BlackBerry, at last, has allowed its lingering smartphones to “go dim” (not RIM). It’s a rather historical moment in technology, as it’s yet another example of how he who blazes the trail so often ends up left in the dust (see also: Friendster, MySpace).
BlackBerry might have had its first origin story in 1996, when it was still in a more germinal “pager phase,” but the iconic silhouette that would appear in the hands of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and every celebrity in between for most of the 00s wouldn’t be enough to inspire Lana Del Rey to write a song about the technology until 2011, when it was already well on the path to decline. Called “BBM Baby,” it remains one of Del Rey’s many unofficially released songs. And although it was written the same year that “Video Games” would end up becoming a viral hit, there were still traces of “Trailer Park Lizzy” in the theme and sound of this track, co-written with Penguin Prison.
As was usual for this era, Del Rey adopts a Marilyn-esque baby voice to seduce, “I be BBMin’ you/Telling you/All the things I’m gonna do to you/When you get home baby.” The 80s-esque sonic landscape is unusual for Del Rey’s wheelhouse, yet it’s retroactively well-suited to the antiquated topic of the lyrics as Del Rey beguiles the object of her seduction with all the things she’s going to do to him when she gets home, described through the BlackBerry medium. She admits her fetish for the BBM (not to be confused with BDSM) by remarking, “Makin’ love then yelling, ooh/Nothin’ I would rather do/Than flirt and talkin dirty, you/Love me, hate me.” That’s always the dynamic with a relationship described in a Lana song. The simultaneous pain and pleasure, la douleur exquise.
Indeed, that also seemed to be the dynamic most people had with their small-buttoned BlackBerries (named because of the buttons’ resemblance to the “drupelets” of blackberries—oh marketing). And yet, even someone like Del Rey, who “came of age” slightly after Paris Hilton, can appreciate the strangely camp value of the apparatus (Del Rey appreciated it so much that she even mentions it again in another unreleased track, “Children of the Bad Revolution”—presumably a bad revolution that includes BBM’ing amid loose attempts to “get free”). Having been developed by the salaciously acronym’d RIM (Research in Motion), BlackBerry began to set itself apart from other mobile devices by focusing on its email capabilities. PDA (personal digital assistant) took on a less tactile meaning when BlackBerry came along and adopted yet another sexually-charged term like “thumbing.” No, it had nothing to do with “butt stuff” (much to Del Rey’s dismay), but rather, the fact that one only needed to use their thumbs to type on the device.
That way, it was easy to “thumb” (which doesn’t sound quite as elegantly lascivious as “sext”) BBMs like, “Treatin’ me nice, and then treatin’ me rough/And I don’t know why, but I can’t get enough I like it, I like it/And I know that I’m making you nuts.” Of course, that might be a bit long-winded for a BBM, but we’re talking about a poet laureate here. She can’t be hemmed in by character amounts. In fact, she finds the entire messaging system rather addictive as she goes on to the chorus, “BBM baby/Middle of the night, wakin’ up to write (oh, won’t you be)/Be my BBM baby/I don’t wanna fight, you’re the one I like.” And what better way to keep any tensions at bay by not actually seeing the object of one’s desire in person (which also ties in to what Ariana Grande was saying on “NASA”)?
Del Rey goes on to immortalize one of the most millennial sentiments in the form of, “He signs XO, hugs, hey I know it’s true love ‘cause my heart goes yay/He signs XX, kiss, babe I don’t wanna fight.” Still written in that more innocent time before the Newspeak of emojis completely took over, “BBM Baby” is an essential technology time capsule in sonic form the same way Britney Spears’ “Email My Heart” is. Except “BBM Baby” is more likely to stand the test of time from a musical (if not lyrical) standpoint, even when Del Rey sings, “The way that you write is crazy/Your typing is poetical/Red roses in your message [some small trace of the emoji lingo], oh I think I met my match in you/Text me, chase me.” The teasing “Lolita shtick” Del Rey would become known for is therefore very much present on this song, and would come to remain as an indelible part of her brand for many albums to come.
Although there was a slight tonal shift on 2017’s Lust for Life that has continued up to now, some might say BlackBerry’s decline was a direct result of doing exactly what Del Rey has also done for most of her career: failing to make a genuine change to the product. Sure, there were tweaks and “model redesigns,” but, fundamentally, nothing about the “essence” was altered. And BlackBerry refused to evolve at a key moment in the 00s when Apple was about to secure its smartphone dominance.
And so, goodbye QWERTY keyboards, goodbye cruel world. What BlackBerry proved more than anything is that appealing to the hoi polloi (even if capitalism has vastly limited the broke asses’ spending power)—which they never truly marketed themselves toward—is the key to any enduringly successful business model. And here, too, Del Rey mimics the device she wrote a song about, preferring to keep her brand niche rather than “Taylor Swift-ify.” Because, yes, Taylor is the Apple of the music industry’s eye.
