I am very much looking forward to my return to school this year. I'll be going into my second year, I'll know the score, and I'll be back in my same single room from last year, a perfect little grotto, save for one flaw; the neighbors. They were the loudest assholes on the planet, forever blasting their crappy rap music. Thank goodness they were evicted eventually. But I know the chances of the same deal is rare, and that since I'll be the only non-first year on the floor, I may even have some clout, the older students have told me.
And then Mead Five-Star had to go and fuck it all up for me.
I was watching TV tonight and I saw a commercial for a new breed of Five-Star binders with speakers installed in them, which you connect to your MP3 player of choice. "Listen to music the way it was meant to be; out loud!" the ad boasts. I can assure you, that is not the way music ought to be listened to, from a binder. You take your binder outside, in public, into classrooms. It's obnoxious enough having people playing their music loudly in their rooms, or singing their crappy songs in public. Now you'll have scores of fucking status-seeking lemmings all listening to the same tonal disasters that have somehow come to be called songs, like a hundred people having a conversation without a point.
I'll tell you right now, Mead, music should be listened to via headphones, unless you're having a party or are at a concert. Otherwise, that's why you have iPods; it's a little box of music in your pocket that you plug earphones into, and then ONLY YOU CAN HEAR THAT MUSIC. That is the inherent genius of it. It's music that doesn't bug the hell out of the rest of us. Steve Jobs ought to have a Nobel Peace Prize for that one.
Luckily, though, I don't see this thing catching on. It's useless and impractical. Headphones are personal, small, lightweight, and quiet to all but you. This product is like a boom box with schoolwork inside it. And there's nothing cooler than the Prepie's Ghettoblaster, is there?
This product will be dead in a week, and Mead will go out of business promoting the damned things.
All I know for sure is if I'm walking through the campus quad this fall, and I hear "My Humps" blasting from some denim-bound ring binder, I am chucking that sucker into the nearest lake... and then I'll break his binder.
That's it for me, I'm out and I'm tired.
- Silent G
