Sep 13 - Bless The Email
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
Sometime in the winter of 2011 I came across the hip hop DJ producer RJD2, and his 2002 album Deadringer. From there, and obsessed, I went on to his 2004 album Since We Last Spoke which had a lovely tune called Making Days Longer. I did a bit of research, looked it up on the Internet and realised it was a cover of a 1971 song called Bless the Telephone, by British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, the guy that wrote the massively famous It Must Be Love (no, it wasn't Madness, they covered that).
I listened to that song on repeat for weeks, first the RJD2 version, then the Labi Siffre version; there was something about the lyrics. I then lost track of it, although I always kept Labi in the back of my mind, until recently, as in a few months ago, when he appeared in a 'related artists' list on Spotify. I heard it maybe three, four, five times, listening to the lyrics. It's clearly a love song, but also an ode to the telephone, in a time (probably, I wasn't around until '89) when although they had been around for quite some time, the telephone was the method of communicating, being favoured over snail mail.
Coincidentally, 1971 was not only the year that Labi Siffre released and probably also wrote the song Bless the Telephone, it was also the year the first email was sent. But as we all probably know, the email and the web in general, although older than we think wasn't really a thing until the late 90s and for most regular folk the early 00s, by which time I too was on the Internet. Of course I don't remember much of my early involvement with the Internet, but I do remember one thing, having an email address meant something. An email address was new, and fresh and people used it to message each other, it was snail mail with a twist. I recently saw a feature online about personal (often cringey) email exchanges between actress Natalie Portman and writer Jonathan Safran Foer spanning over a decade, so from the mid-00s.
From 1971, when Labi praised it as a means of hearing from his lover, to the mid-00s, the telephone was almost definitely the most widely used form of contact for most people. But if you think about from then until now, so about a decade, the way we communicate has changed so much and so many times. I now, on any given day, communicate with friends on Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Twitter, iMessage and sometimes the same friend simultaneously on two or more platforms; we are completely spoilt for choice, and our good friend the email has ended up as being more of an annoyance than a useful tool as it once was.
I've seen it all with email. I've peered over people's shoulders and seen mail icons with no new mail (for the organised type), with a few new emails (for the busy bee) and with thousands of new emails (for the person that gave up sometime in the winter of twenty-fourteen. And I've seen all the differences in myself. I used to be a no new emails kind of guy, but right now (and I've just checked) I've got 82 unread emails. EIGHTY-TWO. I'm afraid that if it goes over one hundred unread emails I would've definitely lost control; but between confirmation emails for e-purchases, spam, emails from my bandmates and newsletters such as the Ann Friedman Weekly which takes a good few hours to get through (but I recommend massively), I really feel like I have no time to manage my emails. I already spend some time every day managing my work email, so by the time I get home the last thing I feel like doing is sorting this one out. Actually, let's try something out, let's take five minutes to sift through unread, unwanted mail and delete and see you in the next paragraph.
OK, we're back; I somehow, miraculously managed not to get sucked into things I wasn't even interested in. But I managed to cut it down to 50, most of which are newsletters, apart from one or two which I'm going to deal with once I'm done with this. So I've looked through my inbox and seen what I receive, and apart from the emails from my bandmates, which are usually just web links with a line or two of text, I haven't received a personal email in a while; and that's my biggest issue. That's my problem with the way things are on the Internet. Do any of you still do snail mail? I do every once in a while, and if you do you'll know how good a handwritten postcard or letter feels. But then you remember the hassle of writing it (by hand) buying an envelope, and a stamp and going to the post office to send it. It's a nice process but a little annoying. However, we all have email at our disposal. Have you ever sent a personal email to somebody? Forwarded something interesting? Years ago, right? Now we're all about putting things on our Facebook profiles and forgetting about them instantly, but don't you think the thrill is gone? I want to go back to a time when email was the best way of communicating via the Internet. When you'd get the odd spam email but sometimes opened up your email to find a personal email, or a nice forward from someone. In a time of impersonal communication can we reconnect with the joys of letter writing, even if it's really letter typing?
As I'm sat here listening to Bless the Telephone I'm wondering whether Labi could write Bless the Email with the same feeling, or whether the Internet will ever be as great as the telephone (even with all its advancements to date) or even if there's that much longer left for something like the email to shift from its original function of 'electronic mail' to just something you need to sign up for the next website.
Stefano Blanca is a writer, artist, photographer and musician living and working in Gibraltar
Email me at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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