Worrying Trends

Just quickly; apparently the search terms bringing people to my blog posts thus far are: 

dido here with me stalker song	2
dido stalker song	2
is here with me by dido a stalker song?	2
dido here with me stalker	1
disparance	1
hear with me stalking song	1
is here with me a stalker song?	1
song by dido stalkers	1

I don't know whether to celebrate or worry. (Or obsess.) 

The Girl Who Got Away

Do you ever get the feeling that you're not onto a winner before you even start writing something?

I...

Uh...

Um.

Bear with me.

We're going to have to approach this from a circuitous route, taking in Uwe Vandrei and Lewis Parker. I know that this is fast becoming a standard tactic for me – approaching the topic without approaching the topic – but it's the only way I can think of to actually address this album properly.

In my previous article about Dido I tried to situate the music within the politics of obsession and loss, and also tried to hypothecate (thanks, Som!) that if you shifted a couple of the tracks around, you would have three quarters of a narrative of obsession followed by some of the most impressive expressions of the ups and downs and highs and lows of depression in musical form. That's what, for me, Dido seems to do in album terms; three quarters radio-friendly obsession, one quarter musically interesting songs on another topic.

The ratio varies, a little, especially on Safe Trip Home (maybe for obvious, tragic reasons), but it's there the same as Eminem spent a decade releasing singles on the comedy/serious/comedy/serious pattern. It's back to the business of obsession as usual, however, with The Girl Who Got Away, just now more with a Catchy! Electronic! Beat!

In obsession terms, however, it's kind of weak tea.

In the autumn of 1994, Uwe Vandrei committed suicide.

This isn't meant as an offhand statement for its own sake; Mr Vandrei's suicide was tragic, and from everything I've been able to put together using THE! INTERNET! it was down to the politics of obsession taken to a horrific extent. (There's some conspiracy theories out there, too, but you may attach as much credence to them as you like.)

Uwe Vandrei was, by all accounts, a committed – perhaps too committed – fan of Sarah McLachlan. He alleged that his love letters had been the basis for Possession:

But before the case could be taken to trial, Uwe Vandrei sadly committed suicide.

By comparison, the narratives of obsession and loss you find within three quarters of a Dido album are oddly tragic in their weakness; Possession is about loving someone so much you can't hide, won't go, won't sleep, can't breathe... Sorry, that's a poor joke, but Possession is dark and deep where Here With Me is – underneath all the creepy – a bit celebrative. The closest I can find to this kind of darkness within the Dido Obsession Canon – boom – is Don't Believe In Love, the sheer overwhelming sadness of losing the ability to actually love rather than have it heal you and hurt you over and over again in an ever-ending cycle.

Five years on, and although the methods have changed, the narratives are basically the same.

In a slightly patronising way.

I'm looking at you, Let Us Move On.

Way back when in the time of 1999, there was a film, and that film was called Plunkett and Macleane. P&M is not, by anyone's standards, a dazzling exposition of cinematic content, and watching it now it's quite badly dated in some ways – especially the Murray Lachlan-Young cameo at the end doing his poetry thing. (Sadly, YouTube does not have this amazing moment for your delectation.)

P&M, however, had an amazing score by Craig Armstrong that was of a quality far exceeding the worth of the film (and, in all honesty, it was as much about giving Ridley Scott's son Jake his first (of two) feature film directing opportunities as it was about getting Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller back together again for the first thing since Trainspotting). Elements of this score still pop up everywhere from Masterchef to Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Dark Angel,sports matches and superhero film trailers.

An amazing score, bar one track – in my humble opinion – and that track is Houses in Motion.

(Sidebar; all these years of motion and I didn't realise it was a Talking Heads cover. I'll hand in my card at the door on the way out, head hung in shame.)

Which brings us to Lewis Parker, because while this song isn't necessarily as bad as I'm making it out to be (and I think it fucking sucks) it simply doesn't fit and has no logic with the rest of the score.

A lot like Let Us Move On.

This isn't a new problem, though; there was the same trouble with Burnin Love on Safe Trip Home; take them out of the context of the album and they're fine songs (well, you might like them) but it was completely out of place on Safe Trip Home and while it's less so here (which is partially form over function, what with the electronica and all) it's still... Odd. Not bad, because it's a fine song, but not good because it's like a jigsaw piece with no edges. Then you dig a little deeper and find that Kendrick Lamar – guesting on a Dido track – is currently shopping a remix of his single Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe and... My brain asplode, really.

