Who's calling? Telephone songs, female vocal empowerment and signfication

The cultural history of the telephone is one that has run in parallel with that of recorded technology in popular music. Both histories are invoked by the corpus of “telephone songs”, songs whose lyrics focus chiefly on the mediation of a romantic relationship by telecommunication technology. Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”, originally a solo project designed for Britney Spears but later a collaboration with Beyoncé, exploits the standard conventions of the telephone song genre. Common tropes are explored, but also sometimes subverted through playful manipulation of the expectations for women in relation to technology, sexuality, race and gender.