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.

Friday, April 30

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #4: "Untouchable Face" by Ani Difranco


Honestly, everything I wrote about wanting to own that Ani Difranco LP last week pretty much could fill up this spot, all the crap about my wife and how shit was and is. I am lucky to have an ol' lady like her, but she's lucky to have an ol' man like me. Really, we are both truly fucked in the head, and could only end up together. Had we never met before getting married, we probably would've ended up cheating on people with each other, and creating a lot of problems and trouble and cookouts where the people having it didn't know who they could invite or not invite, for fear of hurting someone's feelings. I could delve further into exploring this angle, but I'd prefer to just mail in these write-ups and go curl up in the bed next to her.
STEAL "Untouchable Face"
NEXT UP
: A song that I liked before it came to America, meaning I am so ahead of the curve, because I am sooooo awesome!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #5: "Tribal Connection" by Gogol Bordello


Oh damn, today is the end of the month. This means two things... one, my food stamp card gets replenished tomorrow morning, and secondly, I need to finish this goddamned list today. Of course it was a bad move to split it up into individual posts beause I never get around to doing anything unless it's a giant one-shot overblown 7000 words on nothing type thang, yet here I am, sticking to my guns, which don't actually have bullets and aren't really guns, just stupid self-created parameters for an internet thing.
So we are here, at this song, by a group that has blown up amongst the hipsterati elite, then faded into no longer the it thing, and now resurfaced into the retarded angle world music super hippie crowd where I'm absolutely sure Gogol Bordello will be playing a Gulf Coast Oil Spill Benefit in the next three weeks, probably with Galactic, David Banner featuring the most prominent current Lil rapper not in jail, and The White Teeths. And I know fully that this is the internet, and I'm only supposed to really like things that nobody has heard of or just got recorded last night and uploaded to a blog this morning and now I have a mediafire link with WWW.ROJONEKKU.COM as the listed album. But shit man, for as corny as Gogol Bordello could be if you listened to some hipster contrarian complain at a bar over $2 PBRs about how shitty Gogol Bordello is, they still do alright by me at times. And I fully understand this was a band playing a hole in the wall tea house a few years ago. And an olden days good friend told me they're nothing like they used to be back in the day, which is understandable because hunger makes motherfuckers be awesome. When you are hungry, you can either become criminal or become creative, and usually you are physically wired to be too afraid of one or the other to go but the chosen way. And usually if you go criminal... I don't know; I never went that way. But if you go creative, best case scenario, you get paid, and then easily enough the hunger gets lost. Once the hunger is gone, the creativity goes, so you're just trying to cook up that old simple shit but with more expensive and lavish ingredients. But a fried egg sandwich made with French goose eggs cooked in double organic freshly whipped melted butter on two slices of sourdough, it just ain't the same as a goddamned fried egg sandwich for real. And good lord, organic mayonnaise... like that even needs to exist. I like to dip my organic Vienna sausages into organic mayonnaise while sipping on my gluten-free malt liquor myself.
So yeah, you break down East Europe into fucked up white dudes with crazy facial hair and very specific mixtures of bloodlines that they know far better than us mutt Americans do, and you let them make the musics, and if it comes out like a song like this, I don't care how many stupid fuckfaces like it (perhaps I am one such fuckface), the retarded greatness of the quieter later part is good to me. I'm sure at some point they'll blow up like mad and headline Bonnaroo and all the members will run off and form bands with Les Claypool or DJ Shadow or Robert Randolph or some shit. But whatever. All I can do is what I do, which is let songs play on an electronic contraption. And if a song brings enjoyment to my life, all I can do is hit repeat. My pops couldn't do that. He had an 8-track, so you had to skip ahead three programs and then let it play for ten minutes to hear that same song again. By then, it wasn't again.
STEAL "Tribal Connection"
NEXT UP
: I'm part lesbian!

Wednesday, April 28

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #6: "Be Forewarned" by Pentagram


Look, I can't speak enough upon this song, or this group. Basically, if Jesco White of The Dancin' Outlaw and the kids from the Heavy Metal Parking Lot documentary had children together (oddly enough, first time I saw both of those was on a mixtape 8 hour VHS from my man Tony Erba in Ohio, which also included Wham! Bam! Thank You Spaceman!, which I'd love to get on copy again) and they grew up to make the musics. Pentagram is a retarded ass metal band from northern Virginia's 1970s that I never heard of at all until I went to North Carolina and crashed out at my boy Boomer's house after watching authentic lucha libre wrestling where the Mexicans all did the Battlestar Galactica evil robot thing with their arms during their national anthem, even though not in their actual nation. Boomer was pimping some good records, and he played the first Pentagram, describing it as "the American Black Sabbath, just nobody knew about them" and that makes sense enough, though doesn't really explain it either.
And at that time, even knowing dork white people who collect records with strange stories galore, nobody knew about Pentagram. Yet somehow about two months ago they surface within my own personal commonly travelled internet pathways, in multiple places, and I found this odd. It either has to do with some super secret dork internet hipster place that hyped them up that I don't know about, or they have a re-release coming out that sent press releases to popular dork music blogs. Either way, dorkery was going on, so I feel slightly stupid for adding to this egghead meme effect with a write-up on one song by these dudes, but here I am. I have no shame, plus not much else to do to release the stress. I don't get to reform my old ancient metal band and pass out from painkillers and vodka shots on the stage. I sit around at my kitchen table and try to peck at a keyboard to move away the kidney stones of daily life that clog my goddamned heart.
If I were to choose one song on this Earth to be my constantly played theme song as I drove awkwardly in a co-opted vehicle along gravel roads to go fight some dude who had more tattoos and muscles but less crazy than me because he put his alpha male member into my female compatriot, this would probably be the song right now. I would play it loud and slide across the gravel curves and get to his place of sleeping, anxiously, but then sit there on the front porch, quietly drinking his beer, until he finally came out, and then we'd talk about how we were gonna fight, and he might beat me and I might beat him, but either way I was gonna stab him with something, because it's hard not to stab something after listening to this song a whole bunch of times in a row.
STEAL "Be Forewarned"
NEXT UP
: Hipster dooferism, but I ain't ashamed!

(7s) Fred Durst List #7 - Dana White


Dana White is a complete fucking fool, and it makes perfect sense that MMA is sheltered inside the madness of Las Vegas, where such a personality can be comped and propped up by sycophantic tip seekers and visiting hicks in awe of seeing someone from the TVs. A very obvious attention whore who has made himself a bigger star than the guys who actually shorten their lifespans for this new-fangled MMA sport, which - and I say this completely as a compliment - is brutal as fuck and hardly a testament to athletic superiority so much as aggressive dominance. Dana is one of those fortysomething white dudes who came up on hip hop and is really serious about his hard-to-take serious emtity, who uses rap lingo and wears t-shirts that look fucking stupid. (Actually, MMA is a terrible trendsetter for hideous t-shirts, sort of morphing together the over-sponsorship of Nascar with graphic designers who are apparently all ICP fans to one degree or another.)
The thing that bothers me about Dana White most of all, other than him looking like a giant walking penis, is how he acts like this indignant protector of the true honor of mixed martial artistry. The fact of the matter is UFC is the only main game in town anymore in that field, and they set the pay scale for dudes. And when you see the amount of purse money given to dudes, you are like, "Whoa, these dudes are paid like a motherfucker, they have no right to complain." But they also have to pay for all that other shit - the training, the retarded supplements, the bad tattoos - that go along with getting to that spot. And the dudes winning the opening matches, they really ain't making shit to speak of when you figure they only get a few fights a year, and are allowing themselves to have their bones tweaked and brains pummelled. But then when an Anderson Silva acts a fool, or Brock Lesnar says some stupid shit after a fight, Dana White acts all insulted, like guys who are basically beating on each other and twisting at each other's joints until somebody quits or is broken or blacks out are supposed to be gentlemenly nobility, and wear fucking monocles and have cups of tea and speak in polysyllabic words as much as possible. What the fuck man? Fucking shut up.
I actually just got the first disc of season five of The Ultimate Fighter, having took a long ass break since I watched season four, because I started to get convinced that Dana White's whole "you have to realize the opportunity you're being given here" combined with ring girls with weird shaped butts in those really strange UFC go-go shorts that no one could fuck, and the general no female contact attitude combined with grappling on mats with partially exposed men, it just seemed like a really elaborate way to turn alpha males into gay men to me, and accelerate the demise of the human race. Or it could be Dana White's way to narrow down the field of recipients for MMA groupie action so that he gets his pick of the whore every event (which happens like every five days it seems nowadays). Although, it would not surprise me at all, probably in another ten years when he's older and his creepiness is less guarded, that Dana White would be caught up in a gay sex for UFC positioning scandal. He has those sketchy, shady eyes of a closeted pervert. (This is not to say gay people are naturally perverts, but to use your power for gay favors or non-gay favors is a perversion, and when you are a weird shaved-head to hide the balding pattern dude with a weasel face who is fucking big, HGH-ed up mongoloids who love Jesus and popping elbows out of their socket, then yeah, that's fucking perverted.)
It is hard to actually feel like once I'm famous I could smash people with bottles, because I don't actually keep that much hate inside of my twisted little heart. So with my "one chunk at a time" blog writing style, it took me a couple months to actually put together this seven-list, so a lot of it's probably no longer relevant, either to pop culture, or even my own personal animosity. But I can say, looking back across these seven dudes, I'd most likely at some point in any given month want to smash them with an empty forty bottle. Dana White though, man, he'd annoy me far more often than that though, as he's always popping up in his pseudo-hip fashion on the internet or talk shows or whatever, and reminding me of what a little Napoleon complexed out bitch he is.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #7: "Wake Up" by 40 Akerz


