Poppy Mom loves her iPod, up to a point:

But (isn't there always a "but"?):

I'm still doing mixes, but I can see the rest of this somewhere in my own future. After all, the turntable is in a different room from the computer, and it's not like I can just click on a vinyl LP and expect a favored track to start.

Perhaps I should consider this a warning?

File this under Historical Inevitability: you can now get the B. C. Clark jingle on iTunes.

What's more, Oklahoma's Oldest Jeweler is presenting a collection of versions from the last thirty-odd years, including the original unexpurgated version. (Old Clarkies will remember that there used to be one extra line in the song, snipped when 30-second spots became the rule rather than the exception.)

The original jingle dates back to 1956, which means it's been around longer than "Jingle Bell Rock" ('57), the Chipmunk Song ('58) or "The Little Drummer Boy" ('58, though its Czech ancestor dates back to WWII).

Mercifully, no one recorded this version for posterity.

I figured that the bad blood, or juice, between Steve Jobs' Apple and the Beatles' Apple was a permanent state of affairs, at least since the introduction of the iTunes Store, which would seem, on the face of it, to violate a deal between the two in which basically Jobs was allowed to keep using the name so long as he stayed out of the music business. This spring, a judge ruled that the iTunes Store was a data-transmission service and therefore not in violation of the agreement; of course, that agreement, which was reached in 1991, never anticipated digital music downloads and such.

But apparently Jobs and Apple Corps rep Neil Aspinall have decided to let it be: Fortune says that an agreement to put Beatles material exclusively online at iTunes is on the way.

Costa Tsiokos has one concern:

I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be the case, though it won't give me any grief: with the notable exception of the modern-day mashup Love, I have just about everything the band ever released, and a fair number of things they didn't, so there's no particular reason for me to want to spend money for the third time (first there was vinyl, then there was Compact Disc) on these tracks.

(Rejected titles for this piece: "Got to get you into my 'Pod"; "Come together, right now, over $"; "The one after .99"; "Why don't we do it on the Net?")

With everybody defecting to satellite or shuffling their iPods, allegedly there's no audience left for good old FM, let alone even-older AM.

But wait:

San Francisco-based KYOU ("Open Source Radio") says that's exactly what they do:

This does not necessarily have anything to do with the fact that I finally got around to replacing my 31-year-old microphone last week.

Hmmm. I was installing QuickTime on a new box this morning, and apparently — as of 7.1.3, anyway — Apple no longer requires you to download iTunes to obtain QuickTime.

It wasn't a big deal, unless you were on a dialup and had to get those extra 20 megabytes or so, and I'd never had any trouble removing iTunes from a box where only QT was desired, but at least Apple seems to be paying attention to our cries in the wilderness.

(This was for a work box. At home I run both iTunes and — dare I say it? — QuickTime Pro.)

For the first time I actually ran afoul of Apple's DRM, and it was at least partly my own fault. I used to have iTunes purchases billed to my AOL account; when AOL reformulated itself into a more-or-less free service, I moved things to my own Apple account. After backing up the Purchased files today, things I had purchased under the AOL account would no longer work without jumping through an authorization hoop or three. At one point, none of my purchases were authorized on any computer.) It took rather a lot of dialog boxes to fix this up. Curiously, at no time did iTunes ever suggest that I had two machines (of the allotted five) running any of these files.

This experience, I suspect, is typical of DRM in general: you don't notice it until the exact point at which it gets in your way.

I grumbled a bit about the Digital Rights Management system built into iTunes a few days ago, but I noted that this was the first time that I'd even actually noticed the darn stuff.

Which seems to mesh with this:

Needless to say, this particular approach isn't being considered over in Zunetown:

This may reflect the thinking of Bill Gates, who was griping about software piracy pretty much from Day One. (Can you say "Windows Genuine Advantage"? Without laughing, I mean.)

The Metropolitan Library System is now offering downloadable audio books to which you can listen.

Maybe. Dwight is not impressed:

Probably won't work with the Zune, either. And yes, there are workarounds, but:

Careful now. They might start putting DRM on e-books.

Oh, wait ....

The smallest of the Big Four record companies is contemplating dumping Digital Rights Management altogether, and at least one vendor is predicting a sales boom:

Maybe. I haven't run into too many DRM issues — well, one, actually — so I don't think I'm suddenly going to run out and download tons more stuff, presumably at the same price, just because it's going to be a tad easier to use. On the other hand, Microsoft just loves DRM, and anything that perturbs Microsoft can't be all bad, can it?

