Unintentional Period Piece: Difference between revisions
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** Al is an odd case - he tends to parody songs that were popular ''two or three years before his album came out'', which means they're usually forgotten by the time his parodies are released. This is the inevitable result of production times for albums—and one reason why after ''Mandatory Fun'' he will focus on individual songs released to the Web within weeks instead of CDs that take years to produce.
* Most of those CD compilation albums that are released every year, such as [[Kidz Bop]] or Now That's What I Call Music! become this within a few years of being released, because they are just compilations of the top hits of the year.
* Anything mentioning telephone calls or other [[Technology Marches On|technology]] ultimately becomes badly dated. From rural [[Party Line Telephone|party lines]] to [[Pay Phone|pay phone]] [[Phone Booth|booths]] to actually talking to a live operator on an intercity call, phone tropes have been less able to stand the test of time than postal themes like "Please
* The concept of the ten-cent local call from a [[Phone Booth]] or [[Pay Phone]] recurs in multiple works through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. "Happy Together" (Turtles, 1967) includes the line "If I should call you up, invest a dime." Rod Stewart ("Do you think I'm sexy?", 1978) asks "give me a dime so I can call my mother." Tommy Tutone ("867-5309/Jenny", 1982) pleads "Jenny Jenny who can I turn to / For the price of a dime I can always turn to you." Eventually, the telcos got greedy and raised the price to a quarter, to thirty-five cents or even to fifty cents; meanwhile, interactive voice response (IVR) and voicemail systems caused a spike in users charged for calls that never reached a live human. No point leaving a message; coin phones no longer accept incoming return calls. Abuse by telemarketers led to widespread adoption of call display, with fewer residential subscribers willing to answer unknown or unfamiliar numbers. Pocket pagers (which required the user find a phone to return the call) were supplanted by cellular telephones (which are self-contained), dropping pay phone usage further. Outside of locations with no cell service (such as a subway/metro platform or an extreme-rural location) few of the once-ubiquitous coin phones still exist. At 50¢ a pop to talk to someone's answering machine? The few coin stations still standing are rarely used.
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