SONG OF THE DAY: Southern Girl

Frankie Beverly died last week, and I don’t think there’s anything was more pure Black cookout music than him and Maze. It didn’t offend nobody, set a lovely mood, and there was an extensive catalog that went on for hours. I was texting a friend about it and called it yacht rock for Black folks. The next day she sent me a post that Questlove did saying the exact same thing. Maze was smooth as hell. Anyways, this is probably my favorite Maze track, at least today. It changes regularly, depending on the vibes, but I tend to come back to “Southern Girl” pretty often.

SONG OF THE DAY: What's His Name

A lot of my favorite songs from throughout music history have a sound to them reminiscent of the rhythmic combination of cicadas/peepers/frogs/insects/forest creatures making noise in the woods. It’s such a primordial rhythm, and such a symphony I got no idea what actual creatures it is making that type of sound, because likely it ain’t a single animal but a whole slew of them working in tandem. I feel bummed when dogs don’t like me, because it suggests to me I’m not doing something in life. But also when that forest symphony is popping off, and I’m moving through it (or by it, which is far more common for our unnatural human asses), whenever it stops suddenly instead of the normal build up then dramatic stop before starting back up slowly, I feel like I fucked up the rhythm. Then again, that’s a sign of needing to think more naturally, and learn how to walk within that rhythm, so that I blend it and be a part of it instead of disrupting it until it’s sure it’s not in immediate danger. And that’s also fucked up to think that I might be a danger to a natural rhythm, but that’s the reality of how we’ve separated ourselves with our perceived dominion over the Earth, whether we do it out of organized religion or stainless steel sciences. Gotta do better, by not doing so damned much.

SONG OF THE DAY: Marihuana

My brain is no longer equipped to handle smoking, even regular ass weed, much less vaporwaving that space weed y’all got nowadays. That shit just turns my mind inside out to where I’m wanting to be in a fetal position but too self conscious to actually do it, because there’s a spirt in the house called Square Man, and he might see me. I don’t need house spirits judging my old ass, and yelling at the house spirits, “You got no idea what weed is like these days!” won’t help either. Just alarms the neighbors (more than they already are, living next to me).

SONG OF THE DAY: As I Wander, I Will Ponder

It ain’t really a wasteland so much as a wasteful land, but I’m wandering it, with an 8 of Clubs on my mind, thinking about the cycles of building and destroying and how what’s old is seen as inferior because we’ve been enculturated to expect virginal consumer experiences, which ain’t realistic at all. And then instead of the better aspects of old ways being cultivated, we fetishize old consumer items, the “vintage” craze, which is a liberal bourgeoisie version of MAGA, with a hefty price tag, even though all these rare finds came from an abandoned life. We don’t need to save garments; we need to save our ways, performatively fermenting 7 flavors of spirituality without once tossing salt to protect against demons, so nothing that feels real to our heart and gut ever actually proliferates. Even if the smoke is everywhere, and it feels as if our collective trajectory is unbearable, you still gotta ponder a future, where hearts like yours can still beat along, hoping to make a peaceful pace.

SONG OF THE DAY: Play It Loud

I like to pretend I’ve stolen spaceships to drive through the upper ionosphere that I bump modern era boogie funk to, but I’m lying. Usually I’m just sitting on my screened in rural back porch in Polo boxer briefs, sipping on coffee, and wondering if I need to put anything more on when I go out front to feed peanuts to the crows or not.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rolling Love Part 2

As Neil always said, "Let love enter your heart."

SONG OF THE DAY: The Model

Kraftwerk cumbia. And yes, this exists on 45, so I got it and have ripped it slow as well. Like all super solid things, it works at all speeds in all dimensions on most all planet surfaces. That's the pure power of lounge.

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Honky

This song does not exist on 45, sadly. We can’t have nothing nice.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ain't No Big Thing

3-day weekend, if you recognize calendars, or time, or recognize both and are trapped in the status quo schedule of life events. Gonna play shit like this all weekend long, sitting on a milk crate in the abandoned factory of the mind. I wish you all well. I hope you are not wrongly perceived.

SONG OF THE DAY: Don't Make Me Creep

I’ve been cheating on the internet with real life lately, as I had the week off and was wandering. Today was back to work, which interestingly enough means I am once again bombarded with things I don’t need to know about, and also faced with the existence of people who seem to be more important or successful than me, and I don’t know why. The resentment machine is cranked back up, by design. Digital world is meant to demean us. Creep away from it whenever you can.

SONG OF THE DAY: Scorpio

Zodiac sign raps outlasted The Genius.

