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, October 26

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - October '09

This is the October J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown, for American and Worldwise blog readers. J.J. Krupert is the name my gay ass iPod shuffle has, and I am ashamed I lower cased the “i” and upper cased the “P”, pure branded cattle action on my part. But what I be doing, and you can click the tags below to see the history, is list the 13 most played songs inside my cybertronic tiny music machine that plugs through a cord into my truck stereo and makes the music blare out through raggedy speakers with constant tambourine sounds because I busted up my tweeters with some old school DJ Magic Mike. The rules are simple: I data-tize my gayPod, subtracting the skips from the plays, and list out with commentary the top 13 songs, only one track per featured artist, and once it gets talked upon under this thematic gimmick in this tiny corner of the blogosphere, I never speak upon that song again. But honestly, between you and me, whatever songs leftover on my gayPod that would’ve beat out the last song on this month’s list, I give an extra star in ratings, and if it makes the list it gets a star in ratings, so then my gayPod has retarded star ratings to go with everything else that no one else sees but since this is the internet, I like to pretend my opinions matter. Nonetheless, here be this month’s top firteeny...
#1: “Turn the Page” by The Streets - I have always wanted to like this white British rapper, but never found a song I liked. Some internet dude (what up Tree Beats!) hooked me up with a file download, and I dled it, but didn’t like none of it. Then at some point, I randomly decided, let me try again. So I did. And this was the one song that came up pretty fast, while my 10-year-old daughter was kicking it, and she loved it, and I loved it. I put it on her gayPod, and loaded up the whole The Streets CD on my gayPod, and we share a computerized docking center, so the fact she’s played this song about four times a day has ran it the fuck straight up the charts. I’ve enjoyed it, but eventually deleted all other songs from this dude, except maybe “Geezers Need Excitement” or some darts song or something. But this is easily his best track ever. In fact, it lead to a nice homeschool lesson with my 10-year-old daughter about the power of metaphors and what they insinuate with The Streets’ line about “my crew laughs at your rhubarb and custard rhymes”. She wondered what that meant, so I explained it all to her, and she’s writing a book right now about a nation of sheep ruled by a self-appointed President named B.A. Obama who talks big game but kinda splits and leaves everybody stuck in the mud, literally, so they cut the barbed wire and run up the creek to the top of the mountain, or something like that. My point is, I tried to turn that one line into some homeschool power and get the kid writing some seriously heavy rhymes at a young age. I am the rap Earl Woods.
#2: “Weight of the World” by 1000 Feathers - This has become my favorite lo-fi self-recorded screwed hobo rap done in the camper, with the hook co-opted from an old Charles Manson song, and the rhymes straight self-confidence lacking transient dirtface rhymes. “Longhaired ponytail running with the rat race, metabolism slowed down smiling through a fat face...” that’s my shit, literally.
#3: “Rollerskates (screwed)” by Steel Pulse - You know, nothing makes me sadder that DJ Screw overdosed young than this single solitary track off of a Screwtape. Tony Touch made many mixtapes, and pumped the hip hop reggae, helping to push and create a new form of music called reggaeton in NYC and all. Shit, I’ve been listening to Tego Calderon like a mug lately. But listening to this one track off of some random Screw tape that I couldn’t even tell you what it was, it makes me sad Screw wasn’t around long enough to do a whole reggae screwed and chopped tape. This shit is the best shit ever. Ever. I don’t necessarily like reggae, and enjoy dub, but there’s something about the slurry effect of screwed and chopped reggae that’s so different than straight dub, and it makes me want to tap into the half-left bottle of hydrocodone in the spice cabinet, sitting behind the Advil and unopened bottle of dollar store garlic powder.
#4: “Batty Boyz” by MF Doom - Honestly, I’ve played the fuck out of some MF Doom, but this has gotten mad play because it is my oldest daughter’s favorite Doom song. I play it, pretending she doesn’t understand all the gay references, but she’s old enough I know she probably does. She knows Santa ain’t real and the only reason the Tooth Fairy forgot her little sister’s tooth one night is because me and the wife fumbled our memory one Saturday night. She knows what’s up, but she’s at that tweener age where I, as a parent, pretend she doesn’t know what’s up, and she pretends the same, for my benefit, and eventually, hopefully, in a couple years, we’ll meet on middle ground and be honest as fuck with each other.