Up until 1948, all records were singles: 78-rpm discs, ten or twelve inches across. Once in a while you'd see a set of five or six of them bound together in one very thick package, which was called an "album."

CBS, which in 1948 began selling a 33⅓ rpm disc which could contain the contents of five or six 78s, eschewed the term "album" in favor of "LP," or more precisely "Lp," which they registered as a trademark. The customers, even then not willing to take their marching orders from record companies, persisted in calling them "albums."

And they still bought singles: from RCA Victor, also in 1948, came a 45-rpm disc, a mere seven inches across, which duplicated the format of the 78 — the hit and the B-side. RCA also developed a 45-rpm record changer that plugged into your RCA television using — yes! — an RCA plug. And despite the higher profit margin on CBS's LPs and such, the record industry learned pretty quickly that there was no way to generate those profits, except in minority formats like classical and jazz, without coming up with some hit singles once in a while. This was the way of the world, and the 45 ruled that world.

So this should surprise no one:

Which, again, should surprise no one:

Further complication: musicians had long been hiding some good stuff, not on the inner tracks of their LPs, but on the B-sides of 45s, where presumably the truest of fans would find them. In 1966, Dylan had sneaked a live version of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" onto the back of "I Want You," a track you simply couldn't get anywhere else. Even Simon and by-gosh Garfunkel did this, dropping the irritable "You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies," never issued on an LP, underneath "Fakin' It." ("You Don't Know..." didn't even make it to the S&G Collected Works CD box.)

Is there a future for the "album"? It might be something like this:

The Beatles, who recorded their singles and their album tracks as wholly separate entities (though their US label tended to mess up their scheme) were very much anomalies in the couple-of-hits-plus-filler milieu, and when Led Zeppelin, for whatever reason, refused to allow "Stairway to Heaven" to go out as a 45 — a few white-label promos were pressed, but no store stock — radio stations treated it as a hit single anyway. The circle, I'm tempted to say, is complete.

Picking three songs for a radio (or podcast) set is something of an artform, and the best such are very good indeed. (I have a few tucked away for possible future use, which, if nothing else, will appall my brother, who did actual time as a Radio Guy.)

One criterion for "best" is sheer effrontery — who in the world would have thought of that? — and accordingly, I award props to Monty for her Sammich set last weekend: two Bread tunes, with Meat Loaf in between. Delicious, in a couple of senses of the word.

Remember prunes? Of course you do. Except that they'd rather you called them "dried plums."

The remarkable success of this top-down attempt to force the language into another direction, whether it wants to go there or not, has inspired many. Why, it's even made it to television:

The minor detail that none of those vaunted New Technologies actually would require DRM, of course, can be found nowhere in the wild, wonderful world of ZitterSpeak.

Still, if they can sell Simpson's Individual Water Absorb-A-Tex Stringettes — and let's face it, we could use some flood preventers here in Soonerland this week — surely they can sell Zitter's "enablement," assuming the language mavens don't hurl at the very sound of the word.

(Via The Consumerist.)

Rob's DJing a wedding reception for an old friend, and he takes this task very seriously indeed:

Impressive indeed, though the part that really amazes me is the downloading of 9000 songs in two days. That's a little over three per minute. I should have such bandwidth. (And I probably could if I weren't such a skinflint.)

Apple's iTunes Plus has arrived, and with it the usual 40 MB software download. Things were extremely hectic in the iTunes Store last night, which I find heartening: the idea that people will pay a smidgen (okay, 30 percent, but still) more for proper downloads without all that DRM crap has always seemed at least somewhat plausible to me, and I'd like to think that there were lots of like-minded individuals queued up to try it out. I was amused to see an offer to upgrade any titles I'd already bought to the Plus version; I'll probably take 'em up on it this weekend. (I mean, what's sixty cents? You can barely get penny candy for 60 cents these days.)

I also plan to buy some tracks with which I am overly familiar, just for comparison purposes. (I mean, I don't need any more Pink Floyd or Sinatra.)

Apple, as mentioned earlier today, is rolling out iTunes Plus, which vends DRM-free music at a 30-percent price premium.

I can't say that I'm surprised by this:

Not being in the habit of spreading around these things — I've never so much as looked at a torrent, unless it was one of the canonical types, with rain and everything — I'm not going to have my BVDs transformed topologically by this revelation. As always, your mileage may vary.