40 Akerz is the individual name used by Skinny Deville and Fishscales from Nappy Roots, which they released this song last year in anticipation of a whole album or mixtape or something that never made the light of day, and now Nappy Roots is in full-on wasted effort to hype up their new Pursuit of Nappyness album coming out in June. For some reason (probably a gift), I have a subscription to Spin magazine, which is basically just a really shitty list every month. Seriously, the internet put magazines out of business because your average music-related message board with more than 9 posters has more content in a week than a Spin magazine has in two months. It's sad. But I put them in my bathroom to look upon while I hide from the world for five minutes at a time. And the last issue had a stupid list of one-hit wonders, which included Gnarls Barkley and Nappy Roots, whose one accepted hit was "Po' Folks" even though I might be wrong but "Aw Naw" was actually more of an actual hit off that debut album than "Po' Folks" was. Nonetheless, ever since I realized, speaking of one-hit wonders, that David Banner's "Cadillac on 22s" was an anomaly rather than his norm (sad as fuck, because that might be the greatest fucking funeral-ready rap song ever made, but one of those underclass funerals held in alternative type of locations where everyone goes to someone's house and cooks out and gets fucked up afterwards, in memory of the deceased), Nappy Roots took over the mellow (real life mellow, laid back and wasted, not bullshit hippie shit like Arrested Development) hip hop southern group with the potential to make the most greatest album ever in the history of ever. Of course they haven't done that, because nobody lives up to their potential in the age of the internet; but they've certainly slowly amassed a rock solid greatest hits collection of rural country black dude hip hop classics, with the aforementioned "Po' Folks" and "Aw Naw", as well as "Good Day" and "Small Town" and the hype single "Ride" for their shit from next month.
And yet, this "Wake Up" fits in perfectly with that motif, and might actually be better than anything else in the Nappy Roots discography. The re-working of the famous Ice Cube line, "wake up in the morning, feeling good, gotta thank god", the chill as fuck acoustified beat, the thick Georgia vibe... it's a solid song. I ain't consulted wikipedia or anything, but for Nappy Roots to be a couple Kentucky dudes, a couple Georgia dudes (Skinny and Scales are from Milledgeville, Georgia, previously unknown until Ben Roethlisberger rocked out with his cock out), and a guy from Tennessee, they must've met at college, and then all dropped out because they were busy selling weed and writing rhymes. Usually I don't torment my family with music first thing in the morning as I put on my lame ass white dude clothes to go administrate the bureacratic paperwork involved in figuring out how cancer and traumatic brain injuries kill people through killing albino rodents, but lately I have been pumping this song on blast as I get ready to leave the house. Oddly enough, that old Killa Army song "Wake Up" was the same way for me for a while back in the day, until my old boss's cassette player in his 4Runner ate the tape. And way back in the day, in high school, I used to rock "I'm A Rebel" by Accept like this as well. First thing in the morning adrenaline rush songs are a good thing to teach my children as an important part of this balanced breakfast. Way better for them than coffee, and far cheaper than Kashi.
STEAL "Wake Up"
NEXT UP
: Perhaps advocacy of lucifer from a child of god!

Tuesday, April 27

(7s) Fred Durst List #6 - George Clooney


George Clooney is traditionally considered a conventionally hot ass Hollywood dude, so immediate reaction to me hating upon him would be to think, “Oooh, Raven a hater, because George look so good.” But really that’s not the case. My problem with this dude stems from the fact he is a pioneer in superficial plastic surgeries for men, to pretend to be hot, and to look younger and smaller faced now than he did fifteen years ago. Without this dude, we wouldn’t have calf implants or eyebrow tucks or whatever the fuck they’ve done to this guy to tighten his face skin up like a drumhead every fourteen months. And then for him to kick it with the sly smile and the “I’m so good looking, but care about things,” schtick, it doesn’t really bother me like other dudes on this list so much as make me feel bad for the dude. He must have the real deal self-esteem of a porn slut.
But he is propped up as a star now, one who cares about Darfur and AIDS, and makes movies every once in a while that are box office successes but usually the same movie he made like two years ago just with some new bitch starring with him. So I’ll be honest, I don’t hate George Clooney and want to smash him with a forty bottle so much as hate the whole fucking thing we have. But I’m not the following type, so I can’t just sign up for Al Qaeda (though I do have the beard) and learn the trickeries and smash planes into giant buildings. Those old crazy Islam wives who were trying to kill the cartoonist in Europe, they couldn’t even do that. So what’s the point of hating this whole system and trying to destroy it with terrorist acts, when two completely blending in ass white women from America couldn’t even kill a stupid political cartoonist not in America? Plus, if I force my beliefs on others, that makes me just like what I hate. So I ain’t gonna do it. I’m gonna believe my beliefs and leave it to myself. But if I get rich and can get away with bullshit like a Roethlisberger, I’d smash Clooney in the nipped and tucked and stitched and sucked eyeballs with a forty bottle, just to keep it real to my true self, and also because what would they do if I was rich by that point? It’d be an Us Weekly story and I’d go to some sort of rehab facility where I watched baseball games on the TV while taking prescribed sedatives, and masturbate myself to sleep every night for about two weeks. I only hope that at that point, my moral compass is still relatively pointed true north soul, and I’m still gonna use an empty forty bottle and not be justifying the use of a $400 bottle of cabernet sauvignon or some bullshit like that.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #8: "Gulag Orkestar" by Beirut


I don't believe in the fake magic of Pandora, so I go about new shit the old-fashioned way... I accidentally find out about it by hanging around some other dude. I was at my man D's t-shirt shop one evening, for whatever reason, and he was playing on some Gogol Bordello, and we got to talking about real gypsy music, or wacky world music done with indy rock flair, and he hipped me to Firewater, which led me to fuck around and look up other crap, and somehow I ended up discovering this Beirut shit, which is basically one kid from New Mexico who made himself a group after travelling to Europe and what not. On one hand, I want to playa hate on some kid who gets to wander the world and indulge his musical fetishes, let it steep around inside his brain, and then reconstitute it as some musics for the hipster world. But on the other hand, I enjoyed the shit on this album, and I hardly ever enjoy white people music made after 1991.
I do not know the idealogy behind what a gulag orkestar is or isn't is, but I assume in a more perfect world it involves dudes who have pointy and thick facial hairs who like to buy sausages from corner stores that have whole pig heads in the front window. I guess the "gulag" part conjures up dead jewish people, so it's probably some sort of statement against something terrible that went completely over my head, because I don't actually pay attention to lyrical content in anything shorter than a 24-line rap verse, so it just seems like good-feeling out there old world influenced modern musics to me. I've also had a fascination with east Europe lately, I think missing my dead ass grandpa, who was the son of Polish immigrants and would talk about the demon spirits the old ass seafaring Polacks used to talk of, or maybe I'm just a stupid fucking dumbass. Hard to say; probably a healthy splash of both. But it's a song I apparently enjoyed, and it was played with regularity on my gaypod and now was on this list and I had to write about it. And I think I've done just enough.
STEAL "Gulag Orkestar"
NEXT UP
: Mellow ass country rap goodness so chill you don't notice the humidity!

