Bah! Humanity digusts me! Everybody’s running around dropping all kinds of hard-earned dough on these uppity MP3 players, just so they can carry around a thousand or five thousand or ten thousand lousy songs they never listen to. For my money, there haven’t even been a hundred good songs ever recorded! Still, you go strutting around, trying to impress people by telling them you’ve got the collected discographies of Kraftwerk, and Tim Buckley, and Hüsker Dü, and Aphex Twin, and Kurt Loder only knows who else, in your pocket. But when it comes to what you really listen to, it’s twenty spins a day of “Pon De Replay” and ten apiece of “All Right Now” and “Since You Been Gone.” The rest of the unheard music on your player is sheer show-off status symbolism. Bah!

This RCA Lyra MP3 player’s reasonable 256MB memory is perfect for people like me: unsentimental, nondelusional freethinkers who realize that 99.99% of everything is garbage, including recorded music. It can hold the only fifty or sixty songs in the history of music that are worth a damn, and what else do you need? The Lyra also includes an FM tuner, although only an idiot would wander into the swamp of mediocrity that is commercial radio. Those bloodsuckers in the music industry must’ve gotten to the RCA people, because this thing supports DRM. And you can choose between red, blue, and purple backlighting, although none of those colors will change the fact that you’re an insignificant little microbe, alone in a vast, indifferent universe of suffering.

On the off chance that some overpaid, drugged-up clown releases a new song that makes the cut – hey, it happens every few years – you can expand the Lyra’s capacity with MMC or SD cards. Find a cheap 1GB SD card and you’ll have a 1.25GB player without paying for the “look how cool I am” factor. But trust me, with taste like yours, the less songs you listen to, the better! Now, let me tell what I think of your clothes…

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