By: Ben Johnson
I've had two can
openers die on me in the last month. One died because of being too shitty, and
then I bought another one, and that second one died too, also of Immediate
Shitty Can Opener Syndrome. I can see the problem. The teeth aren't catching,
so after the blade wheels clamp on the lip of the can, I turn the crank and
nothing happens. I have to reclamp over and over again, dozens of times, all
around the edge of the can. And sometimes that doesn't even work. So I, regular
Joe American Consumer, am throwing away multiple broken can openers. They will
be taken to a landfill, and they will sit there, not opening cans, until the
fucking sun explodes. Designed obsolescence is now apparently a can
opener-level thing.
What this means for
me is now I have a can opener budget. I have to be an informed consumer about
finding a can opener that is designed to handle the strain of opening a can.
I'm thinking I should either go vintage or high-end. The thought of
strategizing about a can opener decision depresses me to my marrow. What kind
of world do we live in where caveat emptor applies to can openers? It should
be, "Oh shit, food is in that can and I want to eat it. Okay, I'll
buy a can opener, problem solved FOREVER." But the world is not perfect,
and so now I have to spend some of the limited time I've been afforded as an
alive person deciding what to do about my can opener situation. My hand has
been forced. I can't just lay back and accept the status quo. The status quo
does not open my cans.
What we're up to now
is that even the fucking can opener company guys are eying the bottom line and
looking out for number one. You'd think the owner of a can opener manufacturing
firm would be a kindly man who looks like Albert Finney in overalls, going
"I own a can opener factory, been in the family 80 years; anyway, I don't
hear too good." Nope. It's probably his asshole son in control now, a
hotshot who emerged from the sales department with a few ideas up his sleeve.
I'm picturing a rich 45 year old manbaby with a coke habit and an MBA who
drives a Lexus and puts dick pics on Instagram even though he's married with
three kids. This guy, we'll call him Rick because Rick is a funny name for
pretend people you hate, had the bright idea that, "hey, according to my
Principles of Economics professor, I can take over this company, lay off all
the workers, outsource the labor to a slave camp in Malaysia, make the
shittiest possible can openers, and people will buy them anyway because the
thing about cans is you can't open them without a can opener. That way all the
customers, for instance Ben Johnson in particular, will have to buy another two can openers in
less than a month." And Rick Finney multiplied his revenues by a factor of everybody is fucking furious and hungry,
and CNOPNR stock soared. You don't like it, too bad. Rick Finney has a job to
do, and that's taking care of business, Rick Finney style.
Oh shit: maybe it's a
cabal of Rick Finneys. He's probably in league with his best friends Pete Zacutter and Dave Spatula, and they meet in the darkened conference room
from Doctor Strangelove and hatch evil schemes of new brokedick nickle and dime
shit to foist upon me.
This is what I think
of while I'm angrily clamping and re-clamping one of those big cans of crushed
tomatoes. I'm sure there are inaccuracies. I'm probably leaving out some mergers
and acquisitions. Hostile takeovers. A dog-eat-dog business environment where
Mom and Pop Can Opener are besieged on all sides by money-grubbing jackals who
force them to "get with the times." Can opener manufacture is
probably a tough racket. The real life Rick Finney is probably looking at his
kid's college bill and sobbing in his Lexus over the sad inevitability of his
own decline, and he is probably right to do so. There's only so much money you
can make from can openers before the Peter Principle catches up to you and you
go bust-o with investments in areas outside of your area of expertise. For all
his contributions to the can opener business world, Real Rick Finney is
probably slowly dying of stress-related maladies, probably closer to a modern-day
Willy Loman than the villainous Caligula figure of my imagination.
But I don't care
about the particulars of this. I choose to focus my ire on my second broken ass can opener and the worst possible version of the fictional Rick
Finney who brought it to me. I do this because he, representative corpuscle that he is on humanity's taint,
deserves as much ire as can be heaped on him, and because I have a shitload of
ire to misplace because I'm currently opening a can of tomatoes like a starved
mutant lunatic from a post-apocalyptic future. And, worse, I'm so used to getting boned as an average member of the populace it doesn't even feel all that
unnatural to try to open a tomato can with my teeth and hands. I take it in stride.
Maybe I'm reading a
little too far between the lines. Sure. But hey: I've been to a shopping mall.
I've worked in a commercial real estate office. I read the articles about our society's
collapse, our outrageous
inequality. I'm there, daily, when shit doesn't work the way it's supposed
to and nobody is there to do anything about it. A can opener breaks in my hands
and, as with all other subliminal signals I receive from an oligopolied America these days, I am led to
conclude, "What the fuck chance do I have?" I'm just a man with a can
trying to cook some spaghetti so I can not die for one more day of this shit. I don't matter. Nobody cares about me, not even
some fictionally pure ideation of Good Old American Can Openers Incorporated.
I'm nothing and I'm nobody, all alone, and I have to get my own back.
Anyhow, Grantland has
Officially Narratived the 2013 Year In Music. That's what they do over there.
To summarize: Steven
Hyden basically thinks the music biz is like my imaginary version of
the can opener business now. He is basically right, because he is basically
just expressing his own opinions, and he is funny in places, and you can't
really argue with funny.