#5: “Roll Gypsy Roll” by Lynyrd Skynyrd - Speaking of my oldest kid, this is the song she got her goes-by name from. As she gets older, she hates what she calls “hoedown” music. And yet, that’s where her name comes from. Me and my wife used to ride road out of Richmond, splitting an 18-pack of Budweiser, letting the Skynyrd jams blast out of her Jeep Cherokee, either heading out route 5 east into Varina or south down 60 into Powhatan/Cumberland. Good times, and I’m proud to have a kid named after a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, especially since we didn’t name her “Freebird” or “Breeze” which technically would’ve been a J.J. Cale song, although J.J. Cale is about as stimulating as watching grasshoppers fuck. J.J. Cale was screwed and chopped before screwed and chopped existed, which is why probably the only time I’m like, “Whoa! J.J. Cale is awesome!” is when my head is grown tall with grasses fertilized by painkiller pills.
#6: “The Sad Chicken” by Leroy & the Drivers - Off of a whole passel of Sound of Funk comps I co-opted from inside the internet’s intestines, with the help of my boy Sicknote from Encyclonettia Britannica, and this has easily been my favorite track. I think it’s off Volume 3 of that Sound of Funk series (which most likely is obscure as fuck), and probably having chickens, my Australorps, that look sad because the main flock accepts them not and they are forced to be the subjugated domain of the buff orpington rooster called Dixie, and I know they’re just chickens and expected to peck my backyard into garden beds and lay eggs for my breakfast, but I feel bad. The one Australorp (I can no longer tell the difference between my two Australorps, named Swagger Britches and Fancy Pants) just seems so distraught at times, even flying out the coop today because I had the bird netting pulled back to catch the loose guinea hen yesterday. I had the door opened to go back in, and chased her to that opening, but she stood there, right by my leg, pretending she wanted away but waiting for me to grab her, which I’ve never done, even in the pen, so I did, and she BUH-GAWKED a loud buh-gawk, but held close in my hands, and cuddled as I stroked her back and neck. A sad chicken indeed.
#7: “Mundian to Bach Ke” by Labh Janjua & Panjabi MC - I had wanted this song for years, but honestly never knew who actually did it, and then got a downloading Rough Guides to... kick where the world music alternative to Putamayo was on my internet music stealing brain, because rather than the normal easy-going, white people be happy doing the double slide step hippie shuffle dance party type world music you usually hear, it was actual compilations with the whole spectrum of something or another. I knew this because the Rough Guide to African Rap featured Reggie Rockstone prominently. But nonetheless, I jacked the Rough Guide to Bhangra from inside the internet’s back pocket when it wasn’t looking, and as I played it for the first time on my wife’s super Ipod, it had that song I had been a-wanting from a while back, meaning this song, with the Knight Rider bassline and a Hindu dude kicking his rapidly syllabic Hindu stylings. The whole thing I played over and over and it made me swing cast iron frying pans over my head like The Iron Sheik before breakfast and teach my kids that running circles around the playhouse in the backyard before the sun comes up is a good way to work the negative ionic charges out of your knee and elbow joints first thing in the morning. I have no idea what they are rapping about but I roughly translate it as “Raven is so awesome his chickens lay five eggs a day, work is nothing when it rains but with the sun outside and play, three daughters world order pretends it’s new but it’s same, living chilling because mack millian is the earth given last name” and so on.
#8: “Lately I’ve Been Thinking Too Much Lately” by David Allan Coe - Just a good ass DAC song that should be tattooed on people’s upper backs in Chinese calligraphy except it wasn’t included on the Ten Years For the Record greatest hits compilation, which is a shame.
#9: (the “the ol’ lady” beat) by Blue Globe Beats - Another Josh Boogie Brown Blue Globe hook-up that I’ve been pumping on my J.J. Krupert, and it’s a bouncy ass wide open song that makes big assed women press their rear ends against the windshield while you are sitting inside trying to be discreet about smoking a bowl through an old can of beer with holes poked into it.
