As a music-lover, it has been a godsend for me.
Despite what Neil Young says about MP3s, I will take the tiny USB stick over CDs for long car journeys any day of the week.
For a trip to Christchurch, I used to pack a few hundred CDs into banana boxes and gaffer-tape them to the car roof - forget the inadequacy of the glove box.
Within minutes of departure, I would be contorting myself out of the passenger car window and somehow getting my arms on to the roof to find a desired CD with the song that simply Has To Come Next.
Car journeys are about finding those rightly timed songs, as any halfwit knows.
With a 16GB USB stick slipped into the amplifier, I now have a few thousand songs to choose from, and I can choose any particular song I want from my smartphone.
The result of this has been some marvellous long-distance car journeys this summer where all manner of favourite '60s singles, exhumed from the basement and digitised, have suddenly burst into life during the shuffle command, sending me into a delirium of passenger-seat-jigging excitement and tearful musical memory.
Songs like Pony With A Golden Mane, by Every Mother's Son, or For All Time, by Silk.
You've Never Had It Better, by The Electric Prunes, sheesh, ANYTHING by The Electric Prunes.
The Great Banana Hoax! Unbelievable sonic experience.
Songs from a magic time I haven't heard since then.
And You Ain't As Hip As All That Baby, by Jay & The Americans.
Yes, you read that last one right.
You Ain't As Hip As All That Baby.
You thought The Rolling Stones' Under My Thumb was as viciously condemnatory of women as it could get?
Think again.
I can remember some Jay & The Americans' hits, but when I reheard this sublime song, a complete chart failure for them after 10 successes in a row, I had to find out more.
There were three different Jays.
The first one was actually called Jay, hence the next two had to change their name in the contract to be a Jay as well, usually explaining Jay was a high-school nickname, even though their real names were Damascus and Ted.
Jay Black did nearly all the hits, but later fell into bankruptcy through gambling, and sold the group name for $100,000 to the third Jay, who hauled another band around for yonks singing the hits. Steely Dan's Becker and Fagen were in that band.
Jay Black was enough like Roy Orbison to be considered a great singer.
I have no idea of how big he was, but crucially, he SOUNDED big, probably at least - remember, Americans don't understand metrics - 6ft 6in.
And with an index finger the size of a banana.
I can just see him pointing at some hapless teenage girl in the front row and wagging it as he told her she wasn't as hip as all that baby.
The lyric - pop veteran Jeff Barry - is outstanding.
"You're all the time complaining/like the world owes you a living/bluffing, fighting, straining/and never forgiving.''
Boy, Jay had a handful on his hands with this one. He was lucky rock'n'roll is a boy's game so he could get away with singing sentiments like this.
But wait, it gets worse.
"Well, who are you to say?/who ARE you anyway?/no, you ain't as hip as all that baby/YOU ain't as hip as all that baby/you should do a little looking at yourself.''
Lesley Gore would have answered this bad boy with her absolutely magnificent You Don't Own Me but, sadly, it's only Jay singing on this record.
"Your closet's full of clothes, girl/if they sell 'em, you got 'em/your sophistication shows, girl/yeah, everything bell-bottom.''
Brilliant.
Man criticising woman for shopping, and then sarcastically sneering at her taste.
Inverted feminism cowering inside a gloriously drawled melody.
This is why we need '60s pop singles SO much; they're formative, they're fantastic.
You NEVER get as hip as this THESE days, baby.
● Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
