone used to be fun. It used to be “Wow who could that be?” (excited) and not “Who could that be?” (terrified).
It’s not your friends calling, it’s your boss. It’s your doctor. It’s someone who wants you to pay them money. It might be your parents but you moved out years ago so ah jeez that’s probably not good news. You should call your parents more so when they call it doesn’t create an instant sense of dread that someone died or, at minimum, had some sort of accident.
The last ringtone I remember hearing in the wild was once I got to college. A world bigger than I could fathom where I was trying desperately once again to convey who I was inside to a world of strangers in a big city who I felt were much, much cooler than me. I remember sitting in a meeting for the free music magazine I started writing for, run by one of my very cool professors, and a guy’s phone started ringing. He was a bit older than me. He lived off campus, obviously, in one of Philadelphia’s premier Cool Neighborhoods, obviously.
His flip phone rang and “This Is Why I’m Hot” filled the room in its tinny glory. He smirked, knowing we had all heard it. That was the point, right? We all needed to hear that a 22-year-old had a vapid hip-hop track as his ringtone in 2010. That was what he needed to convey to the world in the moment. Irony flooding the moment, as was the style at that period of time in that neck of the woods.
I don’t remember thinking it was especially cool, but of course I didn’t say anything.
Do you know who sang “This Is Why I’m Hot?” I didn’t until I googled it for this. It’s MIMS.
If you held a gun to my head and said “Who sings ‘This Is Why I’m Hot?’” I’d say pull the trigger.
I have absolutely no idea why, but as a real adult with a job and an iPhone, I decided that it was time for a new ringtone. I chose “Night Moves” by Bob Seger, only the version that I bought wasn’t actually Bob Seger. It sounds more like Tom Jones. I still have it, and every now and then I think about bringing it back. Except then I remember that it might ring somewhere like a cool coffee shop and then I’ve conveyed to the rest of the world that I’m the kind of guy who wants a knockoff version of “Night Moves” to play when I get a call.
Best to just keep things on silent sometimes. Maybe we all just learned that sometimes it’s best to shut up. You don’t need to say anything about yourself at all. You don’t need the attention. Our 15-year-old selves would not understand that.
Many reading this definitely remember the songs they had on their Myspace profiles for the same reason — representations of our inner lives laundered through someone else’s voice and instruments. Our most vulnerable feelings or the facade we want to put up to the world but from a safe distance. Plausible deniability that it’s actually how we feel. Myspace is gone now, and Tom isn’t even a maniacal technocrat hell bent on selling America to the highest bidder like his former peers and acolytes. Coward.
We as a society outgrew the need for a ringtone because technology grew us out of it. But we definitely didn’t outgrow the need to convey our feelings without doing something so embarrassing as telling others with our words. We still allow others to do it for us, and painstakingly position those messages in ways that look like we just happened to leave them there with no effort or consciousness at all. Oh, you heard that? Oh, you saw that? That thing?
And you can see the phenomenon on its largest scale in filmmakers with specific needle drops in movies or giving characters a particular musical taste to reflect their own but, again, laundered through someone else — this time someone fictional.
Maybe we start blogs that teeter just on the edge of personal expression but rein it back in with some humor, the equivalent of sending a heartfelt text that ends with “haha.”
At some point, I guess, we just decided that we just wouldn’t do this form of peacocking with our phones. Maybe it’s because we are now terrified of talking on the phone, much preferring texts and DM’s. Maybe we all of this age, who once decorated our phone calls with songs, had to grow up at the same time and decided the way to be an adult professional or professional adult was to have your phone ring like a normal person, or better yet, not at all.
Maybe it was just a passing fad that was frivolous and useless from the get-go and society woke up and put our phones on silent.
I don’t know what I thought I was conveying in my 20s with my “We Have Bob Seger at Home” ringtone. Maybe the same as the dude with “This Is Why I’m Hot.” I guess 20-somethings are just as dumb and insecure as 14-year-olds.
Maybe we never actually outgrow anything.
Remember a particularly funny ringtone you had/heard? Let me know. Engagement is good.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Cloakroom.
Really enjoyed this piece! I always wanted to have a cool ringtone and even downloaded a few -- I think I had a Ben Folds one and a Weezer one for a bit -- but never got much of a chance to use them. I had to keep my phone on vibrate at school. I had to keep my phone on vibrate at work. I ended up keeping my phone on vibrate at home because when I left it on my parents harassed me about who I was talking to or what I was doing every time I got a notification. I think ringtones died out because, as phones evolved into things that went with us everywhere, it became a dick move to leave your ringer on and subject people to it, cool ringtone or not.
loved it mate, particularly the dive into teenage incubus intellectualism.
my ringtone of choice for all of high school was the first 20 seconds of "world war me" by from first to last. listen to it, i think you'll pick up what i thought i was putting down lol.
also, here's a funny one. my dad, in his early sixties, without a shred of irony, started using "drop it like it's hot" as his ringtone. for the latter third of my adolescence and nearly all of my adulthood, he continued to keep his ringer on max volume at all times. each time he got a new phone he made zero attempt to understand it's updated technological capabilities, apart from figuring out how to get the ringtone bumping again. in 2022, at 71, he had a pretty devastating head injury that had him in intensive care, fully out of it for about 3 weeks. although this was one of the bleaker stretches, i still chuckle when i think about the time in the icu being punctuated by the occasional call from a colleague, announcing itself to the whole hospital staff via a (surprisingly loud, every time) falsetto "snoooooooooooop."