Spock has to understand what I mean, nobody else understands but Robert Stack knows, he narrates Unsolved Mysteries so he's an expert, just like me.Īlso, it's possible that the "AM Radio" line is a shoutout to Coast to Coast AM, a late night paranormal/conspiracy talk show broadcast late nights in North America.
#Touch tone telephone lyrics tv#
But rather than actually devoting his time to learning, he's incessantly stalking his favorite TV stars because they have to understand, Mr.
"Better to be laughed at than wrong" - a dead giveaway that he's delusional, that he knows he's mocked and derided for his beliefs but he thinks it must be true, he won't allow himself to see reality the way everyone else sees it.
He's an expert, he's the one, the one who was right all along. He thinks he's a genius, an expert, he's working on a unified theory and if he makes it through tonight everybody's gonna hear him out. The narrator of Touch-Tone Telephone has delusions of grandeur. Like, on first listen it sounds like it's just about a theorist making a breakthrough and wanting desperately to show the world what he's discovered (while perhaps being somewhat delusional), but when you really look at it you see lines like "I try and I try and I try to make you listen to me" and "Don't hang up yet, I'm not done", "God damn it, gonna snap, Leonard Nimoy, Call me back", and "Oh, I'm crying now, authentic tears they flow out of me when I think about you" you can see a more complete picture forming. What's interesting is how stalkery the song is. And lines like "Cause you're the only person in the world who'd understand the meaning of this" and "I'm an expert just like you" betray the narrator's inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality (as if their conspiracy theories didn't.) The first verse betrays that it's addressed to the narrator's beloved sci-fi stars, such as Leonard Nimoy (AKA Spock from Star Trek) and Robert Stack (the narrator from Unsolved Mysteries, which might as well be sci-fi and certainly fits the conspiracy theme). The entire song is in the second person, from the first line ("I think it's time for you to know the awful truth the truth about me, and the truth about you") to the chorus ("I try to call you every day"), to the bridge ("I'm an expert just like you and like you, I'm a genius before my time"). It seems to be about a narrator who desperately idolizes television stars from sci-fi and fantasy shows, and is seemingly unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In a way, Touch-Tone Telephone IS a love song, albeit one that turns the idea of love on its head. He's been "working on a unified theory", knows "the truth", uses outdated technology, is "an expert in his field", and there's shoutouts to various real-world conspiracy theories - UFOlogy (the study of unidentified flying object), Ancient Aliens (the belief that at some point during the development of humanity, there was extraterrestrial intervention), the Super-Sargasso Sea (a purported alternate dimensional plane where lost things go), and a mention towards the beginning of a "Brand new species big cat", a reference to the cryptozoological rumors of large cats not native to Britain being sighted in the United Kingdom, and "space nazis", the recurring science fiction trope of alien nazis.īut what may be less obvious is that the song seems to be, in the tradition of love songs, a second person ballad addressed to someone. I think it's pretty clear that this song is about a conspiracy theorist.
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