I'd have added some
mumbo jumbo about how the major companies are quietly positioning themselves to
profit from all (still rising) vinyl sales, holistically, via solidification of
distributorships and silent hush-hush indie label acquisitions, so that they
still get paid by the unit regardless of which artist is on the LP. I'd have mentioned that they're going to find infuriating ways to further leverage their position in this market as long as there's growth in it. I'd have
mentioned that the failure of big promotions by mega monoculture pop artists
like Katy Perry and Jay-Z isn't that they failed to galvanize, it's that the
narrative of these artists is no longer one of discovery and emergence, and
therefore these artists offer no social media cultural capital accrual via
reportage on same, so people don't care except insofar as it's fun to. It may
be somewhat hip to be square, but Katy Perry is for squares, man.
Yeah, I'd have
probably said something like THAT.
And then I would have caught myself and told
myself that nobody cares what I think. I'm just a dirty unkempt plebian bending back a
half-opened lid of a can of crushed tomatoes with an old spoon because apparently, as confirmed
by literally everything around me on a constant basis, I don't matter. If I did
matter, I would have a nice can opener from Williams-Sonoma that probably costs
$40 but is so, so worth it just like all the finer things in life. Instead I'm
down here in the muck with everybody else.
Anyhow, Steven Hyden
enjoyed the following records in 2013:
10. Haim, Days Are
Gone
This is emerging as
my least unfavorite album that is everybody else's favorite album. At this
point I feel like maybe I should not not buy it.
9. The National,
Trouble Will Find Me
Can we please stop
calling things like this "indie." It's not like it's a sacred word or
anything, but it can just get confusing when people use that word to indicate
"sounds like a baritone T-Bone Burnett."
8. Ashley Monroe,
Like a Rose
Steven's real
favorite album might be just hanging out in a Starbucks.
7. Palms,
Palms
I always think it's
weird when grown men profess an affinity for the music you're supposed to
listen to when you're an early teenager, between the discovery that you don't
have to just listen to whatever's on the radio in the family minivan and the
discovery that all the bands they have on t-shirts at Hot Topics are in fact
quite shitty.
6. Fuck Buttons,
Slow Focus
Have we gone through
the looking glass where the best way to get free publicity is to name your
shitty band Fuck Buttons or Perfect Pussy? I hope there's a backlash of band
naming where all the guitar-driven tough guys go "We don't give a shit
about internet hype and all that crap, and that's why we called our band Fluffy
Unicorns. Sometimes you just gotta take a stance and say enough is enough,
man."
5. Kurt Vile,
Wakin on a Pretty Daze
Nobody's got beef
with Kurt Vile. He's beefless. He's a slippery beefless angel.
4. Daft Punk,
Random Access Memories
Here's an area of
critical agreement that's hard to argue with. I don't care who you are or what
your landscape of individual aesthetic preferences looks like, Daft Punk is
doing more good than harm. You can definitely disagree with 4th best album of
the year, but Daft Punk album years are better than non Daft Punk album years
when measured by number of Daft Punk albums per year. That is a fact.
3. Bombino, Nomad
As bad as fetishizing
world music just for the sake of appearing globally conscious is, Tuareg Rock
is the most promising and interesting rock-influenced thing currently happening
on the planet, and this guy is a high enough level operator in that world to
merit the full production treatment. I might prefer the more raw stuff as
documented recently by Sublime Frequencies, but as the saying goes a rising
tide lifts all the boats. These guys are rockin' where it's hard to live. The
more vociferous the plaudits the better.
2. Kanye West,
Yeezus
It's not that I hate
Kanye West. It's that I long to be indifferent to the existence of Kanye West.
He's good at some things and he's bad at some things. He's like Tony Romo. Like
Romo, I don't see why we have to talk about him every single day, or convince
some unseen enemy he's actually all good or all bad, and pore over his
performances like conspiracy theorists with a newly remastered copy of the
Zapruder film. Kanye West is just a guy, just a musician, and this album is
just an album. It can mean more than that, personally, for you and for a lot of
other people too, but that doesn't mean it is more than that. Sgt.
Pepper is an album. Moby Dick is a book. Caddyshack is a
movie. We take it too much further than that, we get in trouble. We're all
supposed to be human beings, here. Kanye seems to be having some trouble with
this concept, and from the way he's treated I can't say I blame him. At least
not 100%. Yeezus might be the best or second best album of the year, but
it is becoming my least favorite thing to talk about. Like I don't think it's
even healthy to be talking about anything this guy does.
1. Deafheaven,
Sunbather
When I was twelve I
listened to Alice in Chains a lot. I did not actually like it, but there was
something compelling about the music. It created a very specific nausea every
time I listened. Looking back, I think that nausea was the band's
sonic/psychedelic replication of being junk sick, which, if intentional, would
represent an accomplishment of sorts by a skilled rock band. On the other hand,
who enjoys being junk sick? That's a feeling to be avoided. If your most
defining accomplishment as a band is skillfully causing a specific nausea and
unease similar to the sensation of needing a heroin fix, maybe what that means
is you're skilled at being shitty, which calls the value of your skill into
question. Anyway, Deafhaven reminds me of this.
