Legal Commentary

My Ringtone Search

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

I got a new cell phone a little while ago, because my old one just plain died after five years of abuse. The new one allows me to download .mp3 snippets as ringtones, and I’ve had some fun playing with it and putting in custom tones for the people who tend to call me. My wife gets the Monty Python Theme song (aka The Liberty Bell March), because she likes it.

Since I got the new phone, I’ve been using a “yes we can” audio clip as my default ringtone. (You can hear the part I use from the latter part of this video.) I got the idea from reading about South American electoral campaigns, in which I gather it is common for campaigns to produce ringtones and for supporters to use them. If nothing else, “yes we can” got a lot of knowing laughs.

But in my mind that was always a pre-election ringtone. Now I need something more permanent, or at least different. Ideally, I’d like something mixing the optimistic and the cautious, probably political, but more appropriate for the next months, a period in which the poetry of campaigning ripens into to the prose of governance. The ideal song would not be too obnoxious to others, and would sound nice to me, lend itself to excerpting, and no doubt meet many other criteria I’m too tired today to formulate.

Got any suggestions?

Note: I have never ever liked the sound of Happy Days Are Here Again. That is Not An Option. I also rejected these stanzas from Talking Heads’ Don’t Worry About the Government because, much as I like the song, it’s too jangly for a ringtone I’ll hear over and over.

That song, incidentally, has always meant “Roslyn, Va” to me for no obvious reason except it seems to fit….

Full post as published by Discourse.net on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).