One thing I'd never wanted to do, by the way, was highlight anyone else's review, but in the case of the Digital Spy review I have to point something out; Let Us Move On is, according to them, 'a welcome reminder that, 14 years on, Dido can be as badass as the rest.'

No.

It's really not.

(Badass? Really?)

The rest of the album has this weird disconnect to it – truly cognitive dissonance, because within five songs you go from Sitting On the Roof of the World which is cheery as you'd like to Happy New Year which is really, really not, and neither is Loveless Hearts.

In some ways, I kind of resent my own position at this point, because – as someone who ended up being a Dido fan because, as discussed before, you can't choose what music stays with you every time – I feel pretty qualified to review this album, having listened to every previous release (although not, apparently, the unreleased tracks – tragic). This is not a plaudit I would ever have actively sought; Ex-reviewer turned Dido Expert – but, well, here we are.

It's really frustrating, too, because like every Dido album there are some songs that are genuinely deep, or interesting. There's the... I don't want to say dross, but let's say dross anyway, the radio-friendly mothers-day songs with the catchy choruses and less acidic messages, but I tend to take the container ship theory in this case; there are lots of precisely-shaped containers that fit together, and then there's the breakbulk – the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere and just causes trouble.

Day Before We Went To War is, for example, more interesting than the title perhaps suggests. It's a weird track to end an album on, in some ways, because it has a genuine message (or at least an attempt at a genuine message) that conjures up an atmosphere by interesting lyrical usage and backing instrumentation.

Contrast that against something like Blackbird and you can see why the album is oddly paced, spaced and put together. The electronica-folk mix is decidedly not a bad thing – it's basically making a whole album out of Take My Hand – and, equally, experimentation is no bad thing. But it makes for patchy, disconnected albums where the brilliance is blockaded and the lyrics are brocaded by the need for the narratives of obsession to make their usual appearances.

Because of this, it's more or less impossible to do a track-by-track because the songs bear little or no relation to each other in a narrative sense – as singles, maybe, they'd be pickable a-partable, but as an album it's like being told a story about someone's ex-partner except the storyteller keeps breaking off to tell you about how they went travelling or how other partners have screwed them over and how they've just recently found the perfect person for them and then suddenly, The War.

Sigh.

You know what?

If you want Dido without the obsession – or, at least, without most of the obsession – you could do worse than this:

If I've got it right – and I'm kind of new to this Spotify linking thing, but hey – then you should have one or two narratives of loss, some of the bitterer, more acidic stuff and some depression-in-song-form just to round things out. Also, a single B-Side – Paris – which is, in its own way, pure sadness.

Don't say I never give you anything, mais non?

Beautiful Future

Where I pre-review an album based on my perception of the song titles

One of the things I miss about the Old Way of Consuming Music is the big reveal of a forthcoming album’s tracklisting. NME’s news pages used to be full of them, and they helped stoke the fires of anticipation. For there is perhaps no song more perfect then the one in your head; your own unique perception of a song before you’ve actually heard it, based on its name alone. An intriguing or evocative track name can conjure all sorts of ideas in your head, and it’s probably more fun if your vision of the song is completely wrong as you get to be nicely surprised when you do finally hear it.

As well as imagining the individual songs, you can play at sculpting the album as a piece of work. Will you stick all the slowies at the end, or mix it up a little? Where’s the 12-minute spoken-word odyssey going to fit in?

Of course tracklistings are still announced these days but due to albums leaking there’s a much shorter lead time, so it’s only a short while before the music arrives anyway. Back in The Day, a tracklisting might have to sustain you for months.

So I’m going to indulge (and it is an indulgement, if that’s even a word, so excuse me) in a bit of pre-reviewing by imaging what Primal Scream’s forthcoming album More Light will be like.

So what do I know so already? It’s produced by David Holmes and features Kevin Shields, so it’s probably akin to the noisy and aggressive XTRMNTR. This pleases me. Robert Plant’s on it too somewhere, but will he sing lead? Last time he guested on a Primal Scream song, he was demoted to harmonica duties.

