Monster Monsters

Americans are granted a certain inalienable set of rights. You know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, a complimentary Livejournal to explain why we're laughing at you because "you're all the same"... all that crap. When our forefathers sat down at the Thanksgiving table and decided to tell that asshole Queen of France that, by God, we were going to praise God, they penned one of the most famous documents ever written besides "Dianetics." 

Unfortunately, as time passed, their highly praised New York Times bestseller "The Declaration of Independence" began to lose its significance in an age where poofy shirts and three-cornered hats were replaced with FUBU phat pants and gang rape. Sure all that life and liberty and happiness junk still stands, but the Declaration of Independence desperately needs an upgrade to be compatible with modern times. All Americans are granted a certain set of inalienable rights, and among those should be the right to NOT buy Monster Cables.

Go into any large electronics store anywhere. Pass by the drooling cretins shoving cellphones in your face and demanding you switch to some random telecommunications giant who promises a more expansive Modest Mouse ringtone download hub. Walk right past the elderly folks being scammed into buying a Sony laptop because "most modern email programs need at least two gigs of memory to function correctly." Ignore the teeming masses of incoherent white kids pretending to be black kids interested in buying CDs featuring black kids pretending to be white kids pretending to be black kids. 

You should now be in the store area displaying wooden bookshelf speakers and Casio keyboards, right next to the weathered dustbin overflowing with "$5.99 SUPER ACTION DVD COLLECTION COLLECTOR'S SET" movies such as "Nuclear Cop Solves a Crime" and "Street Justice: Passion on the Streets." Here comes the tricky part:

Find an audio cable which costs less than a dinner for two at the Outback Steakhouse (even with the cheese fries).

It's impossible. The days of shelves lined with "Awesome Audio Inc." and "Val-U-Save" y-splitters are long gone. Somewhere, in the back of a filthy and decrepit warehouse, lies palettes and palettes full of rusting copper speaker wire whose beige cardboard packaging slip has become unreadable beneath the aged layers of grease and soot. Us hardworking, patriotic American citizens who spend our free time never forgetting and talking about Dale Earnhardt's many accomplishments have been stripped of our rights to purchase decent, affordable cables by simply driving to an electronics store and using money to purchase them. 

Somewhere on some day spools and spools of cheap, crappy copper wire that disintegrates when breathed upon were tossed into a blazing pyre along with copies of pro-evolution textbooks and Spuds MacKenzie t-shirts, and not a single independent corporate watchdog caught wind of it. Monster Cable scratched another item off their "to do" list and completed their aggressive penetration of the retail electronics industry, successfully conniving their way into Radio Shack and further stretching their blackened tentacles outward like a toxic oil slick.

Radio Shack to sell Monster brand cables - Fort Worth-based Radio Shack Corp. (NYSE:RSH), one of the country's largest electronics retailers, said Friday that it has made a deal with Monster Cable Products Inc. that will bring the popular Monster-brand audio/video cables to its 7,000 stores nationwide. The cables made by California-based Monster Cable Products are considered the top brand of the high-performance cables that are used to connect audio/video components for home, car and professional use, as well as computers and computer games, Radio Shack said, in a press release.

For those of you who mistakenly chose to live in another country, another NON-AMERICAN country, Monster is a giant electronics heavyweight specializing in the creation of highly advanced hype and expensive packaging (like Bose, only with slightly larger boxes). Rumor has it they also own a factory somewhere that produces actual wires, but nobody has ever been able to successfully prove this. While Monster sells cables identical in performance and quality to virtually any other wire company not staffed by eight-year old Mexican slave laborers, they effortlessly set themselves apart from the competition with one of the most aggressive marketing and advertising departments since the birth of Lucifer himself. Monster doesn't spend money researching more effective methods to make the audio in their cables sound crisp and clean; they simply spend money researching more effective methods to claim that they do on their packaging.

For all intents and purposes, this strategy is paying off - big time. Every single major electronics store in America has signed lucrative contracts with Monster where all parties involved receive generous cash kickbacks every time some hardworking American walks into their store and buys their son a new DVD player, unaware that they are contractually obligated by law to purchase three feet of Monster's patented brand dual titanium braided alien alloy shielding complete with low-density insulation matrix and plutonium cancellation surge protection now with patented Monster Crunch technology which sends an arc of electricity through your balls every time it plays a Lil John track. If they refuse to buy one of these cables, store employees will sweep upon them like winged leeches, spouting off each and every "value point" Monster forced them to memorize during their three day training seminar entitled "If You Don't Sell Our Cables, We'll Behead Your Dog." Of course these wires cost nearly as much as the DVD player itself, even more if you include the Monster-brand power filtration adapting converter unit which instantly converts your cash into lines of high grade Columbian cocaine for the company's CEO.

To ensure they are the most obnoxious company in the free world, Monster has taken an extra bonus step to sue anybody even remotely using the word "monster" in any way whatsoever. This includes job placement companies, online Halloween costume shops, Disney (for their movie "Monsters Inc."), and their biggest threat in the fast-paced world of cut-throat consumerism: a vintage clothing store.

Two years ago MonsterVintage .com received a letter from a Trademark Attorney representing Monster Cable. We thought it bizarre and considered it to be Junk mail. After some time, I recieved a phone call from the attorney and he stated because I was using the word "Monster" I would have to sign a license to continue to use the Monstervintage.com name. Logo or design issues were never mentioned or I would have dealt with it). Then he continued with informing me that they get paid and sell their license and how much money could I come up with, I told him that MonsterVintage.Com is a small cottage business and has a limited budget. Monster Cable's Attorney then asked if I could come up with $1000.00. And then went on to say they also required 1% of the gross business yearly income. Of course, I did not agree with this strong-arm tactic and did not pay or sign the huge license agreement that was sent after that phone conversation, 1 1/2" thick License Agreement of pure legal trickery that was received around 5/2002.

