We’ve all been there. 2 am. Drunk into oblivion and picking up the phone to accidentally drunk dial an ex or leave an accidental voicemail. And if you haven’t been in this situation, you probably know of a friend that has been in a similar situation. Now imagine leaving a voicemail on a music producer or rapper’s phone. Embarrassing!
All this started because I tried to explain to a friend the joke on why you never leave a voicemail on the phone – you never know who is going to put your voice in their next album. They stared at me blankly. Voicemails in songs are a well-known trend in the music I listen to. I never realized that this is not a common phenomenon in other genres of music. I started by making a playlist of songs that included voicemails or audio recordings. Some of the songs had audio snippets with the grainy and authentic essence of a voicemail or phone call. In this project, I set out to prove a trend in songs throughout genres, and decades. Through looking at various songs, I found that voicemails and audio recordings are used primarily in Hip-Hop/Rap and R&B songs. Based on the collection of songs examined, I believe that Dr. Dre in conjunction with NWA started the trend and that during the 2010s the trend had a resurgence when both Drake and Kendrick Lamar popularized it. I wanted to find the oldest or first song that included a voicemail. I don’t think I found it yet but this compilation of 131 songs (and counting) is a start to talk about trends and just get the conversation going on how iconic the “voicemail” has become in the Hip-Hop/Rap community.
I first started looking at what was out there. Have people already talked about this? I only found an article talking about the purpose of a voicemail in a song and some things about lawsuits related to voicemails. Honestly, I do want to write about this in the future because wow – drama!
In a spreadsheet, I decided to record: the artist, song name, release date, genre of music, voicemail purpose, voicemail placement, length of the song, and music label.
I chose to categorize songs based on the article “A Guide to Voicemails in Hip Hop” by Sheldon Pierce. In this article, Pierce uses the following categories of voicemail purpose in each song: Narrative Building, Myth Building, Family Business, Backstories, Warning Shots, and Remembrances. Upon further inspection, I decided to combine some of these categories because they were similar. I chose to condense six categories into three. Narrative Building remained as is since this had to do with the voicemail adding to the story laid out throughout the album or song. Family Business, Backstories, and Remembrances were all condensed into Remembrance. I chose to do this because many songs of the remembrance category encompassed voicemails related to exes, family, and also a call back to a time when the album or song was created tying back to the backstories category. Myth Building and warning shots were all combined into the Myth Building. I thought that warning shots were a way to create a brand or myth around an artist. Categorizing was simpler after condensing into Narrative, Remembrance, and Myth Building categories.
I used the songs mentioned in “A Guide to Voicemails in Hip Hop” to add to my data set. I also added the songs referenced in “The Most Iconic Use Of Voicemails In Hit Songs” by Meagan Fredette and from website song facts to increase the diversity of song genres in my data set. However, a few songs referenced were not added because they did not “sound” like voicemails to me. Songs like “Hello, This is Joanie” by Paul Evans and “Stan” by Eminem do not sound like voicemails because they lack rawness. In a normal voicemail, there is a quality of rawness because the person leaving the voicemail has no intention of being in a song at the time of leaving a voicemail and we also tend to hear a staticky grainy quality of the audio. The chorus and rap imitate voicemail content with clean audio in the songs mentioned. The voicemail is thought out and does not have the vulnerable or authentic quality that would naturally come off from a normal voicemail.
Data Collection and Methods
While creating my big spreadsheet, patterns started to emerge. A lot of the artists that used voicemails were part of hip hop/rap and R&B/Soul genres which wasn’t surprising because it’s kind of a running joke at this point to never leave a voicemail to an emerging rapper or producer. However, I was curious as to why this was the case. Who were the people that started the trend? How did this come to be so commonplace?
Voicemail History
Voicemails were created in the late 1970s by Gordon Matthews. Corporations wanted voicemails so that employees could leave messages without ringing the phone. Also, in the early days of their creation, answering machines would save voicemails. These answering machines were usually big and stored voicemails physically rather than saving them on a server. It is important to note that the answering machines were attached to landlines and usually did not save caller ID. This all changed in 1988. According to “A Small Convenience That Changed Everything: The History of Voicemail” article by Rupendra Brahambhatt, “Initially, phone companies weren’t allowed to provide voicemail service on their devices, but a ruling in 1988 by Judge Harold H. Greene revoked this restriction. Greg Carr and Scott Jones, founders of the Boston Technology company saw this court decision as a market opportunity, and in 1988, they launched and sold their first voicemail service to telecom companies.” So after this ruling and in addition to increasing advances in technology, telecom companies started saving voicemails on servers rather than on a physical answering machine. The voicemail as we know it today became popularized around the 1980s-1990s but declined around 2012.
