Dear Winamp

How did you let iTunes beat you out for computer music playing supremacy?  In 1998, you had the world on a string, but your hubris and vanity opened the door for the far inferior Apple to steal your glory.

Throughout high school and college, you were a constant on my Gateway desktop computer.  I had custom skins downloaded, including the awesome Social Distortion skeleton skin, and the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac one as well, lest people think for a second that I was not down with the counterculture, thinking man's graphic novels.  Napster kept a constant stream of tasty new music flowing through your custom built playlists, and the new joy of ripping cd's to my computer ensured that we would never run out of tunes.

You were with me through almost every paper I wrote in high school.  You were there when I did my college acceptance essay, through my term papers, and kept me up until dawn every morning as I worked on my senior thesis.  You and I kept parties thumping, and entertain the occasional lady that we were able to get back to my room with promises of candy and a bootleg Flogging Molly concert recording.  You were there through every rewrite of my "independent movie", which was code for "Look at me, I'm making a college movie.  Please love me, ladies!  I'm artsy!"

Fondly, I remember the day I found the Milkdrop visualization button on your interface.  That's the thing you click and all the lines and pretty colors dance around and make your music even better.

See?   That's the only known way of making "Ace of Spades" a better song.  Even Lemmy agrees.

Sadly, very shortly after college, you became somewhat a joke after iTunes came to power and Metallica killed Napster with their whining and posturing.  Why would someone export all of their songs to you when they were already immediately in iTunes after they were legally paid for?

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to correlate the fact that most of my creative writing curtailed in the years after college, the years where you were absent from my life. Therefore, I place the blame solely on you.  Unable to whip the llamas ass, as you were so want to say, I never wrote the Great American Novel.  I didn't even get close to the Great Canadian novel.  At best, I was somewhere between Belgium and Qatar in the Great Novel game, and that won't cut it by any stretch.

I came up with a plan though.  No one said you can't go back.  I went there, and I'm birnging this with me. 

Does Chabon have Fishbone on his Social D. Winamp?  No.   He probably uses Windows Media Center like a sucker.