Monday, April 26

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #9: "Feeling Free" by The Charlie Daniels Band


One summer when I had a job painting the dorms at VCU in Richmond's sweltering thickness, I was walking home and passed a familiar porch with dudes I often times kicked it with, and some dude I had met like once was like, "Raven, I'm going to Maine on Friday to pick blueberries... you wanna go?" Of course, I went. Why wouldn't you drive a thousand miles (maybe not that far, fuck math and maps together, that's complicated) with a dude you hardly know in his shitty Mazda Escort (or whatever the fuck) to work a shitty migrant labor job for hardly enough money to cover the gas home? We ended up living in tents for a month, with a bunch of yankee ass people, and Micmac Indians. There were also plenty of Mexicans, of course, it being a migrant job, but all the Mexicans lived in the cabins and vans and I never went there and it was kind of assumed that was their area so you didn't go there, but in retrospect I bet they played norteno music and danced on the dirt out front and played wacky Mexican games that were like dominoes but had three sides and they would've told me about Chalino Sanchez and we'd play his music and laugh and fuck and stab each other lovingly in the throes of frustrating poverty.
While living in my shity blue tent that did little to keep me warm during the suprisingly cold ass late August coastal Maine night times, all I had for music was a shitty cassette walkman - seriously - which I later destroyed by trying to make a tattoo gun out of it. The one tape I played the most was a 90 minute Maxell where the one side was all Charlie Daniels Band tracks I put on together, and the other side was all Lynyrd Skynyrd. I think being stuck in an extended road trip with a semi-delusional hippie-ish new age stoner dude caused me to swing back the other way and get in touch with my roots, which is shit like that. "Feeling Free" is a straight road dog song anyways, about riding a bike (motorcycle kind, not gay assed Lance Armstrong kind), and was the first song on the Charlie Daniels Band side of that mixtape, which means I listened to it thirty million times that month and a half. It comes from the completely great Fire on the Mountain LP that also has "Long Haired Country Boy". Look, I'm not gonna be some music blog asshole and pretend "Feeling Free" is a superior song, because "Long Haired Country Boy" is a southern redneck hippie anthem and has been played on warbled hungover Sunday mornings and sad Thursday night funerals for decades, not to mention all those Friday and Saturday nights that go til sun-up. But that record is more than just the one good song (also has that "South's Gonna Do It" song as well), and "Feeling Free" is most definitely the unknown classic off that album. Man, The Charlie Daniels Band, through a streak of like five or six albums in the mid-to-late '70s, had a great discography of good rural stoner awesomeness. Yet all he's known for is the stupid fiddle and that "Devil Went Down to Georgia" song. Pop goes the weasel, even in the country.
STEAL "Feeling Free"
NEXT UP
: World savvy indie bullshit!

(7s) Fred Durst List #5 - Jim Rome

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Sunday, April 25

(7s) Fred Durst List #4 - Jay Leno


This is no thirtysomething Gen X hipster dumbass with weird prescription glasses knee-jerk loyalty reaction to the completely stupid Conan vs. Leno thing, because I don't care. Honestly, Conan should be thankful for the thing because him on The Tonight Show sucked. It lacked the same looseness and oddballery of the previous 12:30 one.
The fact of the matter is Jay Leno is a mean-spirited asshole, who has become ridiculously wealthy by being a mean-spirited asshole. And look at the dude. He's not that good looking. He doesn't really come across that smart, though he condescends well enough to people stupider than him to make himself seem smart. He's just a fucking asshole with a giant collection of stupid cars and that's supposed to make him all working class. "Oh, I'm gonna do my goddamned stupid fucking show for a bunch of unemployed retards and halfwits in some shithole godforsaken rust belt state that's rusting into parts already. And fat yet malnourished, self righteous yet close-minded cocksuckers eat it up. Jay Leno is comedy for the Wal-Mart Supercenter crowd. I hate that shit, and I hate him, and I'd love to smash him and them and the whole thing with empty beer bottles.
There was this dude who wrote the Poor Man's James Bond books whose name escapes me right now, but he used to have a website, and I used to read at it after the 9/11s, and he basically said the best way to fuck everybody up and make them all scared is to just coordinate like three Wal-Mart attacks all at once, because people would freak out, and it attacks at exactly what America really is. And while I keep myself in the line of thinking that I won't force my way on the rest of the world because that makes me the same type of judgemental know-it-all-better-than-you asshole like I condemn, I can see the sense in that Poor Man's James Bond's thinking. Not the sense in like, "yeah, do that shit," but the sense in yeah people would freak the fuck out.
If I get rich though, I'll get myself out of that line of thinking long enough to bust an empty La Fin Du Monde into Jay Leno's fat prick chinbone.

Saturday, April 24

(7s) Fred Durst List #3 - Kanye West


I probably should let Kanye slide for being a dumbass because how much can you expect from a guy whose mom died from complications related to completely unnecessary plastic surgery disasters? I'm sure the home life was a warped and misguided affair from jump, that helped create a kid with undeniable talents barely above mediocre that had a misunderstood genius complex from an early age, looking in the mirror at what he told hisself was the greatest ever, even though everybody was like, "hahaha." The misunderstood genius complex is one of the most dangerous psychological conditions when it comes to pop culture because the diseased thinks themself on another plane about everything, and this is cultivated and grows to the point that eventually, even if people like them, the dude can't be happy because the fans don't truly understand what's being done to truly like it for the right reasons. This is Kanye to the tee, thinking he's on some next level shit when really all it is is basic pop-oriented hip hop with a healthy V8 splash of eurotrashery hipsterism.
Allow me right quickly to get my old fool from old school red and black lumberjack with the hat to match tirade out the way about ghostwriting. I am of the belief you ain't shit if people ghostwrite your lyrics. Now I know this is a tired line of thought that is no longer accepted, as hip hop music has finally been completely turned into nothing more than a commercial industry by the old world overlords - a better term than "zionists" which conjures up anti-semitism accusations, and to be fair it's an old country club of jews and germans and brits and even blackfaces at this point, that turn music from something you do into something you hope people will buy. Kanye has benefitted almost entirely from ghostwriters throughout his career, as well as stupid sped up vocal samples that he probably bit off juke house DJs in his native Chicago anyways, so it's hard to have old school respect, and not because what he does is of questionable sexuality, but because it lacks the alpha male masculinity of doing it yourself. I don't mind gay music at all, so long as the person doing it is actually doing it.
(How many times have you seen somebody write "Kayne" instead of "Kanye"? If they had to make a dyslexia test, they should just tell people to write down the name of this guy with a picture of Kanye. When we used to do the Expert Whiteboy Analysis at dumpin.net, fucking Richard Dawson would never spell Kanye write, to the point I just stopped correcting because what the fuck, I wasn't getting paid to edit that 20,000 words a month bullshit.)
Also, I probably have never gotten over the truth that Kanye blew up off that "Through The Wire" song, which was a good enough sounding song, I won't deny, but was basically a dude being really overly melodramatic about breaking his jaw in a car wreck. Man, there's fake flower memorials along every other guard rail on the 15 miles back road ride from here to town. Fuck you and your broken ass jaw you self-important bitch. If you're some futuristic next level space age bullshit then the future sucks and aliens are assholes and I'm gonna apply "south will rise again" mentalities to the rest of the entire motherfuckin' universe.

Friday, April 23

(7s) Fred Durst List #2 - Kevin Smith


There has been more than one person during my life try to convince me how great Kevin Smith and his films are, and never once has that person had my respect for them overpower my intimate personal knowledge that Kevin Smith is a fucking fool ass. In fact, I tend to associate the friend with fool assery before I start to think Kevin Smith might actually be something more than some dumbass kid who made a good cheap indy film about working in a shitty convenience store. I'm all for that, and sure, Clerks was funny at the time (although I rewatched it a couple of years ago and it's not exactly a timeless comedy classic either), but really, Kevin Smith parlayed that into far more than he probably should have, considering, in essence, he's a comic book dork who argues with other dorks inside the interwebs.
Now I readily admit part of my disdain for Kevin Smith is probably undeserved and based on cultural barriers, me being a half-retarded barely educated beyond my ignorance rural whiteboy from the non-deep South, and him being a half-retarded barely educated beyond his ignorance suburban Jersey fuckface. I say beach, he says shore; I say cookout, he says barbecue; but we ain't calling the whole thing off, because seriously, I would like to smash this dude with an empty 40 bottle.
I understand he has some pseudo-stand-up routine/crowd interaction thing he does that has developed into a highly entertaining night of high brow fart jokes over the years, and that's great, because ComicCons should have contributed something greater to society than empowering fat pasty dorks into going public with themselves. But from the interviews I've read with this dude, the things I've seen him say, shit man even watching part Dogma, it is obvious this is a guy who, no matter how goofy he plays himself off as, when combined with the fact he still, as a famous person, argues inside the interwebs regularly, is someone who takes himself seriously. Now I don't have a film degree from UCLA or nothing, but I've watched enough movies to have a decent idea of good cinematography; and I do have a faggot English degree, so I know well written material, and his flicks don't really offer up either of these aspects in heavy doses. But here he is, Mr. Bigshot Film Dude, who will probably read this, look around my blog, and decide to make a remake of Every Which Way But Loose starring Ben Affleck as Philo Beddo with Seth Rogen as Orville and some stupid Hollywood indy slut of the season as the Sondra Locke bitch and a computer generated orangutan. Mark my words. That's how much of a piece of shit he is.
(Hahaha, I actually wrote that whole thing before his fat ass got kicked off an airplane, but that just reaffirms everything I said anyways. I have dabbled in internet dork cultures, and there are dork spaces for all cultures - from obscure sports to fringe movies to raising chickens to anything really. The internet is a bizarre culture dish where the unwanted in real life can pretend they are wanted and give their pasty fat asses an inflated sense of self. Kevin Smith is probably the most famous example. I remember him bragging on how many Myspace friends he has, and now he seems pretty damn proud of his twitter ranking. He is just proud of himself enough to tell everybody how awesome he is, and given backbone to such things by his sycophantic internet followers, yet still inside he's a pathetic self-loathing shithead still mad because pretty girls didn't like him and the cool kids didn't drink beer with him in high school, so he tries really hard. I almost want to feel sorry for him, but then he pushes himself so hard and plus has gotten rich off of not that great a body of work, so fuck him.)

