Cutler’s and Why Some Aspects of Hell I Like and Why Some, well, Not So Much
Friday, March 28th, 2008Cutlers is a record store on Broadway in Downtown New Haven. It was founded in 1948, is a New Haven landmark and, although I don’t remember the circumstances which precluded this, there was once a small picture of it in an issue of Vogue Magazine. Maybe it was Esquire. Either way I have been going to Cutler’s since my Dad (OneVoice) brought me there a significant number of years ago. When I learned how to drive I drove myself and my friends there on a weekly or sometimes daily basis to rummage through their collection of 45’s and jazz cd’s. When I got older and started reading Magnet and Big Takeover I would go there to find the latest in super hip indie rock and to browse their used bins for copies of Elvis Costello albums, that was of course until they re-issued all of them but that’s a different story for a different day. When I was older still, about a year ago, I would go to the only place I knew that kept a complete-as-could-be collection of Criterion DVD’s, my drug, my passion, the ruiner of my credit. Dad if you were ever wondering where all my money went you can blame Cutlers and the Criterion Collection. And while the décor inside seemed to change on a regular yearly schedule, there was always Standard Cutlers on one side and to the right of it, the store next door, was Cutlers Classical.I don’t think I need to go into detail about what they sell.
That was until last Saturday. I went there to pick up the new Mission of Burma re-issues, which they didn’t have, a not quite new trend for Culter’s, not having something they absolutely should have, that people count on them having, and noticed that Cutlers Classical is gone. Not only that but Standard Cutlers shrank due to the fact that Standard Cutlers ate into half of Cutlers Classical for their used cd, vinyl and old school arcade games section. That’s 50% less Cutlers folks. Which means the already crowded store is now more crowded. It means a more limited DVD selection and it means, from what I could see, a lot less used product and significantly less used product. Pick an artist. Any artist. You could find that artist in the bins and even if they had only three or four albums Cutlers would have a collection of import singles some weirdo live bootleg and a dvd or two even if you were previously convinced that a dvd for that artist didn’t even exist. That was Cutlers. There was a point in their history where you could honestly say that they had Everything. Now not so much.
So I guess the next question would be why did they shrink their business? I suppose the easy answer would be because the music industry is in the toilet but that would really only be a third the answer. Even if the music business was tanking record stores could continue to thrive at some level if it weren’t for iTunes and other music download sites. I will admit that I am as guilty of this as the next person. If the record industry would like to file murder charges against all of those who frequently engage in the downloading of music rather than purchase that same music at a store well then I will plead guilty in court and will gladly do sometime behind bars. Do I feel guilty when I download an album that only a year ago I would have forced myself to trek to the record store at the end of the world before I would even consider taking the suckers way out and just downloading a hard to find record if it was available online? Absolutely. But while I am certainly not alone, I don’t believe that me and my co-conspirators are the real reason Cutlers cut itself in half and why the music industry is in such dire straits. The real reason is…
The music sucks. And if you don’t see that then you are lucky because you have yet to be exposed to the worst era in music in the history of humanity’s reign upon this Earth. Truly we have hit a low point culturally when the Billboard Top 40 is filled with people like Chris Brown, Rhianna, Flo Rida, OneRepublic, Miley Cyrus, Buck Cherry, Sean Kingston, The Jonas Brothers, Fergie, Three Days Grace, Linkin Park, Finger Eleven, Danity Kane, Madonna! Still with the Madonna people come on. Open your ears to something new but more importantly something good. If we all stopped listening to junk and paying for junk and stop enabling people that created the junk their would be less junk and Cutlers would have to cut it self in half and we could all go swimming in a pool of imports and bootlegs and we can live in a world where bad music can only be played at clubs where people wear white sweat suits with big fake diamond necklaces around their necks and wear their hats crooked, where men call women bitches and refer to themselves as pimps. Where people laugh at things that aren’t clever and who say that things they don’t like are “Gay.” Where people talk about movies like “Never Back Down’ and the newest Tyler Perry movie like they’re art films. If people like this want to listen to bad music they absolutely may. The rest of society doesn’t need them for anything anyway except maybe as examples of who not to act like and what a lifetime of listening to junk music gets you.
I like to think of music as Hell. It has seven layers. The surface or layer one is where you get the junk and have to portray the above attitude towards culture for all of eternity but the deeper you go the better the tunes get, the better the food gets, the better the films get. Its really hot and its tough to get there but if youre willing to put in the effort you will be handsomely rewarded.
I suppose its only like Hell in the layers sense. I suppose I could have used a dip analogy as well but I have never been a fan of layered dips. I’m not a Hell supporter either but I like it better than layered dips. Hell for me would be having to eat layered dips for all eternity.
(Tom cringing)