I put some of that text in bold to let you know when your anger should reach a sufficient boiling point and you can begin slowly shaking your head back and forth while muttering "what complete assholes."

Let's make a few things clear here: nobody in their right or even wrong minds could possibly confuse a store which sells vintage Barbara Streisand wigs with an electronics manufacturer which sells colorful words printed on top of thick plastic. There is absolutely no way anybody will ever load up MonsterVintage.com, view a page full of wrinkled Motley Crue concert t-shirts from the 80s, and ask themselves, "boy, I surely didn't know Monster Cables sold VINTAGE ORANGE HAWAIIAN DRESSES. I also didn't know they COMPLETELY CHANGED THEIR ENTIRE NAME. This truly is a step up from that silly multi-million dollar speaker wire racket they were running before!" It blows my mind to believe Monster can patent such a trivial and common word as "monster" and then attempt to enforce such a ridiculous concept with a bloodthirsty legal team full of psychotic assholes who'd felch their own mothers for a handful of bus tokens.

Now I'm all for ridiculous lawsuits and people trying to sue window manufacturers for failing to plaster their products with a few hundred stickers labeled "DO NOT TRY TO CHEW OR MAKE LOVE TO THE GLASS," because that kind of shit makes me laugh until I stop. But everything about Monster's company and their pro-alienation business plan seems just mind-bogglingly outrageous. How could any of Monster's expensive New York lawyers seriously argue that folks lining up to see Disney's "Monsters, Inc." mistakenly purchased their tickets believing they were going to watch two hours of speaker cable sitting on the floor and thrilling the audience with its amazing PEX dialectric insulation? 

More importantly, why did Monster demand the owner of the vintage clothing store give them $1000 up front and 1% of their gross business income? How the fuck is that justified? Can they somehow prove that the sales increase of Members Only jackets is directly proportional to the sales of Monster Jazz Instrument Cables? Better yet, what the fuck is a Monster Jazz Instrument Cable? Does jazz music really require its own special cables to accurately convey the subtle dynamics of an instrument which would otherwise be lost using the shoddy and inferior Monster Rock Instrument Cable?

Pregnant angelic furries and white homosexual anime fans will never forget what happened the day of September 11th, and I recommend you do the same as well.Hey Monster, do I need to buy special ears to listen to jazz music? How come there aren't any Monster Rap Instrument Cables which excel in reproducing sampled cliched vinyl drum loops for 40 minutes? If you do ever begin manufacturing such a thing, be sure to start selling Monster 45-caliber bullets that I can use to decorate my brains all over the ceiling with MAXIMUM BLOOD SPREAD thanks to Monster's patented "MONSTER Explosive© Skull Diffusion© filter using patented TimeCorrection© DynaFlow© UltraMaximum© Technology©." I can imagine the their advertising angle: "The police claimed a single man killed 'Dimebag' Darrell, but we all know who really killed him - a load of awesome Monster 45s, the perfect bullet to make your point! All our Monster 45s are guaranteed for life to have the lowest possible wind resistance and kinetic energy displacement thanks to our patented Nitrogen-gas injected HydroAction© Flex-R-Zap© dielectric providing high velocities of propagation for maximum spread!"

It's really not that difficult to imagine Monster selling bullets. Hell, they are already selling season tickets to San Francisco 49ers games. They are already selling Monster Mints. If you thought either of those were mind-bendingly goofy, then prepare yourself for Monster USB cables, Monster DVI cables, and Monster printer cables. Why? Who the fuck dreamed of these things? Are there filthy groups of lost and confused computer users out there demanding to know why their standard USB cable only lets them transfer text files containing passages from "The Bell Jar?" Has anybody ever said, "you know, this new printer we bought is awesome and everything, but I can't help to imagine how much better our documents would look if they came through a Monster printer cable! They're only $39.95 and are somehow personally endorsed by aging rocker Sammy Hagar, so let's buy a few hundred RIGHT NOW and then bask in the glow of our newly enhanced pie chart and tax return printouts!" The day Monster proves data travels significantly faster through their $35 "Ultimate Performance" cable is the day I go to their corporate offices and learn if a molotov cocktail with a Monster USB fuse burns faster than a normal one.

Monster is simply one of those giant companies I absolutely loathe for their terrible business tactics and questionable products. They prey on consumers' ignorance and lack of alternative choices to sell their grotesquely marked up snake-oil wire, strong arming all competition out of marketplaces and spreading through electronics chains like AIDS. Next time one of your wires goes bad and you need a replacement pronto, you've got two choices: either go to the local electronics store and spend $50 on a three-foot long Monster cable, or go to a somewhat different electronics store and spend $100 on a six-foot long Monster cable. Radio Shack, the last bastion of cable sanity, doesn't even sell their patented brand of 99-cent Awesome Vision cables which were recently upgraded to reproduce the yellow and "most of the blues." Yet despite having completely dominated the field by cramming a bloated wad of marketing and aggressive sales down the throats of every person in this continent, they continue to hammer away on rival vintage clothing stores and online shops selling Halloween masks, not content on resting until the dictionary entry for "monster" has a little "c" with a circle around it. If Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were alive to see the kind of ruthless tyranny Monster has used to penetrate America, they'd probably say, "OH GOD, WE'RE SOOOOOOO COOOLD, KILL US, KILL US PLEASE!!!" You know, because their flesh fell off decades ago. Maybe they just need some Monster Skin.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)