Actually, it looks more like a cheap convenience-store lighter, or maybe a cuttlefish:

It is, in fact, an MP3 player in Sony's eternal (or at least endless) Walkman line, and one of these showed up Friday at slightly less expense than one might expect. (Amazon.com is selling the 1GB version for a stiff $189.95; Woot was selling it — briefly — for $39.99 plus the invariant $5 shipping. Mine is a 4GB model.) It is, though, almost exactly the size of that lighter.

How much you can cram into four gigabytes is, of course, dependent on file size. As an experiment, I sent it a few actual .wav files, and they take up every bit as much room in flash memory as they do on hard disc. They do work, though. At the present time, I have 574 tracks loaded into about two-thirds of the available space. (I tend to encode stereo tracks at variable bit rates, which can slide all the way up to 320, and mono tracks at a fixed 96.)

Two things that came out better than expected:

• Once you figure out where it is, the FM tuner is pretty decent, and it will find presets for you. (Of course, you have to delete the ones you don't want.)

• The player features an active noise-canceling feature: whatever background grunge it hears, it generates a negative signal to counterbalance it. I haven't tried it with the lawn mower yet, but it's pretty effective on the attic fan. (There's a cost — about 25-percent higher battery consumption — but that still leaves you with about 40 hours on a charge.)
  

This being a Sony, cool(ish) design is valued more greatly than workable interfaces, and Sony's SonicStage application, besides being Windows-specific, is quite a bit clunkier than, say, iTunes. Still, it transfers at close to full USB 2.0 speed, and there's a "Don't Disconnect" message on the OLED display when things are happening, which is handy if you're not paying attention, which I'm usually not.

And the sound is quite good. Two different sizes of earbuds are provided; there's an equalizer of sorts built in. I expect this will be my backup audio device on the next World Tour, feeding an FM transmitter to Gwendolyn's Bose system. But first, I have to find 300 more songs. (Piece of cake.)

Were Nick Denton a Brit, he'd still never have come up with anything as relentlessly snarky as hecklerspray, from whom I am compelled to reprint this commentary on the pending availability of downloadable Ringo Starr tracks:

Oh, and the Starr deal includes ringtones:

Where's Pete Best, anyway?

I am pretty much an old hand at ripping vinyl to whatever digital format I happen to need at the moment, but I'm not so smug about it that I can't appreciate this:

Remind me not to tell you about the time I tried to compress a 45.

Unless (1) I win the Powerball and (2) the science of longevity advances spectacularly in the next few years, I won't live long enough to rip all my vinyl, which means that most of it still gets played in the canonical fashion. This is less bothersome than you might think.

This was David's idea:

I balked at that, largely because I use iTunes only for, well, iTunes purchases and for podcasts, and I've bought only 33 songs.

Still, if Tahoe Burns can do it, so can I:

Note that three of these are actually videos.

I'll see what I can do for my much-larger collection of MP3s, which I generally play in Winamp.

I was fiddling around with my MP3 Walkman, contemplating the possibility of avoiding Sony's cumbersome SonicStage interface, when I noticed that the folder on the machine which actually contains all the music files is called OMGAUDIO.

Lame (not to be confused with LAME) as it was, I giggled a bit, and then went looking to see if these letters were supposed to stand for something and/or if Sony had synthesized a backronym. No suggestions of such, but I did happen upon these guys, who have produced what appears to be some pretty nifty stuff — probably with no help from Sony.

Sony, of course, invented the Betamax, the original standard for home video, only to watch it die in the marketplace, outplayed by JVC's VHS. (I wrote a brief history of said death in Vent #82 back in 1997.) While Sony continued to make Beta recorders for the US market until 1993, and for the Japanese domestic market until 2002 (!), the real watershed event was the 1988 introduction of Sony's first VHS recorder, about which I said this:

The company at times seems almost Dylanesque — most likely, you go your way, they'll go theirs. Yet another example of Sony gee-whiz thinking is headed for the dustbin: the ATRAC music-encoding-plus-DRM system, and the Connect music store that sold it to people with latter-day Walkman units, are history. (I have a fairly-recent Walkman, and an interface to Connect was duly provided as part of the package, but I never had occasion to use it, inasmuch as the interface would also accept ordinary MP3 and even WAV files.) Sony has unveiled new Walkman players (can we call them "Walkmen"?) that don't use ATRAC, and Connect apparently will be gone by spring.

All of this, of course, makes me wonder what sort of weird crap Sony is planning for the PlayStation 4.