Thursday, April 22

(7s) Fred Durst List #1 - Shooter Jennings


If the Fred Durst List were not a list but a title belt that famous people would pass off to each other in the back of my head as The Ultimately Most Deserving of Raven Smashing Empty 64 oz. Private Stock Bottles Over Their Head, then without a doubt, Shooter Jennings would be the holder of that title for a few years running now. The popularity of Hank Williams III and modern "outlaw" country has been tough for me to swallow. I mean, the whole alt.country movement was bad enough, full of suburban sterilized souls and outright Canadians pretending to be rurally aware and full of the darkness that grows wild where I grew up like honeysuckle vines and Wal-Mart parking lots. But man, some of these fake outlaw country v2.0 guys fucking kill me. Kid Rock, for example. That Lynyrd Skynyrd/"Werewolf in London" song that played everywhere a couple years ago, oh lord man, it made me wish for more Al Qaeda funding from abroad. But, and this is probably an embarrassing admission on my part, Kid Rock has done like two or three songs that momentarily entertained me, although they all eventually faded into played outness (except maybe that "Only God Knows Why" song, which if it catches me just right, like driving to the river on a hot day with beer between my legs, it still makes sense to me).
But Shooter Jennings' music, if you've never listened to it, is the most pretentious wannabe outlaw bullshit that has ever been made. It's obviously music made by someone who doesn't really understand outlaw living at all. Being a wealthy kid who got into exclusive clubs as a teenager to get drunk is not really true outlaw behavior, and Shooter Jennings always comes across like someone who'd be more comfortable on an episode of The Hills than sitting around a picnic table with a beer cooler centerpiece. He had a show on the Sirius satellite that I listened to for about seven minutes a couple of weeks in a row, at the beginning because it must've came on after something good, maybe Hillbilly Jim's Moonshine Matinee on the weekend, and good lord it made me want to smash the world in frustration for not being able to kill the satellite sending the waves back to earth. Pretendery and pompous. And when you look at the dude, it's such a stylized ruffian look, with greasy looking hair that has grease added after washing with organic lavendar conditioner rather than actually left unwashed to get that natural greasy look going. (That's an interesting aside, the pretentious nature of "organic" as opposed to just doing it, like making three thousand degrees of extra effort to prove you are not doing the same stupid shit makes it better. On food, I understand the labeling, because I don't like feeding my children slow cancer, but at the same time if you're eating Angie's Organic Frozen Pizzas all the time, it's still processed and comes from a big nasty ass factory with giant vats of things being pressed into shape by machines operated by Mexicans.)
I have become certain that at some point I will cross paths with Shooter Jennings, and I will get to smash him, should I choose to live my dream, and I feel bad, because the best dog I ever had got his name from the dude's dad. But at the same time, later generations of awesome people end up sucking. I was supposed to paint a house for a dude who used to be the dentist for the family that the guy named Raven I got my name came from, and I was gonna get the gig because of that connection. But I never got back to the old dude, so he went another way, and I'm sure he was all like, "Man, this damn Raven guy is nothing like old Raven Speed was. These turkeys have turned this world all to hell." And then he'd complain about the Mexicans probably since a couple of them live on our road now and one of them has wrecked into the same embankment in a curve two times in the past five weeks. But he did it into the yard of the asshole former state trooper who lives down the road from me, so I think it's funny. That former state trooper dude used to call our old landlord when we didn't cut our grass. Now we own the place and let it grow all the time, and have junk cars and chickens and pigs and a tipi and a freezer on the front porch and a pile of scrap metal and there's nothing he can do about it. What's up now, bitches?

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #7 - Dilate by Ani Difranco


Can't just pick LPs for myself, though I'd honestly love to own this on wax, but it would make my wife and at least the oldest kid stoked too. I listen to far more Ani Difranco than you'd probably expect from a 230 pound alcohol-fueled overeducated piece of white trash from southside Virginia, but I come by it honest. The first era of exposure to Ani Difranco music was when I was first dating my wife a long time back in Richmond, when we were both pretty different people. I was a lost ass dude crashing on couches, or in closets, or on linoleum floors, or wherever really, finishing up my last semester of college, and getting fucked up on the regular. I dug my wife, and she dug me, but I was in the type of place where no matter how much I dug somebody, a couple percocets and a 12-pack of PBR would sidetrack me to like another city or some shit. I was cheating on her, and cheating on the girl I was cheating on her with, and cheating everything I could, straight up con man for the only time I've been that in my life, at least that proudly. I guess I've always been a con man because most folks tend to think a lot higher of me than I know myself to be. But at that point, I was wide open, and you could've just replayed the hook to "Self Destruction" by KRS One and friends real faintly in the background all the time, because it would've made sense. I wouldn't have heard it though.
Anyways, a date for me and my wife back then usually entailed getting an 18-pack of Budweiser in cans and pointing one of our vehicles out of that fucking cesspool of Richmond, usually either east on Route 5 or head down 60 into Goochland and into Cumberland County, where my dad grew up. We'd find side roads to get off on, looking for logging trails to just kick it and drink beer and chill out without the glare of the neon city lights tinging our soul with a thick electronic BZZZZZZZZZZ all the goddamned time. Probably that's why we ended up together years after even my cheating ways, because it was in those momentary escapes we could see what was really underneath all the grit and grime of being young and lost in a goddamned shithole of a city. Well, there would be times where these outskirt excursions would come after me fucking things up in one way or another, being taken care of like a baby after going black after too much of this or that, or disappearing for a few days, and our night time country date would be thick with tension, so I'd pound the 18-pack with a super-majority to overcompensate, causing me to pass in and out on the ride back to the BZZZZZZZZZZ. These times, the wife, who was just a chick I kinda loved but couldn't stay true to, she'd be pumping the Ani Difranco, singing in her way that she sings that I steal hear all the time and can hear in our kids when they let it loose, and the songs made perfect sense. I was a complete piece of shit, and I knew it, but you don't want to admit it. If I admitted it outright, she might've stopped enabling me like she did. And as I passed in and out, I'd look over and see her face in the green glow of her Jeep Cherokee's stereo lights, singing loud, beautiful, driving through the country, and it was some real shit to see, especially when in the midst of a bunch of constant fake ass shucking, jiving, conning, conniving, drinking, driving, and barely aliving. I'm thankful that I didn't tear it all asunder so badly that we didn't end up together, out here in the country now for good, not just on a drunken trip for a few hours, and we've got the kids and chickens and pigs and junk cars and buildings and artwork and dreams and life we used to talk about wanting to have. Richmond was a dark ass place, and laughed at all that talk back then. Well fuck you Richmond, and your untouchable face.

