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.

Thursday, June 3

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #2: “Weight of the World” by Blue Globe Beats


This is from a long tall stack of old beat CDs called Blue Globe Beats my man Boogie Brown made years back. I had taken three full CDs worth of those beats to run quick songs to inside the camper, but the camper is cluttered with the detritus of my life, and my mind can't find time to recline in the creative sunshine anymore. Some days, even as the thoughts for this or that bounce through my head with the same frantic urgency as they always have, I wonder if I haven't squandered my muse. Will it shut off one day, like an aging man's sex drive? I am not one for pharmaceutical enhancements, so there will be no Muzagracillin to trigger the ideas storming through my brain again. I am 37, and sit basically the same fucking place I was ten years ago, just with more kids now, needing longer clothes, and my hair is barely allowed to grow out of my head. Where do you express frustration when the whole fucking thing doesn't make sense to you, and you know the biggest problem is yourself. You are trapped, but every time you see a new shiny bear claw along the path, you stomp your fucking foot right down in the middle of it, thinking you are stronger than it this time. But you never are. And as more hairs twist out of your cheek with the color of a surrender flag, your bad decisions become a fucking albatross, financially and with psychological clutter, and your internal posture becomes worse. Outside, you walk like anyone, but inside you're a shrivelled goddamned hobo, tramping around a twenty mile cell, waiting for death to make all the questions stop, answers be damned.
Mike Gee and myself actually wrote a song for this beat one Friday night, something about change and getting by, and it's interesting sitting there teaching Mike Gee about how I write. He is a freestyle king, and could ride a beat from now til Friday, with a thick relentless style that has a poppy cadence to it, always. But when he writes, he writes sparsely, not able to hear himself in his own head filling out the beat like he does when he just lets himself do it naturally, freestyle. And that was weeks ago. Boogie Brown sent me an email about doing music, but life and things and fuck fuck fuck get in the way and make the three hour trip seem impossible to squeeze into any week, much less this or the next one. I know I should, but goddamn. There's just so much in the way every day. It's like one of those plastic childhood puzzle games, with the sliding pieces numbered from 1 to 15 and one empty slot, and I spend all day long sliding the pieces around, trying to get the day in order to have that empty time in the right place. Some days, I don't even get close. Other days, by the time I get there, I'm so goddamned tapped out, I can't even use it. I just sit there and stare at the blank screen, thinking about what I was thinking about three hours ago, five hours ago, this morning, and wishing I knew now what I knew then.
Oh fucking well. Salvation is around every corner. Unfortunately, it always ends up being a goddamned lie. But hopefully I'll catch a wave of salvation and ride it mightily for a brief slice of creative satisfaction here before too long.
STEAL “Weight of the World”
NEXT UP:
AM radio mainstay, but inside the interwebs as of my next J.J. Krupert posting!

1 comment:

D said...

Damn.