Gimme a Shit-Brown Zune

I don’t own an iPod. Let’s get that straight right here and now. I don’t own an iPod and I really don’t know what I’d do with one if you felt sorry for me and mailed me one of your spares. I do admire the things. I admire their good looks and simplicity of design. See, any asshole can design something complicated. It’s simple that’s tough.

Now, being simple is great and all — it’s key — but the reason the iPod is such a huge success is because of something far less tangible. It’s a success because it’s cool, and cool can’t be quantified. Or forced.

Enter the Zune, Microsoft’s “iPod-killer” which in all likelihood is only actually going to kill every MP3 player on the market other than the iPod, and then clumsily succumb to its own spectacular uncoolness. I mean, come on — the Zune comes in three colors: white, black and brown. That’s right, brown. And not beautiful, complex walnut brown either. It’s shit brown. La couleur de la merde. And shit is not cool.

Nor are copycats and cheap imitations cool, and that’s exactly what we’ve got in the Microsoft Zune. It would be one thing if Microsoft had taken the idea of a music player and run with it the way Apple did with the original iPod. Apple came late to the game, got all high concept and radical, and seemingly effortlessly reinvented the music industry. It kicked the Walkman’s ass — think about that. What’s Microsoft bringing to the table? Shit brown. That’s it. That’s what they’re bringing. A fucking copycat of the iPod notable only for the fact that it’s available in the color of feces. Who knows? Maybe Microsoft thinks this makes it more human.

Look, the only people who are going to buy a Zune are PC fan boys who can’t stand to see Apple being cool. They’re praying that Microsoft will smother the iPod the way they smothered the Macintosh with their Windows operating system, and Netscape with Internet Explorer. They’re hoping that the Zune will swoop down to claim the coolness crown, but they don’t realize that Windows and Internet Explorer aren’t cool. Oh, they’re successful in a cockroaches-outlived-the-dinosaurs sort of way, but cool they are not. Being cool is like being a cult film. It’s something you can’t control or force. Cult films aren’t made. They’re found.

The fact of the matter is that the world has already found what’s cool, and it’s not the Zune, but those fucked up PC fan boys are still hoping for salvation. Already there’s a grass roots movement amongst the more pathetic Zune freaks to get out and spread the word. They are even rallying around shit brown, claiming to love it, calling it “retro” and “the only good color.” Well, to each his own. My sister worked for the Santa Barbara County Jail back in the 80s. They had a regular customer who would get tossed into the drunk tank and immediately peel off his clothes and joyfully write on the walls with his own excrement. Mr Fink, they called him. Might even have been his real name. Something tells me Mr Fink would have loved the shit brown Zune.

Just speculating.

The irony in all of this is that the Zune’s shit brown is such a terrifically, perfectly poor idea that it’s almost becoming cool in a Plan 9, William Hung, Jar Jar Binks sort of way. The Microsoft Zune may crash and burn before it gets off the ground, but I suspect that people will be laughing at shit brown for years to come.