Cuvee Du 8eme


AFFORDABILITY: This was mailed to me by my broken legged homeboy Ten Dollar David, so it was free, but it was only one bottle, and I had to drink it, and my time is worth something. Isn’t it? 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: There was only one in the package, and it was tiny, and French. I drank it and it left me feeling unfulfilled and wishing for more. But it magically appeared inside my PO Box, so I guess that counts for something. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Looks like the label was printed on white linen paper like you would've used for your resume back in 1999, before 9/11 changed everything and you started emailing your resume to HR@youfuckfaceyoullbestuckinconstructiontilyoudie.com and you worried more about fonts than the type of paper. But then what if they didn’t have your perfect font? Do you include the font so they can look at your resume in all its glory? Of course not; that’s pretentious as fuck of you, and who the hell is gonna unzip and plug in a font for somebody’s random resume, especially when it’s a fat lady at the human resources office looking at it and she’s thinking more about if she can eat one of those donuts in the break room and not trigger her diabeetus by lunch time. The very uppermost left-sided thing on the label says, “be smart, say it in French: ((Q-V-DUE-WHEATY-M))”. That’s what it says. This is the stupidest fucking beer ever. If we lived ten years in the future, this beer would include a font file when you downloaded it so that you could properly see just how clever its label really was. 0 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Cuvee Du 8eme is made by a Switzerland company but written with some French bullshit and imported by Connecticut people. Do the Switzerlese speak francais? I do not know. Whoever makes it does so with a nice looking bottle, so they have a flair for style. Yet the label looks like somebody printed it on their computer, so they cut corners in cost, and still charge the astronomical realm of prices, I’m sure. They are confused people obviously, which is understandable. European culture is so entrenched and so old that the cellular memories probably cross wires internally, not to mention the thousands and thousands of years of history and the pollutants and buried environmental scars from all that. Somewhere a couple sediments down, the Plague is still kicking it over there. Still though, I cannot give a beermaker credit because of the poor upbringing they might have had that left them confused and needing therapy. There comes a time when a beermaker should be old enough to know better. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: How could a gift from an old friend be so disappointing? I think I was reading about this beer on the internet at some point and people were all like talking about the year or some bullshit like that. I don’t understand. I don’t care about beer, good or bad, to become a historian. I like to drink things that make my brain wonky, and I like them to have interesting tastes, which is funny since beer, good or bad, is an acquired taste. Cuvee Du 8eme will never cross my lips again. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4/5 STAR!

Wednesday, April 21

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #10: "Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Caught Me in the Spotlight)" by Thin Lizzy


I have in the past been known to accuse Thin Lizzy of immense overratedness, and my wife one time summed them up a little too perfectly to overcome, as sounding like Elton John and REO Speedwagon got drunk together. So as a whole, I do not necessarily enjoy Thin Lizzy. But there are times in my life where it is just starting to be fall with a slight nip in the air but you can keep the car window down and it is raining like a motherfucker, night has fallen, and you still have to drive two more hours to get to the couch you are going to sleep on, so you pull over at some shit ass convenience store in the middle of nowhere because you are riding back roads to hopefully minimize the reach of the long yet easily confused arm of the law, and buy yourself a couple of double deuces of Budweiser, or Bud Light, since that and Bud Light Lime and Coors Light are pretty much your only four choices at shit ass middle of nowhere convenience stores, and it is during stints of life like that where Thin Lizzy is the most perfect and glorious music that can be heard. Basically, if the world was full of degenerates who were openly degenerated, Thin Lizzy is music from that world, for the easy listening set, like John Denver music for a post-Apocalyptic world that somehow managed to piece back together an entire civilization.
Like this song... this is a stupid fucking song if you let yourself just notice it fresh. But somehow the weird warpedness of Thin Lizzy, again... only under proper mental conditions, makes it somehow a great thing, even though it seems like it would be some stupid hippie bullshit. It is not.
Thin Lizzy really is one of the most confusing musical acts of the rock variety to have ever existed. I would say most people who outright say they are the greatest shit are saying so because they think they are supposed to, but most thinking music fuckfaces vary wildly in their own personal opinion on Thin Lizzy, from year to year. And it is because of this, they survive on the fringes of music.
STEAL "Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Got Me in the Spotlight)"
NEXT UP: Road dog memory makers!

(7s) Fred Durst List Intro


I have always had a confidence that fame would someday surround my stupid name, and around a decade ago, it was a major goal of mine to use that fame for good. Namely, this would encompass taking up a couple of charitable causes to make poor ass kids from shitburg towns maybe grow up with a little more self confidence, or at least a stronger sense of identity other than, "Damn, we fucked." But also, I would want to smash empty alcohol bottles, preferably large ones, over the head of Fred Durst, as he was, at the time I came up with this life goal, riding the brief wave of popularity that the bad white rapper/crappy rock band cross-genre was experiencing. Fred Durst seemed to me to be the antithesis to everything that made sense inside my brain, and it was bothersome that people would even momentarily like him. Of course, one should never be shocked at how stupid the things the masses enjoy are, but also, a guy like that was bound to fall back down anyways. After that hideous remake of a Marvin Gaye song, not to mention just too many public displays of how clueless he really was, he faded into the woodwork. I do remember at one point he was given some token executive A&R position at Interscope, so I don't know if he parlayed his youthful success into the Hollywood Jew career track, which, not to push tired stereotypes, to be fair is followed just as often by non-Jews, including regular white people and black people and Latina women in pant suits very commonly nowadays.
Nonetheless, I've still always wanted to bust Fred Durst upside his head with an empty wine jug, regardless of whether he's famous or not anymore. But over the years, inside my brains, I've kept a running list of people comparably deserving, according to my own highly biases judgements, of a busted up head. The list you will read over the coming days will be seven such folks, some of whom have surpassed Fred Durst in filling me with vitriolic infrared vision, and others who haven't come close but deserve mentioning, mostly so I can fill out an entire list of seven. Honestly, combining famous people who suck and real life people I hold unnecessarily long grudges against, I'd probably be hard pressed to come up with an actual seven people to bust upside the head with a bottle, with thought, but for creative purposes, let's just pretend.
Don't get me wrong though. If you gave me 7 bottles and a bust a head free card with each one, and we put them in an old vegetable box in the back of my truck, I'd be done busting them up by the end of the month, without problem. Day to day affairs always create bustable heads, but to actually premeditate such a violent outburst, it's hard to justify so easily. But nonetheless, I made a list.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #11: "Ladies Night (live)" by Helder O Rei Do Kuduro


Let me just say up front that I can’t recommend the After the End of the World blog over in the link list on the sidebar enough. That dude has turned me onto a lot of music I never would’ve even given a chance otherwise, including this song, which though I have no aural proof to know so, makes me assume that kuduro music is the greatest shit to have sex with strange women to in seedy hotels where the owner speaks bad Portuguese.
Kuduro music is a type of dance music that blew the fuck up in Angola, which I didn’t know shit about. In fact, here is your short C.I.A. World Book-style Bio on Angola by Raven Mack’s brain: It is somewhere in Africa, not the totally wonderful western part nor the fucked up central part but kind of up towards the northeast part, just kinda centered, like maybe near that cluster of The Sudan and Kenya, just not so Muslim. It is one of the last communist countries on earth, and it has the most awesome fucking flag on earth as well, a gangsta as fuck red and black deal with a hammer and sickle except instead of sickle it’s a half of a cogwheel, and instead of a hammer it’s a machete. They also hosted the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament this past year, where the Togo team got shot the fuck up by Angolan rebels, which means there are people rebelling against the Angolan communist government, probably brainwashed by Radio Free Africa or some shit against their own traditions and into Wal-Mart Supercenters, not realizing Wal-Mart has old people in blue vests with a smiley face flag, not awesome machetes and cogwheels and all. That’s Angola.
But apparently, it was also a Portuguese colony, which means kuduro music has jumped the Atlantic over to Brazil (another former Portuguese colony) and holds some dance club sway in Portugal itself. It’s really interesting, all this time later, how the colonial rulers still benefit from the cultural tomfoolery of their former subjugates.
Okay, this song... Helder O Rei Do Kuduro, which means Helder the King of Kuduro. After listening to this song, I have no doubt about it. It’s crazy yell singing slow down then amp it up energy that sounds perfect to do amphetamine hallucinogens in a dingy third world country club to, who gives a fuck if you might get robbed on the way home but maybe you’ll just party all night because it’s safer in the daylight than at night anyways but then again you’re never truly safe so fuck it, let’s go rub up on that light brown woman with the beautifully big ass over there and see if she wants to get drunk with me and make abortions. I cannot begin to hype you the fuck up on this song enough.
I think I’ve said this about thirty-nine times on this blog, but it really bums me out that the so-called World Music scene is so stiflingly and stoned down to that boring fucking Putamayo style of homogenized foreigner music that’s perfect for selling organic vegetables to at Whole Foods, but not really the vibe or speed of the real rest of the World, at least not the parts that still have some of their soul left intact. This sounds like music you play on your djembe and then smash it into bits after you’re done and fuck the first animal that crosses your path afterwards, not get all soulful with your drum like it’s a goddamned bible or some shit.
So yeah, this song is the shit, bros.
STEAL "Ladies Night (live)"
NEXT UP: Music to drive drunk by!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #6 - Pentagram by Pentagram


Pentagram is a weird ass 1970s/1980s metal band from northern Virginia led by some wack ass dude who still looks like it's 1979 to this day, and over time they have become a cult figure within the metal community, for being an obscure American Black Sabbath on drugs. Their first album was re-released under the title Relentless, but I do not want any re-released bullshit. I want the original flavors, in all it's unmastered gloriousness.
First time I heard this was after going to North Carolina to see a bonafide authentic Mexican lucha libre show, where they did the Mexican national anthem and all the illegal immigrants in attendance did that weird Battlestar Galactica arm across their body thing that made me realize we are doomed in our fight against the Mexicans, and I ended up crashing at my boy Boomer's house. He was playing the first Pentagram LP, the first time I had been turned onto them.
They are awesome as fuck. If you don't know that, that's fine. I understand. This is the internet, which is for entertainment not learning, so you can learn about them whenever you feel the time. Personally, it is fucking hot in this house and I am not going to put the air conditioners in until my wife absolutely makes me because the freon weakens your will, and when combined with the cellular phone waves in the air and the fluoride in our toothpaste, it makes me die. So I am going outside to pump some Pentagram through the dumpster 1970s speaker sitting on a milk crate with a tarp over top in my back yard, coming from the camper, and jam the fuck out. “Some say I’m an advocate of lucifer... some say I’m a child of god.” No fucking doubt, bro, no fucking doubt.