SONG OF THE DAY: Pico

Had conjured audio images of horseshoe stobs clanging behind the neighbor’s trailer, which could apply to the house I live in now or the house I mostly grew up in as a kid. That clang is such a deep and satisfying sound – like an old-time upright bassline to play along to a pentatonic wind chime on our imaginary collective grandma’s back porch. I’ve had a couple sets of horseshoes sitting in a pile in the shed out front (the one painted with a purple Papa Smurf signifying the power of lounge), but I ain’t even set them up yet. I’m not a MAGA nostalgia for white 1950s type, nor a hipster bougie vintage fetishist, but I gotta lot of thoughts about cornhole and the decline of American potential. (Of course cornhole was invented in Ohio – the stank anus of America.) But rather than expound a thousand words about how cornhole shows how an infantilized populace can’t be trusted throwing hard chunks of metal around for leisure, I should probably go outside and set up the horseshoe pits. Even if I ain’t got nobody to throw with, I got four pairs of shoes, spray painted purple and orange and lime green and light blue, and I can just have best of 69 games with myself pitting the colors against each other until I determine which ones got the best feel for me. That way by the time I got folks coming over to play, I’ll be dialed the fuck in, and know if I’m throwing partners with purple shoes, to pick the far pit to come down with, or if it’s lime green, go closer to the house to throw up, even though up and down is always more a metaphysical thing than actual slant to the land. Anyways, I’m thankful my mind is fucked up and imagined horseshoe clangs. I was gonna thank my brain but I know my heart had a hand in it too, and when heart and brain get together, that’s where mind is anyways. Anybody who thinks mind is entirely in the brain is out of their mind.

SONG OF THE DAY: Can't Fool Me Twice

This group apparently only has two 45s to their whole discography, and I got ‘em both, and love ‘em both. Also hard to argue with the use of “Thee” in a band. Still trying to learn the banjo, but I might switch to clawhammer, so that I can sing too (actually, “sang” because my present tense will be past). Gonna form a band called Thee Fool Cards.

SONG OF THE DAY: She's Looking Like a Hobo (kudzu'd)

I love hobo songs, always have, so I’m trying to learn this old school beat on the banjo, because it’s a banger. Plus, practice the scratches with two part harmony, so one of us is doing the "ohh.... ohhh...." but a second voice chimes in on the "looking like a hobo" to give it real flair.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Chankla (kudzu'd)

Dancing on the dirt in fresh white Jordans, keeping them crisp in spite of a grimy ass world that wants to sully all that touches it. Flat footing on a hunk of plywood sitting by the train tracks, tapping a beat of “fuck this”ness that matches my heart’s natural rhythm. When I finally get banished to hell, I hope they got cumbia rebajada on the shuttle bus.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nuthin' But a G Thang (kudzu'd)

Broke a banjo string and was waiting on another pack to show up in the mailbox, but it was the 2nd so I could still practice my 3-finger roll, tuned in G, and just kept practicing that same ol’ open roll, over and over, singing in my head, “AIN’T NUTHIN’ BUT A G THANG, AIN’T NUTHIN’ BUT A G THANG” and then freestyling some sad verse about being lonesome as fuck walking the railroad tracks by the river. I got in about 139 minutes before I got bored. That’s two hours closer to my ten thousand goal.

SONG OF THE DAY: Alegria Verde

Obviously, I am a purveyor of cumbia rebajada. But if I were to go back to classic original cumbia, I gotta say nobody does it quite like the jungles of Peru. There’s just a wild happiness to that realm of cumbia, and good fuckin’ lord we all need a whole lot more wild happiness in our lives.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia de Los Taxistas

Taking an imaginary taxi to an imaginary flea market, because there’s an amazing record shop in the back corner beside the old lady with the farm stand. All the 45s are still in a sleeve, and it’s not really organized at all, but the old dude that runs it fills up a cardboard box and writes the date as two digit month two digit year on both ends in big black sharpie, and discourages you moving things between boxes with a handwritten sign on an old pizza box that says “DON’T SWITCH ITEMS BETWEEN BOXES, I DON’T WANNA HAVE TO GO THRU ALL THIS SHIT AGAIN TO FIND SOMETHING” so I know I just start in the past and work my forward, and have to trust the process. He told me he finds a lot of these records in old abandoned houses or from folks who are passing on and want to get rid of their favorite stuff to make sure it goes to people who will appreciate it. He could itemize all these records and maximize the profits by selling online or in one of those hipster ass gentrified “vinyl” shops, but he told me he just wants people to enjoy the music, so he just makes sure they look good and clean and he stuffs them into boxes and let’s folks sort through it themselves and buy it cheap. “That’s probably not best for business though,” I told him one time when he explained all this to me. “Yeah, you get assholes that get mad you hadn’t gone through everything and picked out exactly what they want and charge them a higher price for it. They got more money than time, so don’t wanna put in the work of digging through a bunch of boxes for treasure, because they think everything is as simple as buying it.” And I couldn’t disagree, naturally, because it’s an imaginary flea market that don’t exist, and why this world is not my home. I can’t have my treasure here.

SONG OF THE DAY: Aww Shit!

