RCA Lyra
03 October 2022
1 Vague Memories
Mnemosyne firmly preserved two events for me through this little toy. The first is a blurry impression of gray and green, a classically rainy day in the woods of western Washington. Rain heavy enough to smother car sounds and soak you instantly. No one sane would be outside, but I'm 14, so I'm riding my bike to the elementary school two miles away (I imagine my brother had some sport that involved being there, though why it wasn't cancelled is beyond me). A cardioid of rain and dirt splash up frm the bike's back wheel and leave me with a distinct line of mud on the back of my open hoodie. My jeans have new cuffs made of dirt. At this point in life I had run the Lyra into the ground; the headphone jack had been acting up and required repositioning of the headphones and an occasional torque; at the time I thought it was because the contacts weren't contacting, but now I see that an internal wire must have been frayed. Genius that I was, I'm listening to music in the monochrome downpour, while riding a bike, on a road for motor vehicles. Stupid, stupid. But the music stops, so I stop. To the side of the road, shielding the device from the rain with a vampiric flip of my jacket, fiddling with the headphone jack until the precious music comes out again…
The RCA Lyra is probably the first device I opened and tried to repair myself. I haven't popped it open this side of Bush to confirm, but given the supreme quality of my repair job to the back label I suspect I was brilliant enough to secure an internal wire in place with bare Scotch tape. I'm sure I got my iPod Nano the next year, just in time to avoid any damage that was beyond my ad-hoc arts and crafts repair skill.
Figure 3: Early signs that my future was in IT…
The second memory I can declare with certainly to belong to junior high - for reasons having to do with girls I can pinpoint it as late 8th grade. The room is one of the better preserved cells of that period in my head. I can see the lines of tables, no longer individual desks, pointed towards the room's projector screen. In my memory, this room is oriented to the left; if my eye looks past this monitor as I write to see into the past, the wall with the projector screen is to my left, facing the door to the right and adjacent to the back wall, with all of the desks pointing to the screen. I'm at one of the center desks in the "left" half of the classroom as you enter; this is the half of the room closer to me now as it remains in memoryspace. We are at right angles to each other, my shadow and I. The teacher is missing, and must have been out of the room because I take out my music and flip through the songs. Marlena, a GIRL (with assets), comes from the other side of the room and asks me what I'm listening to. Fresh teenage me would like you all to note carefully - this is NOT an everyday thing! She takes the MP3 player and one headphone (don't you miss those days? The mono headphone sharing?) to sample my wares. It's mostly DDR music at this point, and I'm still in the discovery phase. She passes the late (8th mix) eponymous track and says "this song isn't very good!" I manage to stutter something about a friend and their giving me some music and immediately feel stupid for having done so. A good lesson for a kid to learn - own it. (She's right though, it's not a good song.)
Did she say anything else to me? I'm afraid I don't remember. "This song isn't very good!" was too powerful a blow!
2 AFTERMATH - 15 YEARS LATER
Having repurposed the tiny SD card I had in this years ago to put into a digital keyboard, there are only 33 songs on this little thing! Of course, 33 songs in 128 MB is only possible if the songs are short, awful quality, or both. But I'm no coward; let's see what I left on this MP3 player and whether the tracks hold up.
……
Oh. Oh no. Now that I've actually looked, there ARE some awful things in here. I thought I was soooo kooky and epic and random in 9th grade! The last upload to the MP3 player's internal storage was in May 2006, so I assume I upgraded to a new device shortly after that summer.
Here's the full list anyway (and here it is in playlist form, modulo tracks 21 and 31). I probably had a "large" SD card in here with a lot more music, so I'm willing to wager that this was diluted by a lot more trance (and probably some SOAD). Nevertheless, this is what remains. I've put them in alphabetical order; judge as you please.
Footnotes:
Surely THIS is the lynchpin in the mid-2000s spirit. Don't pretend you didn't like this song!
The first of many songs from The Matrix soundtracks to make it on here.
This song has always been a banger!