In my ongoing effort to find more ways to clutter up my computers, I bought a couple of tracks from Amazon.com's MP3 vaults yesterday.

Anyone who sells digital music has to contend with iTunes, and Amazon offers the following advantages:

• No DRM. These are perfectly ordinary MP3 files with a 256k bit rate, which will load onto darn near anything.

• A small (500k) download manager which automatically loads your purchase into iTunes or Windows Music Player. You don't need it for single songs; you will if you buy an entire album. (Mac OS or Windows only. Linux is "under development." Linux users, though, can still download individual tunes.)

• A (slightly) smaller price. Most tracks go for 89 cents; albums run $4.99 to $9.99.
  

There is one downside, apart from the fact that this is still technically a public beta: if you lose a file somehow, you can't download another copy. Needless to say, they recommend you back up anything you buy.

The two tracks I bought (one by Nine Inch Nails, one by Fergie, and make of that what you will) sounded pretty decent through my iTunes work-box installation.

I'm contemplating offering £4.50 — a tad over nine bucks — to download Radiohead's new album In Rainbows, and after all, the price is up to me.

Rationale: I'm not exactly a major fan, but I think I want to show support for this decidedly-unusual marketing technique.

What would you do?

Claim: Winamp 5.5 "claims that you can stream music to anywhere that has an Internet browser, including cell phones and gaming consoles."

Test:

The Wiimote. Is there anything it can't do?

As an actual paying customer of Winamp, I may have to get this for my home box.

For no particular reason, I decided to take a look at Amazon's Unbox video-download service. It was not a good idea.

Issue #1: The Unbox viewer (which you must install) is basically a front-end for Windows Media Player 10 with some additional DRM; what's more, it runs on Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0. I need hardly point out that this means it won't work on a Mac or on any Un*x derivative; on the other hand, this could be considered an advantage for those operating systems.

Issue #2: The gizmo insinuates itself into the system tray and will not leave.

Issue #3: If you do succeed in removing the gizmo from the system tray (as I did), your uninstall will collapse in a whole screenful of Fail.

I can see owning this if you have a hungry TiVo to feed, but if I'm going to wrestle with DRM, I'd just as soon it be Apple's.

For years (like, thirty; I started in 1972) I made mix tapes, and lots of them; when it became possible to make mix CDs, I started burning my own discs and documenting them on the Web. Of course, I wouldn't duplicate them for the general public, because (1) I have extremely weird musical tastes and (2) there are an awful lot of lawyers out there just waiting for the opportunity to jump.

Then (as in this month) came something called Mixaloo, which enables you to produce a downloadable mix from the tracks they're allowed to distribute, which others can actually buy via a Web widget. Hence, the Wendex Quality Assortment, fifteen tunes ranging from Del Shannon to the Deftones, which you could buy separately from some other download service for $14.85 or so, or which you can get complete from Mixaloo for, well, $14.85. (Assuming they operate on a licensing model similar to Apple's, I figure they're paying around $9-10 to the record labels; I get $2.05 out of what's left.) The widget, which comes in three flavors, is actually pretty slick, and it allows a 30-second sample of each track before you commit yourself. I'm looking upon this as an experiment rather than as a source of income, for reasons which should be obvious. (Downside: This uses Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 and up, and presumably Microsoft's DRM.)

Update, 9:15 pm: To continue the experiment, I bought these eleven tracks for $10.89. The download manager (which presumes IE, dammit) can grab four tracks at once; the whole transaction took less than ten minutes. The actual tracks are DRMed WMAs encoded at 192, which sounded pretty good.

I knew when I bought the 6133 that T-Mobile, avaricious to the last, had directed Nokia to rig the phone to play MP3s, but not to allow their use for ringtones unless they came from T-Mo itself. Being an old hand at screwing around with filetypes, and having noticed that WMAs actually will work, I am trying to locate a suitable conversion tool. Alternatively, I could do a CD full of potential tones, and then rip them with Windows Media Player.

I mention this now, in early December, inasmuch as I'm currently wrestling with the idea that the B. C. Clark jingle might make one heck of a ringtone.

The fabled Deutsche Grammophon label has opened the DG Web Shop, which sells downloadable tracks from DG's vast catalog of classical music. This is very much in line with Universal Music Group's desire to get out from under Apple's thumb, and there are some distinct advantages to dealing directly with DG:

• Bit rate of 320. Constant, yet.
  
• No DRM.
  