The album title suggests positivity and optimism, but somehow I don’t think this album is going to offer the euphoric hit that Screamadelica did as they’re probably not off their faces on E this time*. It might be a nod to Shoot Speed/Kill Light, the closing track on XTRMNTR. Or it might be extolling the virtues of buying new light bulbs.

And I know the first track, 2013. It’s an eerie, hypnotic epic with blasts of off-kilter sax and Bobby lambasting the apathy and decay around him. But what about the rest of the album?

2. River Of Pain

This is going to be even more trippy than 2013, with freaky effects, stuttering beats and Bobby whispering creepily into your ear.

3. Culturecide

Time for a fast and heavy one, with savage guitars and punky lyrics.

4. Hit Void

A short electronic instrumental. What’s not to like?

5. Tenement Kid

Hmm, could this be Bobby baring his soul as he harks back to his youth? Might be slow, sincere and mournful.

6. Invisible City

This one will be the closest thing to a hit, with a riotous chorus and a catchy refrain e.g. We’re all trapped in the invisible city, c’mon!

7. Goodbye Johnny

Might this be Johnny Guitar from Riot City Blues? If so, expect some low-down and dirty rock n’ roll.

8. Sideman

I have absolutely no idea about this one, so let’s say Robert Plant appears on it.

9. Elimination Blues

This is going to be the densest, slowest song on the album.

10. Turn Each Other Inside Out

Another short punky one, referencing philosophers and politicians.

11. Relativity

A psychedelic instrumental with organs. Why not?

12. Walking With The Beast

Come to think of it, Robert Plant might be on this one. He looks a bit like a beast, doesn’t he? And it would make more sense to leave him until near the end.

13. It’s Alright, It’s OK

Apparently this is going to be the next single so it’ll be a shard of hope that cuts through the chaos of the previous 50 minutes.

There are some bonus songs on the deluxe edition of the album but I’ll spare you my pre-analysis of those (although Requiem For The Russian Tea Rooms sounds amazing).

Right, I think I may have just polluted your brains with 500 words of ridiculous hypothecating. The album’s out on 13 May so time will tell if I am a mentalist or a modern-day Nostradamus.

* Primal Scream’s albums fit very nicely into the theory that the character of an album is dictated by the drugs the band was consuming at the time:

E = blissed-out happiness = Screamadelica

Heroin = sludgy horribleness = Give Out But Don’t Give Up

Cannabis = twitchy paranoia = Vanishing Point

Cocaine = unfettered aggression = XTRMNTR

Alcohol = brash stupidity = Riot City Blues

I bought those shoes also for 30 euros at Champs D'Elysee

Seriously; I've been listening to this all day. 

Make it stop. 

- James

In Addition, Three Things

I wrote the previous three articles in a literature-fuelled jag on Thursday night, and there's three things to bring up that have come up since then; 

- I'd like to revise my opinion of the Amazon Cloud service. It's wonderful if you have a tablet/smart phone and access to WiFi, the second of which, living out in the sticks, I don't. Anywhere with free wifi, though, you can stream or download to the device. Rather impressive. 

(Except, of course, that you can't tell it to store the music files in your iTunes folder, in the growing age of file format segregation; you can listen to your iTunes music through Amazon Cloud, but not the other way around, which is a little bizarre.) 

- In all actuality, I do now have a copy of the new Dido album. (Digital Deluxe edition, my BEES.) What made me laugh, though, is that you cannot find a physical copy locally for love nor money anywhere near where I live, i.e. in the major supermarkets. It's apparently the - I think - number three album in the country, but there aren't any record stores any more, and supermarkets can't help you. 

Well, it is Mother's Day tomorrow. 

- It is entirely possible that my incredibly bad David Gray pun in the previous entry has actually physically concussed Somik, but I know he's working on something as we speak. I can only apologise - to him, to you, to music fans everywhere. 

- James

Spurned Singers & Stalker Songs: An Album Pre-Review

Remember when I said I was going to review the new Dido album? 

No? 

Really? 

It was only, like, a few articles ago.

This isn’t that review.

(I know, right?)

It’s time to declare some baggage.

I no longer know whether this is actually worth mockery in today’s slightly more accepting world of musical tastes – yeah, right – but I have a blind spot when it comes to Dido. Or, more accurately, I did have a blind spot.