I used to play a lot of Tha Alkaholiks and used to be an alcoholic. I actually got the 12-inch single that was the first beat Madlib made that got released on wax, when he was still part of Lootpack. Tha 'Liks used to be an absolute favorite, so though I don't drink no more, I never gave up them. And I still say, in old head way that references archaic media, Side A of King Tee's Tha Triflin' Album, where Tha Alkaholiks made their debut, is one of the all-time best hip hop tape sides ever.

SONG OF THE DAY: Glad Tidings

I bring you glad tidings of the beginning of the end of this false age of hyper-awareness and hyper-productivity and hyper-speed expectations of the human mind. The wind chimes of destiny should be all you hear once the outage has spread through enough machines to silence the white noise we've pretended was progress towards utopia all this time. Do not be afraid, though I know many of us will be, with real questions about the logistics of post-epoch distribution of survival ingredients. Have faith in the Universe, as well as all the wonderful humans already blessed with universal magnetism that have been silenced by all the buzzing we were trained to believe was comforting. The men who have led us led us astray, way further back down the line than most of us realize. It's okay though, because the Universe always recalibrates into balance. The Earth is only a small piece of the Universe, but it too can recalibrate if allowed to. Man is only a small piece of the Earth, and we too can recalibrate if we let ourselves. But we are also a small enough piece that if we don't let ourselves, we're expendable, in order for balance to be maintained. Let's hope our egos don't get in the way and we continue to claim a false dominion over all the we are able to sense.

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Hear Music

One of the main reasons I don’t get all caught up on “Oh, gotta listen to this new music right away!” is there’s always a false sense of immediacy attached to capitalism, that we all gives ourselves because we act like we’re supposed to be curators of culture when actually we’re mostly just getting tricked into consuming a bunch of shit. There is no must-watch TV or must-see movies or brand new albums we have to hear, and if any of that shit is actually as good as it’s being hyped, it’ll still be around when we get around to it.
I say all this because I had no idea this song existed six months ago. I never even heard of Debbie Deb that I can remember. And if I had heard of it back in 1983 when it came out, I was a little aspiring delinquent metalhead, so I probably would’ve been too cool to give a fuck. But this song did come across my experiential radar this year, and it immediately became a favorite. The 45 also went to the top of the list to acquire, because I could tell that beat slowed down was gonna bump like crazy. And it does. I can’t imagine not spinning this record already whenever I have a slowed down 45 gig. That doesn’t happen often because most people don’t want things they don’t recognize. They want nostalgia or basic, and usually a combination of those two. Shit, even when I was at the stupid local community radio station, when I was getting run off for daring to think I could play records in the daytime, the rock programming manager lady was like “We just prefer to keep weird stuff late at night.” To a basic ass fucker, a slowed down beat is weird, especially if they don’t already recognize the song.
We live in such basic times. We need more Debbie Debs.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take Me In Your Arms

I am not a music nerd so I didn’t know “Latin freestyle” was a genre of music that bridged the gap between disco and house music. But since I been collecting 45s the past few years to play them all slow because fuck regular speed anything, it’s too damn hot, one thing I realized is my all-time favorite beat when calculated at 45 at 33 rpms is “Let the Music Play” by Shannon. And apparently because of this whole ass compilation of “Latin freestyle” I downloaded from a bootlegging music blog (because I still play mp3s like an old ass man who isn’t that old because mp3s are fairly new in the grand scheme of things), there’s a whole genre of that style of music. So I’ve been playing the shit out of it, and now trying to find all this shit on 45 as well. I do not have Lil Suzy’s “Take Me In Your Arms” on 45 yet, and Suzy used to be my ex-wife’s name, but after we got divorced she took her herbalism more seriously and became Suzanna. I thought about texting her this song but didn’t because it’s better to maintain good boundaries now. A weird fact of 21st century life is it’s usually them folks who always be talking about boundaries that you need to be practicing having boundaries with. She’s not Suzy anymore anyways, so the song no longer applies.

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Been Having An Affair

If multiverse theory is true, somewhere in the endless expanse of universe, there's a whole planet full of humanoids who all look like Latimore. I wanna go there. That has nothing to do with this song, other than Latimore and Tonya both recorded for long time Mississippi record label Malaco Records. But a planet full of Latimores probably gonna have some hilarious cheating scenarios too though.

SONG OF THE DAY: Let Us Pray (kudzu'd)

Praying to the hidden Gods of Greater Appalachia for rain, both real and metaphysical. The ground is brown and dry and thirsty as fuck right now. But we need a metaphysical rain, too, in the unseen realms, which have become extremely dried out by the over-application of heart pesticides. I'm sure it's been going on longer than I can feel it like I have, but definitely the past decade or so, the heart pesticide usage has become so heavy that life itself feels toxic. Nobody should be existing like this, especially not a people that love to wave flags and proclaim their freedom, in the name of the false gods of money and ego and pride, and killing off their grandchildren to have big things that are unnaturally cool. Not sure how folks don't see how this contributes to how dry our existence is, but also I can't entirely fault folks who have been bombarded with brainwash for so long. Yakubian engineers tinkering with the neurology of 85% of us, still.