Songs on Screen: Music in the Digital Age

Technology such as the internet and smartphones has weaseled into every corner of our lives, including music.

Written by Haley Kennis
Illustrated by Paige Giordano

With each passing day in the 21st century, it seems that advanced technology is increasingly installed into our daily lives. The past two decades have seen the advent of smartphones, the rise of the internet, and the domination of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, forever changing how people interact with one another. As technology intertwines further into our lives, it’s no surprise that this topic has found its way into music. Many artists make music to process how our everyday devices affect our minds and our relationships, whether it be negatively, positively, or somewhere in between. 

Smartphones are now inseparable parts of people all around the world, but the attachment to the devices might be affecting us in ways we may not yet realize. The band MGMT recently tackled this subject in their song titled “TSLAMP” (Time Spent Looking At My Phone). Andrew VanWyngarden sings about the fear that he might be wasting his life looking at his phone. His worst fears are confirmed when he sings about dying after a wasted lifetime of staring at a screen: 

“Gods descend to take me home

Find me staring at my phone

I’m wondering where the hours went

As I’m losing consciousness

My sullen face is all aglow

Time spent looking at my phone.” 

No matter how much he knows that “You can never find the time / If you spend everyday looking at your phone,” he still finds it hard to turn it off. The song “Disconnect” by Clean Bandit and Marina touches upon a similar theme. Marina feels anxious and isolated, and is losing sleep by using her phone too much, but as much as it harms her health, she can’t make herself disconnect. Something about mindlessly scrolling through our phones keeps us coming back for more, even if we know there are better things to do with our limited time.

Social media can make us feel isolated and alienated, but it can also damage the way we interact with others. St. Vincent explores how people feel compelled to share all of their lives online in the song “Digital Witness.” Instagram and Facebook encourage us to share our lives online, but some people take it a step too far. St. Vincent sings “digital witnesses / what’s the point of even sleeping? / If I can’t show, if you can’t see me / What’s the point of doing anything?” displaying the compulsion some feel to share every intimate moment online. “I want all of your mind,” she sings from the perspective of social media itself, highlighting how these sites can warp our minds to share more and more to impress our digital witnesses. She has sold so much of herself to the internet she ends up wishing, “Won’t somebody sell me back to me?” In the quest to create an eternal online life, she lost who she really is. 

Though it can often be alienating, the internet can also bring physically separated people together. “Little Wanderer” by Death Cab for Cutie tells the tale of a couple separated by travel, stuck communicating over the phone and the web. 

“You sent a photo out your window of Tokyo

Told me you were doing fine

You said the cherry blossoms were blooming

And that I was on your mind

But I couldn’t make you out through the glitches

It’s how it always seems to go

So we say our goodbyes over messenger

as the network overloads.” 

Bad connections and time zones will always be between them when she is away, leaving him to hope that her “absence makes [them] grow fonder.” Long distance relationships relationships are just as genuine as relationships not separated by travel, but there will always be a longing for closeness and touch that a computer can never provide. 

However, if someone can never return, their internet presence may be all you have. The chilling song “Ghost Page” by Red Vox tells the tale of someone endlessly scrolling on the Facebook page of their late lover. Though she is gone, her Facebook page remains frozen in time. He keeps leaving posts on her page, which is one of the few ways he has left to interact with her. 

“Rain hell, rain it on top of me

Cause right now, no one is stopping me

Rain hell, rain it on top of me

Cause right now, nothing is stopping me.”

He is obsessed with visiting her “ghost page,” trying to maintain the illusion that she is alive. But visiting the page is a reminder that she is gone, a constant torment raining down on him. There is nothing that can stop him from visiting the page; he is stuck in a loop of checking and writing on a wall that will never update, singing “we’ll be together till the end of time / I’ll be scrolling through your shrine.” The pages people leave behind create a space between life and death, suspending someone’s life in a snapshot. We will be outlived by our online presence, and ghost pages will forever enshrine fragments of our lives on the internet.

One band that really has utilized  the complex interaction of technology in our lives is Radiohead. Throughout their career, they have not only explored how the modern age is affecting people through their music, but also through the recording and releasing of the music itself. Songs like “Airbag” and “Lucky” on their album OK Computer explore the fears of common technologies like cars and planes that are still relevant twenty years later, as detailed in a piece by The New Yorker. They had online forums and a website in the ‘90s, released mini-music videos on the internet in the year 2000, and did live streams in the mid 2000s — all years before any of those technologies were popular. The pay-what-you-want release of their album In Rainbows in 2007 was a response to online pirating and a way to flip the record industry on its head. Though much of their music highlights a fear of the technological, modern age, their career remains intertwined with that same technology. Radiohead is a reminder that though we may be wary of its effects, technology is a part of our lives and we ultimately get to control it. 

As time marches on, we will continue to rely heavily on technology while not fully understanding its impact long-term. Though technology may forever change our relationships, minds, and lives, we can turn to music to try and express how this makes us feel. This topic is still very new in music, but it will likely become more present as humanity intertwines more with tech in the coming decades. Music can slow down our minds from the constant overload of information we face daily, but also explore the ways it might affect us now — and in the future.