Era and its remixes have always confused me, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of them. This is not an official release, and I got it from a Stepmania simfile pack in 2003. I can't tell you anything more than that.
This set off an infatuation with eurobeat and conditioned my eventual fall from "I don't like anime" to being an incorrigible weeb. This album is hard to find and I still need it.
What's incomprehensible about this song being 64 kbps is that I owned the soundtrack to Reloaded. It was the only one I had until a few years ago. Could it be that I got it Christmas of 2006? Next time I'm home I can go digging through photo albums.
Another "In case you doubted what year it was…" track. Where did this extended mix come from?
I listened to this in the back of the bus on a g*rl's headphones and it blew my mind. Hasn't been turned off since.
Surely no one from my school days can have expected me to almost completely stop playing video games.
The version linked isn't actually the version I had, but it was a megamix version of the "ultimix" from a dance mix album. It took me many years to hunt that album down, but I bought it relatively soon after I realized there even was an album. I had been sent this and a number of other tracks over AIM, and it wasn't until years later that my peanut brain managed to put them in the correct order to realize that they were parts of a continuous mix. Once I knew, though….
Still fun. I probably like this more than the Juno Reactor tracks today (not the case when I was a kid).
The first of three Max[X] songs here. This one seems to be a slightly sped up version of an unofficial "full version" of Max 300. We used to compete over scores on this one in Stepmania until I got my Cobalt Flux dance pad and passed it on my feet. That deflated the little troupe of local finger gamers.
I hardly remembered this one until it started. There was a whole ecosystem of Max[x] remixes, and most of them blew. On that scale, this one is alright.
The classic. My favorite of the boss songs. I still wish I was better at it. Passing this consistently was my peak DDR performance.
A surprising legacy for a dude who went by "FFMusic DJ". If all video game remixes were this good I would still listen to video game remixes.
Another good remix. Not one I still throw on, but it's one of the higher points of that website's old output.
A surprising choice. I always, always preferred the Groove Coverage version. Maybe I was looking for a change of pace after overdoing it on the club mix of that one.
I never even played Mortal Kombat so you know I was being epic. The beat really does go hard though.
Mr. Anderson, welcome back. We missed you.
Рофл tracks aside, this is the biggest "why?" of the playlist.
This one is the king of the рофл tracks. YTMND was thriving. The Hampster Dance was still in recent memory. Ha-ha. I was so funny.
NU METAL, GUYS! IT'S SO TRENDY! I HAD THIS CD WAY BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR, MY FAVORITE SONG ISN'T EVEN IN THE END!
I cannot overemphasize that I did not watch anime during school. That means that having the Sailor Moon opening on my MP3 player was EPIC to me. So zany! It's pretty funny that no one wants to admit to writing the track, though.
This is an OK Bemani song, but not the sort of thing that went the distance with me.
The version I had on the Lyra was actually a crappy 1:52 cut, probably yanked straight from a Stepmania folder. The full version will have to do here.
Since I didn't have an Xbox, I didn't realize that this song was from DDR Ultramix for many more years. It makes sense in retrospect that I had it in some semi-official Stepmania packs.
Of course.
Easily the worst track here. Lots of КРИНЖ on this thing (but it could have been worse)!
There's also lots of stuff that is great. This song hasn't stopped being on rotation since I first heard it in 2003.
For almost twenty years I have been listening to a long version of the song, at 4:02 in length, and until a few years ago I assumed blindly that it was the "full" version. It turns out that, as far as I know, there is no official full version of the song. I've linked the game mix in its stead. So many people want there to be one that there's a whole ecosystem of bootlegs and remixes. I can't identify it, or track 31.
I have no idea where this came from. It might be up to me to upload it and track 30 myself until someone can tell me who made them.
This links to the extended version. Mine was only 3:15 but why limit ourselves, since we live in the future?
Xenon is an alright track but really, to beat out so many other songs from the same era? We'll never know what was on the SD card, and the iPod Nano that replaced the Lyra as my daily carry is freshly destroyed. Go with God, 2006 music playlists.