RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Monday, November 10

J.J. Krupert's October Gaypod Mix

I never got around to doing my write-up and dl mix for the October J.J. Krupert Gaypod mix, even though I took the ten most played songs off my tiny little shuffle gaypod and made a rar file for just such a thing. I have not been motivated to dabble in the belly of the beast that is the internet. Life has been a financial struggle, mostly self-created, but still a struggle, and when life gets real, you see the internet for what a fucking waste it is. But I digress, and talk shit against the medium you are all up on in the process, which is kind of my way, to shoot myself in the foot and mock and detest anyone who is interested in what I’m doing. But nonetheless, here is a mix for you to fuck with if you feel like it (meaning most likely nobody but Kami will dl it), and self-reflecting write-ups of the ten stupid songs follow as well, to try and explain why I like gay shit or show how cool I am for obscure shit.
#1: “Pills I Took” by Hank Williams III - Again this month, we start off with a track from the Straight to Hell double CD, which is a classic. Hank III’s new shit just came out, and it’s more like stuff that didn’t make Straight to Hell than an actual new album. It doesn’t seem like progression, I guess because his heart is into making halfway shitty rock music instead of incredibly retarded country music. “Pills I Took” is by some other band I don’t care to remember, because in the honorable tradition of country music, Tricephus took someone else’s song and owned the fuck out of it. Very timely as well, being so many people pop the pharmies nowadays. I was at a big party at my fam’s house, the Fall Fling, and this dude who was a good high school friend of mine’s older brother, Grambo, he disappeared after playing some horseshoes. The next morning when I was spinning some Wilson Pickett much to the delight of older redneck people wanting to shuffle their hungover feet fireside on a Sunday morning while sipping on the day’s third Bud Light, Grambo told me he passed out early because he took a couple painkillers. We shared funny anecdotes of the world slowing down suddenly and against your will when mixing pills and alcohol. I know you’re not supposed to, but it’s just such a perfect hard stomp on the brakes of your brain to do when you feel like getting completely fucked up. Honestly, I find it weird someone would just do pills without drinking. That seems really fucking weird to me.
#2: “Longhaired Lounger” by Prolo - This is off the last Prolo CD, which is one of my musical groups, but I had nothing to do with this. My man Brown writes shit all the time, and has a group with his bro and some other dudes called the Porch Loungers, but he said he wrote a few songs that were just too fucked for them. So basically, this is a country song, but screwed and chopped, and put at the end of a sort of rap album. I guess. But it’s also about the best fucking thing ever, and it has entered my canon of shit to be played at my funeral.
#3: “Wagon Wheel (live)” by The Porch Loungers - See, here’s Brown’s other group, kind of southern rock, kind of bluegrass. This was from the Newport Festival, and S.E.P. played a shitty short set there too like 2 in the morning after everybody had passed out the cops made us cut off the PA since the ultra-shitty Led Zep derivative local classic rock guitar hero fuckfaces before us played really shitty cover songs really fucking loud for far too long. I really love when Boogie and Nate Brown get to getting down, it’s some great shit. I heard they’ve revamped again, with the yankee drummer not being able to play quietly enough for a newgrass band, so they’re all acoustic now or something or other. As long as it’s still loungin’, and not all uptight and conflicted.
#4: “Box #10” by Jim Croce - I love me some fucking Jim Croce. I grew up with my parents playing a bit of his Greatest Hits type stuff, and have pretty much accumulated all his pre-death studio albums as an adult. His ability to tell stories and describe characters is pretty underrated, and were he someone who grew up in an earlier time, I would’ve loved to see what kind of stories he wrote had there been no Jew-run music industry to exploit him for profit. This was the first favorite song I found of him while in college that I had never heard from what my parents played when I was a kid, which meant I tried to blow both my parents brains with this awesome song on mixtapes (actual tapes too, usually Maxell 90 minute bitches) because I knew they didn’t know it. I often times, when writing stupid rap lyrics, try to emulate songs like this, because this is truer to my heart and soul than pretending on and on about how smart and clever I am and how many surgical metaphors I can espout about microphones or words.