Paulaner Salvator Double Bock


AFFORDABILITY: We had just homebrewed up some new beer, and were going to be bottling it, so big homebrew-agreeable bottles were on my mind. But when you are at the white people grocery store where they sell the fancy beers, that type of purchase can make your chest and lungs work funny style, $5 a bottle, sometimes more if it's that crazy Belgian shit with the cork and wire twisted around to keep it from popping bottles even without the Birdman's involvement. But the Paulaner Salvator was sitting there, very modestly, like a silent monk kicking the grand funk, at like $2.50 per bottle. That ain't too bad for some high alcohol content style beer in a bottle shaped like it's gonna pull an AAARRGGGGH out of your soul, especially if additionally unlocked by some old Hawkwind. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: The Paulaner Salvator with its accelerated destruction mode, even with only two 22 ounce or so bottles, gave my brain the freedom of irresponsible thought processes that it so desires. I felt the monkiness (and that doesn't mean I went to Catholic churches as a dumbass kid). 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Looks to be a monk and a gentleman of much finery both smiling mischeviously over a frothing silver pitcher of beer, yet the label patterns it to look like a woodgrain. It looks like they might be going to have sex with each other eventually, although at the same time, at one point I guess only monks made awesome beer, so it might just be some rich dude coming to get himself a pitcher of the good shit from the dudes who wear brown robes with rope belts. Monks always have the nice rope belts with the knots and thick golden rope that look like fancy lady drapes. The monk guy on the label looks a little like the crusty principal asshole from Head of the Class, but he also has an old man's mohawk, with hair on both sides and a Mr. T top. I have never in my life seen anybody bald in such a way. There is also, in both the main label and the little top of the bottle wrap, a round shield with a younger looking monk all bronzed Grecian style sporting the pointy long beard of a Mountain Dew drinking dirtbike trickster, and I have to assume that's the younger image of the same old dude about to have sex with the fancy gentleman in the main label. It's good to reminisce on our more purified youthful days. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Paulaner Salvator is owned by monks, good honest monks who do the Lord's work, not molest kids or hate gays or people who kill unborn babies or worship magic Muhammads that fly off into space without a safety helmet on like a spiritual Scud missile. I am sitting in the dark tonight writing by lamplight after spending two beers worth of time standing on my magic stump by the pig pen, soaking up the stars and night time and trying not to get freaked out by the strange energy surrounding me the past couple days, so I can’t look at the bottle to see what company actually is behind it all. Sometimes you just have to believe. Not everything can be proven or backed by science (a religion itself... trust me, I’m on the inside of it now and see it everyday). Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? I bet out of the seven million people lolling through their internet-wasted days about those Miracles, most of them don’t know how magnets work. They don’t care to know. It just is. The monks need to start making hallucinogenics too, methinks. 7 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The Paulaner Salvator Double Bock was a most pleasant experience, and it helped me stifle the terible nightmares of my pigs eating me, which have become more graphic and intense. Lately, I've had to piss really bad, but I am in high school, except high school is all fucked up and dilapidated like we need Joe Clark to come swing a bat at the kids as well as the county budgeteers. So all the bathrooms are like these big open bathrooms that are nasty as fuck and stained by diseased shit and the only thing separating the stalls are flaps of tin siding kind of stuffed into position. And I don't have any shoes on. And I'm trying to find a good one to piss in, looking and looking, bumping into the kid from 10th grade health class who went to prison for robbing a gas station and once pulled an Uzi on a weed smoking partner of mine, who I just saw inside the Facebooks, the Uzi prison guy not the weed smoker, though he's on there too. Apparently the one is no longer in prison and the other no longer smokes weed. But anyways, I am looking for a semi-clean and discreet stall and finally I find a normal one and open the door and my pigs come diving out, biting at my face, and I wake up. So the Double Bock was tight for shutting that down for a night. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 4/5 STARS!

Tuesday, April 20

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #12: "Straight to Hell" by The Clash


I came back upon this song completely by chance, as I had been playing old 45 singles in the kitchen and my oldest kid (11 years) was way into “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. So I downloaded the entire Combat Rock CD, since she also was in some 4H llama club last year, and her llama she trained to do shows was named Casbah, and I told her then where the name was probably from and she was like, “Yeah, whatever,” but then it came full circle. So Combat Rock The Clash entered our household music playing, with the only other The Clash in the house being London Calling, which I put on my wife’s Ipod years ago because it was listed as one of the greatest records of all-time in some stupid magazine listmania thing at some point (maybe Rolling Stone) and I very specifically remember a Penthouse letter from back in the day from my dad’s stash of porns that referenced how great an album that was for fucking as some dude fucked his sister’s best friend on a beach after a wedding with her first black penis to get out of a cop ticket with an amputee midget, which he never thought he’d be writing about, for the first time. I do not love London Calling but it serves a purpose when I’m in the right frame of mind.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was initially gonna roll out with the “The Clash is overrated as fuck and only assholes like them” angle, but toned it down because I know people who have dogs named Strummer or children named Strummer or tattoos of Joe Strummer on their crotch regions, so I’ll be civil here and just say The Clash do not impress nor speak to me like they do others. But let’s be honest, I’m a small town whiteboy who has always felt doomed even though I feel destined for fame, so the adult contemporary punk rock sounds has never made sense to me. In fact, most of what has always been considered punk rock has confused me. Being that shithead shithole small town piece of trash, like the epitome of punk rock is The Sloppy Seconds - a big fat shredding guitarist and a ugly mulleted lead singer yelling about “I’m So Fucked Up!” (which is a great song by the way, I should find that shit so it can be on the list one month eventually).
However, in playing this CD out loud in the kitchen, I came back upon this song, which I previously only remember being the track that I figured inspired a really shitty western movie I once watched starring Deborah Harry. I had forgotten it was a bonafide The Clash song, and a good one at that. What triggered this memory was the new musics, as M.I.A.’s mega-hit “Paper Planes” is a reworking of a couple of loops from “Straight to Hell”. This of course had me playing them back to back while the kids cut out the lights and had a dance party in the kitchen, to over-analyze the tweakings and remixings that the new derivative song did to the original sound. Oddly enough, it sounds stupider. Bass for bass’ sake, which buries the really strange rolling drums effect of the original The Clash version.
This led me to playing this song a lot, but also my daughter with her Ipod has run up the count on this song to get it on the list. She was also playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” incessantly for like two hours one Saturday afternoon, and I asked her why. She said it was to make me write about it. I told her that it didn’t do it for every song in our shared Itunes, but only ones that were actually on my gaypod shuffle. This bummed her out. So apparently, next month I have agreed to include that song on my gaypod so that I have to write about it. I asked my daughter why she wanted me to write about the song for my blog which she can’t read anyways and will probably never see, and she said, “It makes me happy.” And then my second kid piped up about wanting me to put Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” on my gaypod too so I could write about that, and I just kinda ducked out the conversation at that point.
STEAL "Straight to Hell"
NEXT UP: Crazy African bullshit!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #5 - Long Haired Lounger/Dread Headed Stranger by Prolo