In all honesty, I didn’t know she had a new album out until I saw it announced on daytime television, followed by Dido playing what appeared to be a song written by an extremely high Bob Marley that he threw out for being too generic.

That’s being overly harsh, but it appeared to have one six-stanza chorus repeated three to four times with only one or two verses in between.

Now, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum when I tried to re-engage the atrophied part of my brain that deals with reviewing albums; I started to listen to No Angel with my reviewing head on instead of my passive listener’s head, and it was kind of a revelation.

How is it that, about twelve years since I’ve listened to it last, I never – no, let’s capitalize this because it’s worth shouting – I NEVER REALISED IT WAS A SHOEBOXING FOLK ALBUM?

This realization is freaking me out, a little, to be honest. But some explanation is in order, and it comes down to two things; preconceptions and personal history.

Firstly, there are some weird preconceptions that came with listening to Dido back in the day; her songs got around more than a [SEXUAL METAPHOR] back in the day. I’d listened to Dido before I’d even realised it because of being a big fan of Sunday 8PM, with the sample of My Lover’s Gone on Postcards (complete with weird digital vinyl crackle, which completely re-situates the song).

Then you have to bear in mind that one of the major reasons No Angel was even re-released in Europe was because of Eminem’s Stan, which is really, really odd to listen to again now. Plus Here With Me was used in Roswell, which I remember watching at the time for no other reason than it was on.

So back then I approached the album as a kind of electronica-based Faithless offshoot, which completely coloured my perceptions right up until this very week, when I re-listened to No Angel as a different person and had, well, a different experience.

A somewhat uncomfortable experience, to be honest.

This takes us to the second part; personal history.

When I listened to the album before today, I would be instantly transported back to a ropey bedsit in east London, and a relationship that is best not discussed in an open forum – suffice it to say that like most relationships it had high points, low points, and had a defined shelf-life, plus a running time to which the soundtrack, for a lot of it, alternated between David Gray’s White Ladder – yes, please forgive me – and No Angel.

It was kind of strange to listen to it again a few days ago – and again today – and to hear a folk album with lyrics that I just found disturbing.

If you strip out the idea that there’s actual love therein behind the songs – and I’m sure there was – then the songs are about spurned lovers and stalkers, disguised behind well-produced melodies and folk harmonies.

You know what? Let’s do a track-by-track;

Here With Me is much about not being able to live without your partner as it is about someone who completes you (and, in a post-Twilight world, feels a bit Kathy-Bates-in-Misery; you can’t breathe when someone’s not there?)

Except that once it’s done with, Hunter is about wanting to be released from a relationship (and it’s rare that I’d say an Emmy the Great song handles something better than this, but 24 really does). So you skip dissonantly from I can’t live without you to Thanks, but I’m off.

And then when she’s actually gone, Don’t Think Of Me seems to be basically be saying well, I left, but you shouldn’t have fucked someone else, now, should you? I really love that there’s a disparance (title drop, ho!) between the official lyrics and the album lyrics, too, where I hear she cooks delightfully becomes the infinitely dirtier I hear she comes delightfully. So you’d think she’d be happy if this fella just, y’know, left her forever, right?

No, because My Lover’s Gone.

Seriously. (Except in that instance the lover’s, well, dead. Honestly, My Lover’s Gone feels like the most folk-y of folk songs on there, in an almost Wicker-Man-esque style.)

So now that Lover No. 1 has gone, Ms. Armstrong moves on to another – if you take this as a linear narrative, which I am doing for comic purposes – and we’re back to, well, obsessive love.

Seriously. (Again.)

All you want is right here in this room, / All you want is sitting here with you,

Except the man is – Of course! A cheating bastard.

For the love of god.

We’re going to take a brief break here for some Fenix TX, but we’ll be right back.

Doesn’t that make things better?

So does Thank You – which I have trouble saying nasty things about – which is about a good, decent relationship, with cold tea and towels. I’m sure they’re metaphors, but I can’t really process them at the moment.

If anything, though, Thank You marks the end of any notion of relationship-based sanity, because if you take that away then Honestly OK and Slide are, in fact, some of the best ways of describing depression in song form out there. Yes, really. Taken as a triptych with Isobel, this is arguably the real core of the album – less about how men are great but not great but are total bastards.

They’re also the more electronica-based tracks. Because screw folk, that’s why.