I priced a DG reissue: piano works by Debussy, including both books of Images, the Children's Corner, and seven of the Préludes, played by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. (I bought this stuff years ago on vinyl.) Individual tracks are a buck twenty-nine; however, the entire set — nineteen tracks — is only $10.99. And though this isn't one of them, a number of albums are offered with liner notes of a sort, in PDF format.

Best of all, this isn't limited to items in print: according to DG, some 600 out-of-print albums are available for download.

(From Create Digital Music via Consumerist.)

Ford's SYNC in-car entertainment system, appearing in several 2008 blue-oval vehicles, was developed with Microsoft, and you might think that for this reason alone, it would work fairly well with Microsoft's Zune music player, perhaps less well with Apple's iPod.

Or at least I might think that, and I would be wrong:

Costa Tsiokos is also surprised, but not too surprised to offer an explanation of this phenomenon:

For some reason, this reminds me of the time (circa 1988) when Sony built a VHS machine to sell alongside its fading Beta boxes.

The iTunes installation on my work box contains 2,388 songs. There exists, of course, the question of how truly "random" a random shuffle really is, especially since the iTunes application contains a slider to change the perceived randomness. ("Random" is set at the midpoint; at the ends, "hearing sequential songs by the same artist or from the same album" are "more likely" or "less likely.") I have the slider set to one-quarter above "less likely."

None of this prepared me for this juxtaposition today: Richard Cheese's lounge-lizard take on "Baby Got Back," followed immediately by the Showmen's "39-21-46." I have to assume it's not exactly a 2387-to-1 shot — for one thing, there are two other versions of "Baby Got Back" on the premises, Sir Mix-A-Lot's original and a Jonathan Coulter cover — but still, this seems odd. Then again, earlier today the box played "Past, Present and Future" followed by "Dead Man's Curve."

In this Wired interchange between David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Thom Yorke (Radiohead), the two Heads agreed on one thing: actually selling CDs isn't what keeps them going. Ben Worthen writes for wsj.com:

Jeff Brokaw draws the conclusion that's obvious to anyone not running a record company:

Indeed.

The gizmo that grabs the album-cover graphic is not infallible.

See what I mean?

I've had nothing to say about the DVD Format Wars, except that I was sort of rooting for Sony's Blu-ray to lose, because, well, it's Sony's, and God knows what sort of malfeasance they'll bake into it in the future.

This has nothing to do with DVDs, but it doesn't make me feel any better about Sony either:

Think about that for a moment:

Could this possibly be any more cumbersome? Let's not give them any ideas.

(Via Laurence Simon.)

After all, I can't do the boogaloo:

Not in its original form, they don't, unless I misread the list entirely.

Capitol, which issued this in the States (#2819), had a number of different 45 labels over the years, some of which were indeed orangey. My copy, however, has a blue label; it's one of Capitol's Star Line reissue singles, #6210, and it's backed with "Neanderthal Man" by Hotlegs, who might conceivably be described as 7.5cc.

And I ripped them both for my own iTunes installation, because they didn't have the original "Neanderthal Man" either.

Just about anything musical is downloadable in some form or fashion, but Trini would rather have the CD. Not only is it better quality than your garden-variety MP3, generally compressed to within an inch of its life, but it's tangible in a way a mere computer file will never be.

DVDs are compressed too, but they have the same advantage over Web movies, and what's more, they lack this significant disadvantage of downloads:

This, at least, could be fixed:

But that would make too much sense.

(Via Hitsville.)

As expected, it's from Nine Inch Nails.

Ghosts I-IV, a collection of 36 instrumental tracks, is the new release from the no-longer-under-contract Trent Reznor, and he's offering it in a variety of formats:

The download, incidentally, comes in your choice of three flavors:

• 320-kbps MP3s (LAME encoded)
  
• FLAC lossless
  
• Apple's own lossless format
  

The band is also throwing in liner notes (a 40-page PDF file) plus wallpapers, icons, and similar effluvia.

I may have to grab this myself, though I'm wavering on whether I want to wait for the CDs or spend half as much on just the FLACs. (Should I need MP3s, I keep a LAME encoder handy.) If you're keeping track of Halo numbers, this is number 26.

Update: I'm ordering the CDs. Ship date is 8 April; shipping charge is $6.99.

Further update: The downloadable stuff didn't, due to a server error; I've left an email to the proprietors.

Elvis Costello's album Momofuku, due out next month, will not be available on Compact Disc; you want it, you wait for it to show up at your favorite download store — or you buy the vinyl LP.