At one point during the Solaris Earth Pipeline experiment, the Psyopsogist was gonna sink some money into printing some sort of S.E.P. 12-inch, except it wasn't gonna be a real record, just a collection of songs, and I'm sure if he paid for it, he'd want to do the album art, which means it would've been some space age spaciness done with a low amount of creativity that he probably saw on some obscure movie or some shit at some point. And that would be what I have for myself on vinyl had that happened.
Luckily it didn't happen, and I would always prefer an actual CD you make be what you press up on vinyl instead of some music version of a vanity chapbook. Our last bullshit, 45s on 33, wouldn't embarrass me if we had that done on vinyl (you can still google "Solaris Earth Pipeline" and the sharebee link for that CD comes up... I don't know if any of them still work or if sharebee will put computer AIDS inside your laptop, but it is there... do what you must with that knowledge).
But if I could have one full-length piece of music I did with the few different projects I've been involved in over the years on vinyl, it would be this CD, mostly because so much of who I am is deeply layered in this one. You meet me in real life, and I'm not some wacked out polysyllabic know-it-all asshole like I sometimes came across as in the S.E.P. stuff. I'm just a simple-assed dude with bad genetics who has been educated beyond his intelligence. Or I'm a really intelligent regular ol' piece of shit who was born to lose. But both those sides play into that album.
Really, all in all, there's only one song, even a few years later, that I'd take off, and usually I hate anything I do two months after I done did it. Plus, I started writing sangin' lyrics around this time, and with Brown's multi-track bluegrass harmonizing from another level he does, some of these songs are fucking classic. Like shit that if I heard and wasn't involved at all, I'd be like, "Holy fuck, this is awesome. Why isn't there seventeen more things like this in the world? What's wrong with this world?" Mostly though, this was a CD I did that I know the same type of hopeless degenerate/endless romantic/trapped in a small town but with dreams of being a road dog people could dig on.
Now Boogie Brown's got a kid, and I've got three, and we live three hours apart, and have the fucking endless unloungery of this modern world trying to stifle us. But I'm glad to say we've been starting to get some new shit together. Hopefully we'll have some more of this shit ready by summertime. But it's gonna be hard to top the awesomeness of the Long Haired Lounger/Dread Headed Stranger CD.

Monday, April 19

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #4 - Space Ritual by Hawkwind


For some reason now that it’s gotten warm out and I drink beer like beer, I have hit a stoner rock phase. Tonight, right before bedtime, the two-year-old was rock-n-roll dancing with me naked (I was still wearing clothes), which consists of holding my hands and doing crazy bounces and jumps, to Kyuss. I said, “Hold up,” and went over and cut the stereo up louder, and she just giggled crazily and bounced higher. Having kids is the bestest thing you can do to make the world not be so goddamned sterile and fucking white. Anyways, the thing about the whole stoner rock genre, which credits itself springing from Black Sabbath basically, is that there used to be that whole British Space Rock genre that dabbled in this darkness, but Sabbath took the furthest. Uriah Heep has some wacky shit. And of course Hawkwind, when dialed in appropriately, is the fucking best shit there ever was. It’s really a shame they lived long enough to suck it up. I think they’re still touring, as old men acid casualties. But this live album, which I don’t even rightfully know if it was an album at any point, is the fucking shit. I am so bored with doing rap music now that I usually just want to do retarded shit like make ten songs of long two to three minute Hawkwind loops and pitch shift lyrics about spaceships made of granite.

Sunday, April 18

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #3 - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams


This is a most critically accepted CD offering from Lucinda Williams, the highlight of a magazine dork review guy's musical darling, and that turns me off. Plus, this is considered a classic of the "I like the idea of country music but hate those ignorant fuckers that actually listen to country music radio" alt.country genre. (You judgemental fuckers, how come ignorance is from social conditioning when non-white, but when it's white people, for some reason it's their own fault? I bet you don't want them dating your daughter either, you fucking assholes.) But the thing is, there's real shit in here, deeply embedded, deeper than your regular fucker with a guitar and a dollar store composition book to jot down lyrical ideas can even begin to scratch at. There's a certain fuckedness to it all; it's very downtrodden and sinking into some things. But there's also a pride about it all, that yeah this is bad, but I can fix it and it's better than the alternative. That basically is the white trash mindframe. And I don't pretend to be an expert or an authority or nothing; I am just who I am. I grew up how I did, and today my dumb ass was wearing a button down shirt tucked into some dumb ass khakis (from Goodwill, naturally) and walked into a goddamned soul-forsaken Whole Foods to buy two stupid fucking things, which of course cost almost $13. So it's not like I'm sitting around drinking beer and making bets on who's gonna win a fight between my down's syndrome cousin and simple minded son who sleeps with pigs in the afternoon for fun, which is nice, because it keeps the pigs calmer and more accessible. But I know real shit because I've stepped in enough real shit and was sprouted from real shit. And this album is some real shit, alt.country cul-de-sac PBR-drinker approved or not.
Thing is, none of the rural half-wild hopeless motherfuckers out there really like country music that comes on the radio. I've passed this CD along to a few people, and everybody who's heard it is like, "Man, who the fuck is this? I've never heard her on the radio." Again, people's ignorance is not completely their own fault all the time. Partially it is, yeah, that's true, but you can't blame people for not knowing something they've never been showed.
So yeah, one time I went into the indy dork record store a block off the downtown mall in Charlottesville, and there was a brand new copy of this in LP format, shrinkwrapped purity, and I was gonna get it, but new vinyl costs $15 (at that point), which is a hard pill to swallow, especially when I ended up digging through his used crates and finding six or seven go-go 12-inches for a dollar apiece, plus I bought a third extra just-in-case copy of The South's Gonna Do It by the Charlie Daniels Band. That right there is DJ/hip hop culture mixing with country music more than anything else in my life, the fact that I will buy any copy of that or Red Headed Stranger, just because. I think I have nine albums just of those two records. And some people don't even own nine albums total. I am the harbinger of retroactive stylages.

Saturday, April 17

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #2 - Master Of Puppets by Metallica


I has the Kill 'Em All and I has the Ride The Lightning, and I had at one point thought that would be the only Metallica LPs I needed, using my reverse most recent is the best Metallica methodology. Except Master Of Puppets is more awesome than I've liked to admit, mostly because at my first job the shitty boss's son who slept in the warehouse drove a really nice truck and would always talk about Master Of Puppets. Assholes ruin a lot of things in this life for regular people, and this was such a situation. But I am man enough to admit it was a mistake. I cannot let asshole offspring of modern day wage slave overlords ruin the goodness of the for real goodness. "Master... master..."
I have a camper I hang out in when it's warm, and it has four turntables of assorted styles, and I keep milk crates full of albums out there, and there's a lamp I got at the thrift store that when you turn it and click it once the regular light comes on and a second time makes a red glass bottom base of the lamp come on with the white bulb and a third click leaves just the red glass light at the bottom, all opium smoke shop style. What I am saying is this all makes for the perfect environment for a fully grown man to get high as fuck and listen to a record like Master Of Puppets and trip out on things that he forgot he probably tripped out on 20 years ago. I am old, and yet still half-retarded.

Friday, April 16

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April ’10 #13: "Ghetto Red Hot" by Supercat


Oh man, I do not remember the time perfectly because I am a man not a digital calendar, but there was a point where in the hazy violent humidity of early to mid 1990s Richmond, Virginia, this was The Fucking Song you would hear coming through tinted windowed Jeeps like mobile sub-woofers bomping down Broad Street. Those were the days, a stupid fucking small town hick transplanted to VCU before they regentrified that whole area within six blocks of campus, where I'd walk or ride my shitty 10-speed down Broad Street to the Willie's with the Chinese shoe store next door at whatever corner that is, I think maybe 5th Street, but not sure because to this day I still only see it as "where Willie's was". I went through that area a month ago, taking my daughter to the CAA basketball tourney at the Richmond Coliseum, and that corner where the Chinese shoe store (sold regular ghetto fabulous shoes, run by a Chinaman; not selling Chinese shoes, without toespace for women) has a Subway now. That was weird. We rode up Broad Street, heading west, and I told her about how it was, got mad because it looked like Aladdin's was closed, plus they don't take debit cards anyways, and explained what a kefta kabob sandwich was. We rode up Laurel, past the VCU campus, and she was like, "Hahaha, they're all college students, looking very college studentey" and we went all the way into Oregon Hill, over to the house she was born in back in 1999. I was hoping Mamma Zu's was open, but it was Sunday so I knew it wasn't. Plus they got mad rich white bitches hoping to eat there, and I was just gonna try to bum my way into a free hook-up from the owner, who may not even be there anymore for all I know.
I do not know what happened to Supercat. I think I read in my brain's internet one time that he shot somebody in New York City back when raggamuffin artists (as they were called back then, but sounds like something they'd print on pins for people who work at a national chain bagel store) actually had business in NYC, but why did he disappear? He was the fucking supreme shit. It was the remix for his "Dolly My Baby" that introduced Biggie to the world (as well as that other dude with the weird hanging drawl that was like a dude from Harlem pretending to be from Georgia like a urban black dude 1994 Hee Haw skit). Now, Jamaican dudes making music are stuck in Jamaica and never get featured on American rap songs. But at the same time, which situation is going to end better... having some second-rate strippers in love with American money dancing in a youtube video for exposure, or having some fat-assed women shake their ass in front of a tin building? I do not endorse poverty, but I've been a broke ass bitch a number of times in my life, and the best thing about poverty is it frees up a lot of time for fucking. That's basically what dancehall means to me.
STEAL "Ghetto Red Hot"
TOMORROW: Punk rock for the unpunk!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #1 - Straight To Hell by Hank Williams III