#5: “Enough Rope” by Chris Knight - I am not a fan of new country or alt.country or anything that’s supposed to be a shining beacon light of real country in the light polluted neon overglow of modern country. Most all of it, whether mainstream or alternative, seems to be crap. But I heard this song on the satellite one Sunday morning, and it got me. A dude on the Secret Clubhouse message board hooked me up with a number of Chris Knight tracks, as he’s supposed to be this awesome unheralded Nashville songwriter guy who I think wrote a famous song or two, maybe even for stupid homoerotic Brooks & Dunn, but I can’t rightly remember to be honest. A lot of Chris Knight’s stuff didn’t do a whole lot for me, but this song is top fucking notch, small town go-nowhere but happy about it all being perfectly imperfect whiteboy goodness. If Sarah Pailin ends up running as the Republicrat candidate in 2012, this should be her campaign song, if they wanted to be real. But they won’t. They’ll have stupid Charlie Daniels and Lee Greenwood and more irrelevant to regular people bullshit like that, with maybe Toby Keith being a washed-up cartoon of his more marketable younger self by then to throw in some pablum too.
#6: “Born Poor” by The Jaggerz - I have accumulated a ton of 7-inch singles for the broken jukebox I own that I’ve been meaning to actually get fixed for a couple years now. Every time I call the old dude who fixes such things in town, he doesn’t have room to stuff it in his rented workspace, but he’ll call me next week. He never does. Although he always asks me where I live, I tell him, and he says he’s gonna be in that area next week, he can come by and look at it, and I explain I could just drop it off for him to fix at his leisure, and he says he’ll call me next week. This has happened three or four times now. Anyways, this is a 7-inch A-side I have that I know nothing about the group at all, but the song is one of my favorites. It’s goofy ‘60s era white people soul (from the sound of it), but I love this song. I often just go along singing that shit in my head, “I’M SO GLAD I WAS BORN POOR” downt chicka downt du-downt dow downt. Catchy as fuck, and makes being a miserable broke ass far more enjoyable.
#7: “Small Town” by Nappy Roots - Stolen off of their Humdinger CD, and this is about the best song on there. I really dig Nappy Roots for making shit like this, which they seem to do better than anybody else (“Aw Naw”, “Po’ Folks”, “Gonna Be a Good Day”, this song), but it’s like the David Banner “Cadillac on 22s” thing... I just wish they could concentrate on creating this weird sub-genre of happy-to-be-country southern feel good rap music, like Arrested Development but for people who aren’t fucking fruits and not nearly so fruity or pan-African. When I first stole this, we had rented a Pontiac Torrent to go to the Outer Banks and I had this on my gaypod and bumped the fuck out of it on the trip, as it was rap music that my kids could actually listen to. The lyrics aren’t groundbreaking, and I don’t understand why they wanna go to Cape Cod in the hook, but nonetheless, this shit make me feel all warm and sunshiney and want to play horseshoes with 3 point ringers with ponytailed rednecks who smell like Winston cigarettes.
#8: "C.R.E.A.M." by El Michel's Affair - Two sub-culture ripples collide with this song, as the goofy beta version Wu-Tang appreciation societies, most famously represented by that fucking Norwegian whiteboy group who does Wu songs, combines with the new school vinyl funk 7-inch movement. El Michel's Affair put out a 7-inch where they basically, as a funk band, recreate the instrumental to a couple famous Wu-Tang songs. I could see how it could get repetitive quick, but it sounds fucking amazing in minor amounts. This song was always a favorite of mine (way back in the day, Prolo sampled that "livin' on earth no different from a cell" line for an on-the-verge-of-suicide song I used to do all the time). Somehow, El Michel's Affair redoes it, and I love it. One thing on my mental checklist of American consumerism to eventually do now that everything will be different forever since Obama is gonna be President (for example, no more abortions because people won't want to have them, not because they were told no; also, homeless people will smile more) is to buy some of these obscure 7-inch funk pressings that are going on like crazy now and can be seen in Wax Poetics magazine advertisements. I also really need to get some Sharon Jones records on vinyl as well.
