ABSTRACT
In the 1967 song ‘The Red Telephone’, performed by the West Coast psychedelic band Love on their seminal album Forever Changes, songwriter Arthur Lee uses the concept of hypnosis as a social metaphor. The hypnotism that disempowers us in the song is meant to be a product of society as a whole. Society has many ways of lulling us to sleep, entrancing us and closing our eyes against the things it doesn't want us to see. Taken to an extreme this is the paranoid view that the TV is a tool of the establishment, whose malignant purpose it is to control our minds.
