On Bean Dad and Gen X Irony

What a guy who wouldn’t help his kid open a can says about the Culture War

I met John Roderick exactly once. Almost a decade ago, we were in a photo shoot together because our bands were playing the same local festival and we both wound up on the cover of a now-defunct Seattle arts magazine. I had never heard of his band The Long Winters, and I think that fact surprised Roderick, who seemed very used to people knowing who he is. Throughout the photo shoot, he was loud, boisterous, and occasionally funny, although nowhere near as funny as he seemed to think he was.

Roderick’s overall vibe was one that I encountered often in the small and close-knit Seattle art community, especially in those days. Everything ran on cachet, and there existed at this time a cadre of older Gen Xers who seemed to own the place. (Some of them literally owned the place, and still do.) These were guys who had been there when Seattle had its MTV moment and lived to tell about it. Guys who had bought single family homes when they cost less than a quarter of a million dollars. Guys who bought bars and their friends who played music in them. At some point in the early 2000s, the preferred musical idiom of this generation became indie guitar rock with whimsical, ironic lyrics foreclosing any hint of vulnerability. Their dominant sense of humor was bristly and irreverent, reflected in the smirking voice of The Stranger alt-weekly (for which I would later freelance) and its then-competitor Seattle Weekly. In many ways, John Roderick, his music, and his subsequent podcasting career (as well as his 2015 City Council bid) embody the spirit of a certain era—one that strikes me as dated, but which nonetheless continues to resonate with the swath of the general population that still has Modest Mouse’s “Bukowski” on heavy rotation in their personalities, if no longer on their iPod shuffles.

I hadn’t thought about John Roderick in years when, on Sunday, I opened Twitter and discovered that despite a bombshell story about Trump attempting to manipulate the outcome of the Georgia election, “Bean Dad” was the social media network’s top trending topic. Bean Dad, it turned out, was John Roderick, who had issued a series of tweets about how his 9-year-old daughter had asked for his help opening a can of beans while he was working on a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of showing…