In October, I replaced my venerable Motorola Droid (the Original Gangsta model) with a new Droid Bionic. Since the switch, I have been constantly ridiculed by Brak—you remember Brak, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Brak Show. This is going to take a minute to explain, and it will require discussion of Bluetooth, Android, cartoons, music, and the nature of open source software. If that’s too much for you, stop right here and just go buy The Mouse and the Mask by Danger Doom. It’s the best album of 2011.
For the last year I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones (model: Jaybird SB2) with my phone. That may seem excessive, but before you accuse me you should take a good look at the fact that I listen to music constantly. I’m telling you I got sick of the cable becoming temporarily disconnected, which pauses the music player, requiring me to pull the phone out and unpause it several times a day, usually while huffing up the stairs from a subway platform. These wireless headphones never come unplugged, and they have convenient transport controls (play, pause, skip forward/back, volume) on one of the earpieces. Anyway, shortly after I bought the Droid Bionic, the Google Music app started malfunctioning in a highly unexpected manner: approximately one out of ten times when I press a button the headphones (e.g. pause), my phone starts playing the 2005 Danger Doom record, The Mouse and the Mask. Most frequently, it’s the beginning of “El Chupa Nibre,” the first track on the album, which opens with Brak’s taunt “Why did you buy this album? I don’t know why you did, you’re stupid.”
Let me elaborate a little more on what this taunt has come to mean to me. I listen to a lot of weird music. I frequently listen to albums I don’t even like, because someone recommended I check out a new artist, or because I feel a need to fill-in an underexplored area of my musical interest. So I might be listening to something great (these days that might be Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key) or something I don’t like much at all (sorry, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz). And then, right there in the middle of a song I press a button on my headphones and one of three things happens:
- My phone obeys my command and does what I ask
- My phone switches the song to something from The Mouse and the Mask, usually “El Chupa Nibre” but almost as frequently it is “Vats of Urine”
- My phone decides to cooperate with my request, but also plays a something from The Mouse and the Mask, right on top of whatever I’m listening to
So more than once I’ve been confronted with a pretty valid criticism—why did I buy that album? I am stupid. I deleted the Sufjan Stevens record from my phone. And then sometimes two songs play simultaneously, and all of a sudden it’s Amateur iPod DJ Night hosted by DJ Such-N-Such, former roommate of a girl who knew a guy who used to roadie for Girl Talk. Great mash-up. You make me want to turn down my stereo. Pump down the jams.
I have two points to make. First, The Mouse and the Mask is the best record of 2011. Yes, I realize it did not come out in 2011. I first heard it in 2011. It’s better than everything that came out in 2011—I can say this with some confidence, because I have listened to it (or at least part of it) every day now for months on end. It’s better than the Adele record, better than the Kanye/Jay-Z record, better than Foster the Hoople. Really the only 2011 record that comes close is David Lowery’s The Palace Guards. Fantastic. If you could convince me that The Mouse and the Mask did not actually come out in 2011, I’d concede that David Lowery made last year’s best album.
My second point is that Android is not as free or open as it should be, and this is why I am hounded every day by harsh words from Brak (“Why did you buy this album?”) and Ignignokt (“Behold! The digital vats of urine!”). Android is now the dominant phone platform in the USA, which is quite nice given that just a little while ago it seemed that a completely closed, craptastic phone OS (like RIM’s Blackberry or Nokia’s Symbian) would plague our future indefinitely. Google shepherds the Android platform, which is advertised to be free and open source, but 2011 showed this to be only loosely true. You can read elsewhere about the Android 3 source code fiasco, I’m here to talk about The Mouse and the Mask and my phone’s incredibly strong desire to listen to it constantly. I admit that at first I was mystified—had my phone become self aware?—until I started learning Android programming in December. It turns out that when I press one of those buttons on my headphones, something called an “intent” is created in Android. An intent is a representation of my wishes, something like “hey phone, I want to skip to the next track.” At that point, the Android system compares that intent with applications that are capable of implementing my wishes. If there is only one such application that plays music, then Android will send the intent to that application. If there is more than one, it will ask me which application should receive the intent, and also whether I want that application to always handle those intents.
And we have arrived at problem 1: The Droid Bionic comes with a pre-installed, stripped-down version of Google Music, which cannot be removed from the phone. The technical term for software that you cannot remove from your phone is “crapware.” I’m serious, that is actually what technical people call it. Anyway, I attempted to upgrade it to a newer version, but that is not possible. I searched the Android Market and found that I could install the newer version, so I did, expecting to only have one Google Music app. Surprise! Now I have both the old crapware version and the new version, and that’s when the trouble started. So when I send a command to my phone from the Bluetooth headphones, Android has to figure out which app to send that command to. No problem—or so I think—I’ll just tell Android to send this command and all future commands to the new Google Music app, right? And now problem 2: the two Google Music apps have the same name. Android gets confused because they have the same name, and sometimes sends the command to the other Google Music app. At least that what I think is happening. Regardless, I might be listening to something pleasant like Grandaddy’s “Aisle Seat 37-D” (one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard) and then I hear “Behold! The digital vats of urine!” I like to think that Jason Lytle would appreciate the humor.
I’m a reasonably intelligent person, one who happens to be a Linux system administrator. I can wrap my head around most programming languages. I could fix this problem. However, doing so would violate my contract with my cell phone provider, because I am not to uninstall crapware under any circumstances. For instance, long after Blockbuster goes bankrupt and disappears, I will have the unremovable Blockbuster app on my phone. I could remove it (by “rooting” my phone), but having actually rooted an Android phone, I can tell you that the process is far more difficult than it should be, with significant risk of turning your phone into a “brick.” This is not what openness looks like.
This brings me to my final point. There has been a lot of talk lately about why Google cannot force mobile providers to provide stock Android, but that is only partially true. Google has frequently used two tools to force the mobile providers to comply with their wishes: access to the Android Market, and access to Google Apps like Gmail and YouTube. I recently read an opinion piece [can't find the link at the moment] arguing that Google should use these terms to stipulate that mobile carriers must provide a stock Android build for any device that will have access to Android Market. Not that Google would force carriers to use stock Android–that would be even further from open source–but rather that each device would have to be able to boot stock Android in order to pass hardware certification. This would go a long way toward allowing customers to finally opt-out of crapware. Crapware like Blockbuster and the built-in Music app are only the tip of the frozen urine iceberg. Hidden on most phones is the most dangerous crapware of all, spyware. Do yourself a favor and read this short article on CarrierIQ, software that is tracking everything you do on your phone right now, even logging your keystrokes (and therefore your passwords). Yikes.
Until users can easily switch to stock Android, the OS will continue to be crippled by problems like this one. I will continue to be taunted by cartoon characters. Your mobile carrier will continue spying on you. And I will keep listening to The Mouse and the Mask day in, day out. I guess it could be worse.






