J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #6: "Methamphetamine" by Old Crow Medicine Show

This is a different "Methamphetamine" song than the Son Volt one I wrote about a month or two back, and I did not give it a proper listen for a while because O.C.M.S. tend to do a lot of covers, which is not a bad thing at all, but I was in my head all like, "Why would you do a cover of a song that's not that old? That seems kinda triflin'." Turns out it's not a cover but an original, a completely separate alt.country warbler about the wonders and consequences of speed. Where I'm from, it was always called crank, and much like religion and opinions on the effects of Mexican people in our town, the drug jargon I learned from my parents is what I still speak. In fact, there's a few things I say from growing up in Farmville, Virginia, that my wife and now daughters make fun of. For example, I call a purse a "pocketbook". They find this endlessly amusing because I guess wherever my wife was raised, pocketbooks did not exist at all. We were watching some show, all of us together at some point, and one of the characters said she was going to buy a new pocketbook, and my wife and the two oldest kids all just turned and stared at me incredulously, like they couldn't believe somebody not in the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Farmville would ever say that word. I just smiled a "told-you-so" smile, stuck my paws in my dungarees, and walked into the kitchen to finish cooking supper.
Old Crow Medicine Show is a weird band. They can be really enjoyable and you dig it a lot, but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you'll realize it's 2011 and you'll think, "What is wrong with these guys?" But I will dig on them, if for no other reason than I'm still convinced that you could book these guys to play a bonfire party. I guess they are in that whole jam band festival concert loop now, but I just refuse to believe if I told them they could sleep in the camper and we'd be cooking a hog that we raised ourselves and we had a tent set up with a P.A. and everything, that we could get them to play in our back yard for a cheap enough price that I could convince like two people I know who might have money to throw in on to make it happen. It wouldn't be like singing for Qaddhafi or anything, but hey, it'd be a fun gig.
Speaking of those famous types who played for Qaddhafi and now caught flack for it, I feel the worst for Nelly Furtado. When my oldest kid was like five, I took her to the record store (back when those places still existed - Rest In Peace record stores) to pick out a CD of her choice, to encourage music appreciation. She loved that "I'm Like A Bird" song by Nelly Furtado, so that's what she got, so through that CD purchase for my firstborn, I've haphazardly followed Furtado from afar. When she made that "Promiscuous" song, I felt personally betrayed to be honest, because I didn't want my sweet daughter who knew all the words to "I'm Like A Bird" to be listening to shit like "Promiscuous" at a still tender age. Anyways, Furtado was one of the first musicians to be outed for performing for Qaddhafi, pulling in a cool million bucks for the gig. Furtado said she would donate the money to charity once the story was broke, but I couldn't help but wonder if somebody like a Nelly Furtado actually has a million dollars still around to just get rid of to charity, cushy gigs for Libyan leaders aside. I mean, I think we tend to exaggerate how wealthy the entertainment elite end up being. Every one- or two-hit wonder from the past twenty years is not a multi-millionaire, and usually they only become financially successful by moving into the management/industry side of things, learning from their own exploitation how to exploit others. I have a hard time believing Nelly Furtado is sitting on an eight-digit bank account where scribbling out a million-dollar check to Africa Got AIDS Let's All Wear Red Shit To Help or some other charity is really that easy for her. Although sending out a press release saying she would do so is probably not that hard. And with the internet, journalism now is basically just retyping the bullshit people email to you anyways, and pretending you researched it afterwards.
STEAL "Methamphetamine"
NEXT: A carnival anthem, applied metaphorically to a shitty relationship with a crazy bitch!