Pandora the music website is a great idea, but a problem with it is it's all musically scientific and lacks a respect for the spirit. In my personal life, I feel there is no form of music that needs to be multiplied that Hank Williams III's Straight To Hell LP, especially the strange cokehead country whiteboy meets codeine-drinking screwed and chopped styles of the second CD. It is, to borrow a played out phrase, the shit. I have often looked for other music like this, but it all falls short or goes in a different direction. Wayne Hancock, while cool I guess, is too far on the “like Hank Williams Sr.” tip for my tastes; it makes me think of college city girls with tattoos who are on the roller derby team and have a vintage kitchen table with sparkly top. Those Poor Bastards, who originally wrote “Pills I Took”, are like a happy dirge you play for your own one-man suicide party. Stuff that calls itself “outlaw country” is usually outlaw filtered through the profitability factor of the Nashville sound system, so that a guy like Jamey Johnson or Chris Knight, as pure of heart as they may be, still sound like they might rip off their honest eyes like that old mini-series V and are really just fucking lizards making money for record companies in subversive ways. And stuff that calls itself “alternative country” is usually, from my experience, the idea of honest country music filtered through a series of cul-de-sacs. It’s not necessarily a dishonest form of music; it just don’t know.
I am from a shithole place where hopelessness reigns supreme. I am a chronic fuck-up with bad tattoos, stupid scars, and lifeline on my palm that’s got a few bridges out that I’m gonna have to pull some General Lee jumps to make it to 60, much less 70. Shit man, let me just give you a straight real example... I took my riding mower to get fixed last year at the shop that my dad worked at for nearly 30 years, because I figured I could trust them. My drive belt kept slipping from where I hit a loose piece of tether cable in the field where I used to stake my goats up, and I just bent the pulleys and all back into close enough shape, which worked for a year or two, but it needed fixing. So I took it to that shop, hoping for the hook-up, and the crooked-walking guy who worked with my drunken dad for a decade said he’d hook it up. I had money in the bank to get it done. Except that guy, Lee, was the one who had to do it to make it happen right, and he had a tendency to not show up to work for weeks on end. So it took them a few months to fix my goddamned riding mower, and by that time my own chronic under-employment had left me broke, so I couldn’t pay the $175 to get it back. So I fixed my push mower on my own and power walked my way through 2.5 acres four times last year, in random patches that made my yard look like it was way into De La Soul’s first album. One day, the small engine shop lady called me and I told her I didn’t have no money, could they hold it for me, and she said yeah, which I knew meant they’d charge me for holding it. Fast forward to nowadays. Now understand this was a family business that I’m part of the family of, and it’s a family related name (my grandmother’s maiden name actually) that’s on the business sign outside, yet nobody there is connected to that. Except one cousin, who is back home cleaning up from heroin and opiate painkillers and too much realness at too quick a pace. But he’s solid earth. I call him up to get my mower back and he says he’ll make it happen, but come tomorrow. So I do. And my great uncle is there, who used to own the store, and was the nemesis to my dad’s drunken employment for those decades in the back room of the store, where the repair work was done, where I used to scoot around on this weird sliding seat thing all the time when I was as young as I can remember. I talk to great uncle for a while, who’s over 80 now, and still complains about every goddamned thing on earth like he always did. (This guy actually used to give me old copies of Popular Mechanics, because he wanted me to be an engineer because I was smart. Not laughing, just saying, that’s the history.) Nine months sober from heroin cousin hooked me up on the bill, gave me a couple files to sharpen my chainsaw chain, and we loaded it up on the back of my bruised and battered truck, and then leaned along the bed rails to bullshit away an hour. Another dude I grew up with who works there was chilling, and we should’ve went to get a beer or four, but my truck had an expired inspection sticker, so passing cops were sci-fi flick floating eyeballs waiting to report back to the overlords and ruin my life. And he has offspring and offspring partners to answer at as well. So we just got in our assorted vehicles that aren’t like the ones we wrecked or the ones we used to have last summer, that we got given to us or pieced together to keep running or were allowed to borrow for the time being, and we took our turns down the road in different directions. But we all came from that same place.
That’s why that Hank the Third shit, most especially the Straight To Hell, speaks so goddamned loudly at me. There hasn’t been music from that same place in forever. And there’s a lot of motherfuckers like us out here.

Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout


AFFORDABILITY: In all my years, I don’t remember to be drinking upon a Sammy Smith Oatmeal Stout, probably because oatmeal is some bourgoisie ass shit to me. I grew up broke, with WIC checks and screaming baby sisters who had health problems, so we ate Cream of Wheat mostly, or whatever the generic brand of that was. Man WIC checks are annoying. Even today, when food stamps are so streamlined and like a debit card you can flow with, you actually have pieces of paper with a WIC check and you have to sign like nine of them for your groceries at the store and the person working the register doesn’t know how to do it and then you have to trade your half-gallon of milk in for four pints of milk and all sorts of retarded ass shit. But I’m sure in my life I’ve drank the Oatmeal Stout, especially considering how many hippie-ish girls I’ve been in long-term relationships with. And the Sammy Smith big bottles were on sale at the Kroger, who is my friend when it comes to beer at times. Shit, they were rolling with the $12 12-packs of Stella Artois there for like a month. If beer could be cheaper, I could be richer. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Oatmeal cookies are kinda gross to me, and I’d prefer not to choose them but I do enjoy them if they are sprung on me unexpectedly. My favorite cookie is the fat and soft peanut butter cookie made so well by Mennonite types using massive amounts of butter-flavored Crisco. The only thing that has ever tempted me in the past five years to turn towards a Christian god are these peanut butter cookies and seeing young teenager Mennonites hanging together at the demolition derby at the Rockingham County Fair. That was beautiful. Actually there was a young woman with crazy eyes who also seemed to be Mennonite (she was hanging with them) one time at a parade I took my daughter to. Man, I hope I don’t accidentally have a Mennonite fetish. An oatmeal beer luckily does not taste heavily of oatmeal but why the hell bother if not. And why use oatmeal? I hope there’s something ancient and pagan about it but I would expect it’s just some wacky alterna-beer bullshit that does something lame to a regular man like myself like it “dries up the fermenting process and gives it more of a wild hops taste” although really I wanted to write something stupider but could only think of wild hops, which actually would be cool, except wild hops don’t work like regular hops so you can’t really brew successfully with them and plus they’ll overtake all your other shit because they so wild. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It’s a nice label, like all Sammy Smith labels be going about theyselves. The gold wrapper around the top of the bottle is a classy touch, like you’re drinking some fancy assed $250 a bottle champagne or something, when it’s only beer. I will forever be a beer drinker because that’s my caste in life. We just got given by my bro-in-law a bunch of wine, some of it some seriously expensive wine, and I can get into that stuff, but it’s just not in my bloodstream like beer is. I mean that in both a family tree genetical type way as well as a literal day-to-day interpretation. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Samuel Smith is not a company but an overlord, a cruel yet mindful overlord who knows that industrial overlords cannot get over by the spiked whip alone. I am not sure what other beers they make other than exporting their fancy big bottles of white people beer to America for old men who have bushy mustaches and an ability to talk for far too long about deli meats, as well as for hippie girls both new to adulthood and far enough down their path in life to already have an etsy page for their homemade dresses. But I am not down with overlords, having underclass stamps on all my white blood cells. This is why I give blood as often as I can, because I am doing my part to bring down society from within, literally. The only problem is, and this is not a well-known fact, the upper crust elite type of people, they have private blood bank things set up for if they need blood, kind of like how normal people find out if somebody's kidney matches them, except it's more about the socio-economic match. But that's not really shocking. If they don't want their kids to possibly mix blood with the loser lower classes by making children together, you should expect they don't want an automatic injection of poverty and shiftlessness and ickery shot into their bodies. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Samuel Smith is like one of those open brick fireplaces with a mantle kicking mad dental work and some sort of faux finish that looks like it’s 390 years old when actually some blonde haired lady in a late model BMW spent two afternoons at $40 an hour doing it... it feels good, but isn’t very practical. Or useful. For one Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, I could’ve had three tall cans and two fried egg sandwiches, although I would’ve had to snag a couple mayonnaise packets from the deli counter probably. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!