I Can Hear You: A Time Capsule About a Time Capsule

Exploring “I Can Hear You” by They Might Be Giants. An antique recording commenting on 1996 technology that has since become history.

The back cover of the advance promotional release of Factory Showroom, with “I Can Hear You” tucked near the end of the track list.

Wizardry in Wax

Generally speaking, my understanding of how sound works with our ears is decent. Waves traveling at varying lengths, follicles in our ears that feel those waves and send signals to our brains to interpret the information... the rest of it.

When it comes to trapping that information onto a device so that it can be saved and played back at a later time? That’s just wizardry.

An Edison wax cylinder record — sound physically carved into wax, one fragile groove at a time.

The wizard responsible for our earliest commercial recording medium was Thomas Edison with his phonograph and tin-foil cylinders. Eventually, Edison’s team combined brainpower with the folks at the Volta Laboratory — including Alexander Graham Bell — to develop the wax cylinder recorder.

Some of those original machines still live at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey.

And that is where They Might Be Giants recorded I Can Hear You, the second-to-last track on Factory Showroom.

This Car Is Protected by Viper

In 1996, these lyrics felt like sharp little snapshots of modern life. Today, they feel like artifacts:

This is a warning

Step away from the car

This car is protected by Viper

For those of us around at the time, it was common to walk through a mall parking lot and accidentally trigger sensitive car alarms. This particularly infamous system used a stern voice to warn potential threats that the car was “protected by VIPER!”

It was less of a theft prevention system and more of a public shaming device, doling out embarrassment to anyone unfortunate enough to set it off and draw the eyes of every living person within a 90-foot radius.

Guess where I am

I’m calling from the plane

I’ll call you when I get there

My dad once showed me a cordless phone that his job gave him. It could work almost anywhere outside of the house. A phone you could use on an airplane, in the car, or out in the field while working, I guess. I didn’t know the phrase “cell phone” yet. Most of my junior grade classmates were buying pagers at mall kiosks. Probably right after setting off Viper alarms in the parking lot. It would be two more years before my first Nokia phone.

An early 1990s “brick” cell phone — portable, powerful, and roughly the size of a paperback novel.

What’s your order?

I can super-size that

Please bring your car around

Drive-thru fast food ordering was cliched as impossible to understand or order effectively, and that technology, from recent experience is mostly the same. Honestly, if you drive through for some burgers today, unless you are blessed with a touch-screen computer to place your order, you will find that understanding employees through the tiny menu speakers has made zero advances in three decades.

If I want food without cooking or sitting in a restaurant, I can use my supercomputer phone to order that food for someone else to sit in a drive-thru line and bring it to me. Why would I go there myself? Have you ever tried to order food from the Wendy’s drive-thru in Tacoma? You can’t hear shit from that speaker.

The Sound of the Future

In 1996, listening to I Can Hear You was an experience that let me hear what it was like when we first started recording sound. The band used 1890s technology to comment on 1990s technology. And the punchline was that the “cutting-edge” devices of 1996 often sounded just as distorted, tinny, and half-audible as the wax cylinder itself.

The yelling car alarms. The novelty of calling from a plane. The novelty of ordering through a speaker. What makes the song even more interesting to me now is that those targets have also become antiques.

The ancient recording method now feels like it’s calling out the modernity of 1996 as just another temporary phase of noise.

As a person who frequently ruminates on my own mortality and the infinite passing of time, maybe that’s what I’m really hearing now. Not just the antique recording or the outdated references, but the sound of a moment in my own life becoming historical.

Just Barely

That wax cylinder once preserved fragile voices from the 1890s. This song preserved a fragile moment from the 1990s.

When I press play now, I’m listening to both eras at once.

I can just barely hear a version of the world, and a version of myself, that don’t quite exist anymore.

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You’re reading one of my Factory Showroom essays. An album full of oddball beauty, quiet heartbreak, and some of the band’s most elegant songwriting.

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