Remember phones with cords? Cardi B’s counting on it in her new video.
In “Ring,” director Mike Ho uses a bunch of phone booths and rotary phones as set pieces to underscore the Invasion of Privacy track’s tale of romantic insecurity. Elsewhere, he’s less literal, wrapping Cardi and featured singer Kehlani in cables meant to signify phone cords and all the tangled webs woven in the waning phase of a relationship that was never meant to last.
The whole outdated phone motif really takes me back, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Watching “Ring,” I recall the touch…
…the feel…
…of vaguely slimy metal…
…those cold-as-a-corpse repositories for an entire city’s face oils.
Is this interesting? Do you like reading my thoughts on public phones? Am I exploiting nostalgia to posture as relatable? Am I contributing to the wave of post-internet nostalgia content that followed VH1’s I Love the ’80s, confusing that which is familiar with that which is good? Do any of you even care about phone booths? Does anyone? Can you be nostalgic for something you don’t care about? “Sometimes nostalgia is a cage,” André 3000 told The New York Times in a 2014 interview, but can it be a phone booth?
Watch the video below!