#9: "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. - Remember, this was from September gaypodding it, so I was swept up in that undercurrent of pop culture which made me like this song. I remember Mike DIKK trying to get me into M.I.A., partially because he thought it was great and likes to try to trick me into liking gay shit, but also he has a Hindu vagina fetish (just not the hairy ones) and wants to share his perversion with me I think. Hindu girls have weird noses though, for my tastes. The M.I.A. CD, much ballyhooed by musically intelligent dickwads as a must-have offering, I found to be annoying as fuck and not very enjoyable. Too urban American music is one thing, and too urban Euro music is far worse, because it's white people making it mostly and their cities are giant clusters of brick and mortar thousands of years old, but third world chaos sprawl too urban music is too much. I thought I was gonna have the malarias if I listened too much. But somehow, "Paper Planes" snuck into my brain. Somebody told me it was in some movie, but I don't see movies, but some Jew who owned the rights to her next CD must have paid to have this song positioned with the HAARP beams they aim at us all from the satellites, and it got stuck in my brain. My wife, who hated the M.I.A. thing too when I put it on her ipod, was distrustful of me saying this song was good. We must've listened to it like 300 times that week at the beach. In one moment of psychic clarity - I thought - she wanted to hear it and I told her with my gaypod (a shuffle, which means you have no control of the order), you just have to think about the song and it comes on. She was like, "whatever" but I told her I'd been practicing it. Sure enough, two songs later, it came on. We rolled the windows down (actually pressed the down button) on the rental car and smelled the saltwater in the air and it was good man. Thanks weird ass fake drug dealer tiny punjabi chick. (I also realize, after putting these thoughts together, that it wasn't my brain power so much as the HAARP energy that caused the song to come on. All these electronic things are in cahoots, against us. This is why Maximum Overdrive has never been released on DVD, because They don't want you to know The Truth.)
#10: "African People" by The Jay Boys - This is a snippet of the actual song, culled from Madlib's Blunted in the Bomb Shelter mix, which is a great entry into the world of dub music. Dub music is like the new thing that uber-music nerd people like who feel the need to be contrarian to things regular music nerd people say is great (Santogold, for example, or pretty much anything in Fader magazine honestly). The reason I love this song goes back to my personal affinity for the Paul Revere & The Raiders "Indian Reservation" song this is a re-working of. My dad used to play that song, and I actually have it on 7-inch. That's a great song, and really odd and out of place with everything else you hear from that time in pop music. The Jay Boys switching it to Africans just makes it all the more intriguing to me. I just pressure washed a house where a dude from Ivory Coast has a drum importing business, and I hope to do more work there so I can barter for some djembes for my kids, and also to try and talk the dude into hooking me up with a connect to import crates of west African records. Having a source for actual vinyl from that region would make me happy as fuck, because you can't find real good shit within the normal American music dork crate digging realms. I think that's why, no matter how much crap he actually puts out at times, I will always love Madlib, because he is ultimately a guy obsessed with digging for sounds and making beats. But he's not like normal crate diggers - he goes to foreign countries and does themed mixes and shit. Madlib, as much as he is jocked by the normal music nerd people and I am the contrarian type who feels I have to be smarter by being differenter than them, is an American treasure. I know Stones Throw cult members scour the internet looking for links to their shit to throw their robot lawyers at and get links removed, so I hope if you soulless SoCal white dudes working under the magical spell of Peanut Butter Wolf happenstance across this, you will let this mix link fly, being it's just one song, and I have given your overlord's #1 prophet/profit much love.

2 comments:

kami said...

you got me! i'm gonna slap this on the mp3 and go shopping at the second hand book shop/record shop where they've got some 50c lps from the 70s just waiting for an old man like me to get all nostalgic over...

kami said...

chris knight? he's a wrassler over here. going to see him do his thing tonight at EPW. seriously, that song is great, definitley going to have to find some more of his stuff.