Of course, if you do buy the vinyl LP (it's on the Lost Highway label), you get a code for a free downloadable version.

It takes, I think, a certain amount of cheek to designate something which may or may not have a follow-up "Volume One," and the concept is perhaps more honored in the breach. The first Smothers Brothers best-of compilation was called Golden Hits Vol. 2: not only was there no Volume 1, but everything in Vol. 2 was newly recorded versions of previously-issued material. The Traveling Wilburys issued two albums, Volume 1 and Volume 3. Even Mad magazine got into the act: the first issue (October/November 1952) was of course Volume 1, Number 1; more than 400 issues later, Mad has yet to reach Volume 2.

Which brings us to She & Him, whose first album on Merge Records is called Volume One. And the group name makes more musical than grammatical sense: She (Zooey Deschanel) is out front, but the backgrounds (and occasional background vocals) come from Him (M. Ward). I was woefully unprepared for this set, since I had barely heard of Ward, and my one exposure to Deschanel, her portrayal of Trillian in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, had left me with one of those annoying fanboy crushes. Based on Volume One, that crush isn't going away any time soon.

Deschanel wrote most of these songs, and they fit into a mostly-forgotten segment of the pop spectrum: wedged between Shelby Flint and Norma Tanega. ("Black Hole," to me, sounds like a long-lost sequel to "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog"; here's a live version from SXSW 2008, with Ward on guitar.) Not to say that they're all of a piece, either: Deschanel does girl-group fluff ("I Was Made for You") and country yearns ("Got Me") equally well. Ward's backgrounds, augmented with outside drums and pedal steel, are spare and satisfying. There are three covers: the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better," given a Judy Collins-ish folkie-yet-arty treatment; Smokey Robinson's "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," with both voices harmonizing over a single guitar; and the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," which brings things to a gentle close. Not one track over four minutes, and not one wasted moment.

Technical note: While CDs are available, I bought Volume One as a download from Amazon.com ($8.99). Unlike previous Amazon downloads, which were at a fixed 256-kbps bitrate, these tracks are all variable-rate, floating up to 320 at times.

Um, no, not exactly.

But I had to pass this on: iTunes in shuffle mode (there are 2,947 songs to choose from) just segued from Liz Phair's "Flower" to "May I Take a Giant Step (Into Your Heart)" by the 1910 Fruitgum Co.

Like I said, the Radio Station from Hell.

(Oh, you want to know what was next? "That's the Way I Like It" by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And that first link might not pass muster at work.)

Since unexpected iTunes segues seem to make for less-uninteresting bloggage, here's one from this morning: the Ventures' version of the theme from Hawaii Five-O, sliding right into Blondie's remake of "The Tide Is High." (The original, by the Jamaican group the Paragons, dates back to 1967. Both versions are on this box.) Had I any talent for video — no, never mind, I don't need any more bad ideas.

Even if you think you want to convert some YouTube nonsense to QuickTime, trust me: you really don't want to.

I'm just saying.

Trini sent me a download link for the newest Nine Inch Nails project, The Slip, which was offered as a Zip file full of variable-rate MP3s or, if you do torrents, Apple Lossless, FLAC or actual .wav files. I don't do torrents, so I opted for the MP3s, which sounded decent enough.

Somewhere during the download, I found myself with a horrible thought: What if I actually met NIN's Trent Reznor and he turned out to be your genial, neighborly, 1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero sort of guy? Surely he can't be this angst-y all the time, especially after having cleaned up 100 percent following some industrial-strength substance abuse.

Or maybe he can, and after some reflection (and listening to the tracks on The Slip), I figured out just what it was I've been responding to in NIN's music. Reznor isn't even close to monochromatic, tonally or emotionally; but his reaction to emotion, as I perceive it anyway, is binary: he confronts it, or he wallows in it. This is very like me, except that I do way more wallowing than confronting. I tossed this notion at Trini, who is more of a NIN fan than I am, and she said that it made sense to her. Then again, I suspect she's still a bit surprised that I, barely on the near side of fifty-five, pay the slightest bit of attention to Nine Inch Nails, especially given my affinity for the Dawn Eden dictum "I don't consider myself legally bound to know about any music past 1968."

Speaking of 1968, Kim du Toit has a nice overview of some choice albums of that year, not all of which have been played to death in the subsequent four decades. Trent Reznor, I note for no particular reason, was three that year.