Singer Adele is back with a new music video for "Hello," and it brings some retro tech to her retro musical sensibility. Apparently, people on social media are flipping out over her use of an old flip phone in the video, but it's clear that the video doesn't reflect current gadget obsessions—quite the opposite, in fact.
The song, and the video, are about the past—mulling over the past, delving into a past relationship, and trying to resurrect it. The singer is emotionally trapped in the past, trying to call her ex over and over again, and wandering out into a psychological landscape of flashbacks and overgrown, abandoned buildings to illustrate what's going on in her head. Director Xavier Dolan uses a sepia filter and progressively older communication technology to make a point. First Adele has her 2005-era Samsung flip phone:
Then she's seen dialing on a home push-button phone:
And finally, there's an abandoned British phone box with a decades-old rotary phone in it:
I spent way too long plugging through PhoneArena and my own memory to nail down Adele's phone model: the "Samsung" logo is above the screen, and there's a small, raised, circular external camera. Samsung released a bunch of models like this in the 2003-2007 time frame, such as the E600, E620, and S342i, but I couldn't figure out which one exactly matched. (If you can, tell me in the comments.) One thing's clear, though—this phone is at least 10 years old. In a cabin like this, festooned with items like an electric typewriter and an old flip-up address book, it's not a statement about retro tech—it's a statement about being trapped in the past, emotionally, and wanting to reconnect with it.
Her boyfriend is very visibly carrying a Motorola V235, a flip phone that was popular in 2005-2006. That scene is a flashback, of course. If this is, in fact, a flashback to 2005, Adele would have been just 17.