#10: “Dixie Chicken” by Little Feat - Our chicken Dixie is most definitely a rooster and has just started this week to try and kick a crow, and it gets all Peter Brady style halfway through, and when he does it, our other rooster Arishkagol kicks a big fat gangsta ass crow while standing on top of their 3-gallon waterer, and sometimes my oldest kid can crow and get the two of them flapping wings at each other. It’s fun stuff. Personally, there’s about seven Little Feat songs I love more than this one, especially “Willin’”, but I have a chicken now named after this song, sort of, so I guess it gets extra play. Dixie is a bitch of a rooster though, and I’ve only held him once, which upsets me because there’s nothing I like more than strolling around the yard holding one of my cocks in my hand. That’s not just a pun, because I really do like strolling around the yard holding my male chickens, with their gangstaly curved tail feathers. Did you know that west coast gangbangers, when they used to break their fingers to make extra-curved gang signs, actually learned that habit from watching the extra-curved tail feathers of fighting roosters in underground chickenfights? Raymond Washington, who was one of the original Crips in the late ‘70s, was a huge fan of cockfights. In fact, the ghetto habit of having pigeons is a watered down remnant of having gamecocks, once cockfighting became mostly illegal in America. For real.
#11: “You Don’t Know the Life” by The Moving Sidewalks - In my internet searching for rare but real bullshit, I came across an album by The Moving Sidewalks, which was Billy Gibbons band before ZZ Top, and it was a good album albeit a very Jimi Hendrix-inspired album, and many of the song were eventually taken off my gayPod one by one, but this track survived to this day, and eventually made my dorkrod blogospheric music nerd monthly list. I can tell you that there are few musical people on this planet that I think of as highly as Billy Gibbons, and it pains me to my soul that most folks only think of ZZ Top in a “Legs” and “Sharp Dressed Man” 1980s synthesized funny video sense, because the ‘70s ZZ Top shit is some of the greatest rock-n-roll to ever be known by drunk people trying to have sex without protection.
#12: “Just to Get a Rep (instrumental)” by DJ Premier - From off of some sort of instrumental collection I collected, but getting more play than other famous Premo tracks like “Above the Clouds” or whatever else. I used to make these mixtapes with one side of one thing and the second side of another thing, and it was my favorite songs from my record collection, like one was the Rolling Cooper Mainline, with Rolling Stones cokehead classics and the other side was everything that could’ve been on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits if it was a double CD instead of one; and then there was an AC ZZ Mainline with AC/DC trash and ZZ Top trash. But my favorite of all these themed two-sided mixtapes on actual cassette that I played when I owned my grandfather’s Toyota Tercel that I looked like a big old 230 pound clown driving was the Black Premier Mainline, which was one 45 minute side of Black Sabbath jambos and one 45 minute side of DJ Premier produced instrumentals. I didn’t own the “Just to Get a Rep” single then, nor do I now, but I remember going to Boogie Brown’s when he lived alongside the national forest in a silver jellybean camper years ago, and he wasn’t there, so I pumped the fuck out of my Premo side of my Black Premier Mainline mixtape bonafide and drank upon the beer in my car and it was a great thing to piss on the side of a mountain while the remix instrumental to “Ex Girl to the Next Girl” blared from a shitty maroon Tercel, and when Boogie Brown showed up, he declared, “LOUNGIN’!” because that’s exactly what it was.
#13: “Personality Crisis” by New York Dolls - This is a song that is great. The first New York Dolls LP is an LP that is great. It is something that if I had a son, I would hope he could one day understand the beauty of. Being I only have daughters, I hope they never know guys who like this type of music, unless they turn the guy onto this music. As a man who understands all too well the male brain, I would prefer my daughters be ahead of the curve when it comes to menipulation. I don’t want them to be biyotches, but I want them to understand dudes are always in one way or another in conquer mode. If they can use my New York Dolls LP played on cheap turntable to confuse dudes with their unexpected awesomeness to delay sexual interactions once they are grown or at least almost grown, then I will be a happy man.

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