When looking at the data, the five oldest songs I found were the following: “Mi Corazon Lloro,” “Slow Ride,” “All The Love, Message to B.A. – Interlude,” and “Disgustipated.” “Slow Ride” and “Mi Corazon Lloro” have phone call audio. In the songs, the audio clips depict a phone call between two people. The first song with a voicemail is “All The Love” by Kate Bush and “Message to B.A.” Both songs utilized answering machines to play the voicemails we hear throughout the song. The release dates for both songs were 1982 and 1991 respectively. The dates correspond with when voicemails and answering machines became popularized.
|
Song |
Artist |
Type |
Genre |
Voicemail Purpose |
Date Released |
Year |
|
Disgustipated |
TOOL |
Voicemail |
Metal |
NA |
04/06/1993 |
1993 |
|
Message to B.A. – Interlude |
N.W.A |
Voicemail |
Hip-Hop/Rap |
Ego Building |
05/28/1991 |
1991 |
|
All The Love |
Kate Bush |
Voicemail |
Pop |
Narrative Building |
9/13/82 |
1982 |
|
Slow Ride |
Sublime |
Phone Call |
Ska Punk |
Narrative Building |
1991 |
1991 |
|
Mi Corazon Lloro |
King Clave |
Phone Call |
Latin |
Narrative Building |
1975 |
1975 |
So anyways back to looking at the data…
I began to graph voicemail occurrences by year. The voicemails started to increase exponentially after 2010. I made a list of all the artists that were in the spreadsheet and examined how many times they each had songs that had voicemails in them. The most prominent artists that kept coming up were the following: Isaiah Rashad, Baby Keem, Drake, SZA, and Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick Lamar was the one with the most use of voicemails. Also, at some point Kendrick, SZA, and Isaiah Rashad were all involved in TDE/Top Dawg Entertainment… and funny that Baby Keem is Kendrick’s cousin. So that was one pattern that quickly emerged when I began to look at which artists seem to use voicemails/audio recordings in their bodies of work. As I started getting into labels, I also noticed that Kendrick at some point was involved with Dr. Dre since Good Kid MAAD City was released thru Dr. Dre’s label: Aftermath.
|
Artists |
Occurrences |
|
Baby Keem |
3 |
|
Drake |
3 |
|
Isaiah Rashad |
5 |
|
Kendrick Lamar |
6 |
|
SZA |
3 |
|
Warner Meadows |
3 |
I kept going and then noticed Snoop and Eminem’s use of voicemails. I kept going farther and went far back enough to see NWA using a voicemail as early as 1991. Dr. Dre didn’t leave NWA until 1992 meaning that he must have also influenced the released song “Message to B.A.- Interlude.” All these artists have collaborated or have had close ties or involvement with Dr. Dre. Coincidence? I think not! All of this led me into a spiral rabbit hole where I was convinced, I had uncovered a conspiracy and tying back people’s music relationships and playing detective to who influenced who. All this led me to believe that Dr. Dre and NWA created a blueprint for adding voicemails to songs. And this seemed to hold up since Snoop and Eminem also had early tracks with voicemails and also had close ties to Dr. Dre.
However, as mentioned, this trend didn’t explode until the 2010s. What kind of albums were released in the early 2010s? Enter Good Kid MAAD City and Take Care. These are iconic albums that forever popularized the art of voicemails.
Wait a minute… How does Drake fit into this theory? What is his relationship with Dr. Dre? I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer to this question. Listen… I do not care for Drake’s music, but you can’t deny the iconic “Marvin’s Room” song or the astounding influence that Drake has over pop culture and has had for about a decade now. This man puts out the most mediocre songs and still tops the charts… but as I was saying…
Drake released Take Care on November 15th, 2011, and Kendrick released Good Kid MAAD City on October 12th, 2012. On Kendrick’s albums, we have 9 out of 17 songs or around 53 percent of the songs end up having voicemails or audio recordings. Could it be that Dr. Dre was the one that influenced Kendrick and then Kendrick was able to influence voicemail in his fellow counterparts in TDE? This is my mini conspiracy and speculation LOL but yeah… Honestly, I want to keep collecting more data on older music from the past 1990s because I still have not answered what older songs with voicemail exist. It’s a little tricky to find specific release dates of pieces before the 1990s because music used to be released on vinyl so there typically were multiple releases of songs. Also, because the internet was not as prevalent. I hope you all enjoyed the video, and please subscribe or comment if you have suggestions for making my data stronger just because I am not a statistician. Please criticize. Thanks!
I will admit that there are limitations to the data gathered. A glaring limitation was that I found most songs based on the music my friends and I listen to. I tried to branch out by using open-source lists such as (pitchfork articles and other music blogs). The songs I found from other genres are limited to what other close friends and I listen to. Again, I’m not a stats person and this is an ongoing project, but I did my best and these are the results based on my compiled list of songs. If you would like to collaborate or offer guidance on older songs that include voicemail or any audio recording please dm me. I would appreciate the help of old rock heads or hip-hop heads. I can understand these patterns written off by my bias of listening to mostly Hip-Hop and R&B and my bias to listening to more current music from the 2010s and onwards.
Link to Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3LfwJymLgFbVZ1r1hotTih?si=1ff78fd3117a45e8
Link to the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nx8vcZG0hwpj4b6K1hpgcdjBrt36S0oc7DQmzTrxlcU/edit?usp=sharing