Remember getting your first flip phone? It was probably so incomprehensibly advanced that you could store all your friend’s phone numbers in there, and if you were really lucky, you might have even be able to play snake on it. The postal service was alive and well, people still read books, and occasionally you got shuffled off from in front of the television if your parents thought you weren’t getting enough sunlight. Those were simpler times. “Modern Days,” the new video from Fredericton’s CHIPS, is not about those times.
“It’s a tough spot, man. I remember when I met my first love back in high school. No one had phones. We used to talk on my parents landline for hours. That was our way of staying in contact when we were apart. It was a simpler time,” says CHIPS frontman Adam Guidry.
In particular, “Modern Days” addresses our dependency on our tiny smartphone taskmasters and our society’s compulsion to stare into screens, like our whole world somehow exists within their tiny steel bodies.
Also, it’s about how smart phones ruined Guidry’s love life. Go figure.
“I wrote the song when I was going through a breakup. It’s basically about technology and how it ruined my last relationship. It is sort of about how everything around you falls apart sometimes and how important it is to not give up and stay positive,” explains Guidry.
“Many people wake up and the first thing they do is look at a screen, and the last thing they do before bed is look at a screen. Many of the negative things we see and hear are from media and just having access to everything all the time.”
Filmed by Devon Murrins, the video provides a straightforward rock out. The question of how a smart phone really came between Guidry and his lover is perhaps best left a mystery. However it happened, it still made for a catchy as hell track.