I’m aware that this is kind of approaching American Psycho levels of talking about individual songs;

So we’ll move on fairly quickly.  Because it’s weird that I’m No Angel comes between Isobel and My Life, as it’s almost completely tonally dissonant. It’s a return to pop to try to de-embitter the latter end of the album, but if there had just been an all-the-way-up culminating in I’m No Angel with a longer come down with the more Depression songs, it might have worked. 

But using a musical sledgehammer to crack a serious-song walnut so as not to leave people on an utter, utter downer.

Which is why Take My Hand would have been a perfect ending if I’m No Angel had been moved forward to after Thank You; it’s a lovely, beautiful piece of Rollo-formed electronica that doesn’t have quite as much of the relationship overtones; it’s more ‘this relationship is happening, it’s really good, let’s enjoy it’ than ‘this relationship is the best thing ever, except I want to leave, and now you’ve cheated on me, and I guarantee the next man will do this as well because life’s shit’. (If memory serves, Take My Hand wasn’t on the original release, either – remember, we’re back in the times of ‘special edition’ CD albums.

It’s weird to analyse an album that had so much of an influence in my earlier life (and, not sugarcoating it, my earlier love) but No Angel is, twelve years on, an extremely strange album to listen to in that it has a lot of narrative that’s not interconnected in any obvious way, and one song substitution – IMHO – could have changed the feel of the whole thing.

But, just for you, when I’m done with Richard Hawley, I’ll try out the new Dido album.

One last thing; in a previous post (and I’ll throw up a link if I can) I mentioned that my time of music not having a central part in my life could be traced to the period between White Flag and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

As old as I was when White Flag came out, I wasn’t really into Dido any more – the relationship that it was central to having finished, and because, well, Dido isn’t – to be fair – the kind of music I’d grown into liking. (And my tastes varied at the time, but it was more… I don’t know, ‘harder’ stuff, guitar-driven indie-rock, although I’m aware that to most people anything is harder than Dido.)

But since I’ve just written nearly one and a half thousand words about a twelve-year old middle-of-the-road BUMBLEBEE folk album, which is, effectively, baring my soul, let’s end this with a personal reminiscence about why I couldn’t exactly leave Dido behind when I left London behind.

A long time ago – and, really, since we’re talking about when I was last caring about music properly, everything’s a long time ago – I used to work in a low-rent chain pub in a low-rent area, where the whole Town-and-Gown problem was kind of pronounced because the university I was at was situated in a pretty dodgy area, except that given that hundreds of students flooded the area every year it was undergoing a strange period of gentrification.

So the pub I worked in was a strange mix of student employees, who tended to piss off after a few months, management – who had an even worse turnover, which tells you something about the pub – and a few local people who worked there, one of which I got on with very well in the truest, most platonic sense of the word possible.

She was a quiet, reserved person, and I liked her a great deal, but my one defining memory of her was walking down from the staff room to the kitchen and hearing her – thinking nobody else was around – singing along to White Flag, which was this moment that’s stuck with me forever because she was just being herself for two and a half minutes of a song.

I think because of that moment it was the last time I bought a single (and, having moved out of London a short while later, the album).

I don’t like Dido in particular, not just because of the reasons above – although they’re not a big part of it – but, for better or worse, her music’s a big part of my history. I’d be foolish to ignore that.

So watch out for that review, soonest. Because it’s either that or deep lyrical analysis of Us 2 Little Gods, and we don’t want that.

We really don’t.

- James

Push The Sky Away

You’re going to have to bear with me, because, as the previous entry should have shown, it’s been a bloody long time since I’ve actually reviewed an album.

But you have to (re)start somewhere.

The problem is, however, that I’m going to review this album by not reviewing this album, in that I need to talk about the three issues that are getting in the way, i.e.

-       

     1: The Southern Gothic Problem

-       2: The Richard Hawley Problem

-       3: The Amazon MP3 Embuggerance.

Of these problems, the first starts with a confession that will be really problematic; this is the first Nick Cave album I’ve ever bought. This is not to say that I wasn’t aware of his work before this, but that lack of knowledge ended up bringing a morass of preconceptions to listening to Push The Sky Away that made things alternate between interesting and bizarre.

I can give you three points of exposure to Cave in my past; Red Right Hand, used not only on Songs in the Key of X but also brilliantly – in my humble opinion – in Hellboy; The Ballad of Franny Lee by The Shirehorses), a parody that had me laughing while not knowing why; and Phonogram, which had a backup strip in the second volume describing a kind of latent misogyny in some of Cave’s work, among others, which I never followed up.

The Southern Gothic problem, then, is down to how I perceived Cave’s work without ever truly hearing it, a sin which I’m probably guilty of for many other artists. When you just give in to a cultivated image, instead of actually questioning it or analyzing it, that could be seen as a kind of passive enculturation –

And there goes the pretentious alarm.

Let’s step back. The Southern Gothic problem was that I assumed a lot about Cave’s music, and I decided to challenge that by actually, y’know, listening to a whole album, which brings us to the second problem. When I use the term Southern Gothic, too, I’m thinking of the way it was appropriated for television and literature in the 1990s (specifically within one of William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy books, and it’s bugging me that I can’t think which).

Part of the reason I picked Push The Sky Away for my glorious return to album reviewing is because I ‘discovered’ BBC 6Music about six months ago, and they’ve been playing Jubilee Street (and, to a lesser extent, We Know Who U R) on and off over the past month or so and, well, I was intrigued.

Intrigue is as good a place as any to start with this whole ‘getting back into album reviewing’ thing, because if you wanted me to write about something I have more experience of and a greater grounding in, well, this would be a review of the new Dido album. (Although, fact fans, that may be forthcoming.)

I wish I could say that I chose Push The Sky Away as an album for review because I wanted to challenge my preconceptions and maybe learn something new about not just myself, but music too –

Sorry, the pretentiousness alarm went off again.

But in all seriousness, I chose the album for review because I liked the singles which appear to have been chosen because they represent the kind of Nick Cave song that the average listener might expect and be able to immediately define as Nick Cave.

The rest of the album’s not like that, which is what threw me. Preconceptions, challenged. Reviewer, confused. Not least because of the second problem; 6 Music have also been playing the hell out of Don’t Stare At The Sun by Richard Hawley, which I only – in the last week – actually started to understand.

The first ten or so times I heard it I was set to thinking that there’s a thin line between heaven and here poetic and rambling, and that Don’t Stare erred on the side of rambling, Then, a few days ago, it ‘dawned’ on me that Richard Hawley sings – to my mind, and maybe nobody else’s – ‘Songs For People With Children’, and once that occurred to me, I started to actually see where he was coming from. (I’ve since bought the album, so there might be a review of that forthcoming, too.)

The problem is that once that was installed in the music section of my brain, the kind of dissonance in content and structure on Push The Sky Away was a bit overwhelming – you have the social parables of Jubilee Street, which sounds like a film pitch in song form, up against the This Is Hardcore-esque We Know Who U R, but then there’s all kinds of meta-songwriting with Finishing Jubilee Street and, to return to problem one, there’s an inconsistency that, while it works, I wasn’t prepared for; to expect one thing and then to have Cave rambling (well, rambling may be a bit unkind) about Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus in Higgs Boson Blues was jarring.

I don’t have a mental filing cabinet sleeve that properly fits Nick Cave, is basically the problem.

All of which adds up to the fact that (a) I need to actually listen to more albums, (b) review more albums, (c) get back into music generally and (d) might not have been the best person ever to review Nick Cave, given that I’ve predicated my opinions on his music on what I thought I knew from what I’d been told rather than what I actually knew.

You live, you learn.

Water’s Edge is still a cracking song, though.

- James

P.s. The Amazon MP3 Embuggerance isn’t a huge issue, but it makes me feel like a cro-magnon presented with fire for the first time; I don’t want the Amazon Cloud. I want to click and have the proprietary third-party software downloader put it straight into my iTunes folder.

Instead, I had to enter into a dialogue with the Amazon website to make it download the album at all – and when it did, I managed to get it to download the album three times in a row. Then I had to find the sodding thing, copy it into the iTunes folder, then open all the songs therein through iTunes before I could transfer it to my iPod.

A silly thing to be complaining about, but why make a system more complex when it previously just worked? We all know the answer, of course; Amazon want a share of that lovely iTunes direct market, instead of basically selling you the music on Amazon to play through a different program.

I don’t like it when technology makes me feel old, though.