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 16

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May '11 #6: "Free Born Man" by Jerry Reed


I never really talk too extensively on this site about what Rojonekku really is, for various legal reasons. But my Rojonekku compound has produced a few "graduates" so to speak, who have gone on to settle in different parts of the country (that term is used both in reference to the geographical entity that is the ol' U.S. of A., as well as in that city mouse/country mouse dichotomy), and we circulate songs amongst each other, and the kid who ended up starting the satellite branch in Wyoming, he was always way into that clean guitar picker style of Wes Montgomery, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed. He also used to fucking blast Jimmy Smith every Sunday morning at like 7 am in the coophouse, which was fine by me, but annoyed others present at times, usually those who had been too far up inside the tail end of Saturday night. Anyways, that kid out in Wyoming got me hyped on this song for the modern day application of it, how Jerry Reed is talking about knowing every mile of road and inch of railroad track, and we were philosophizing and comparing it to the world of Google street views, how these rolling machines with super cameras stalk every road they can and capture what is considered public but very much private moments (if you've never seen the 9-eyes tumblr/website, you should scope that out - I'll probably forget to insert a link so google that shit, which is kinda ironic since a big part of my thinking here in this write-up is how ultimately evil google is... which also means fuck the fact I was in the middle of a sentence and had a parenthesis tangent, because now this tangent becomes the point - correct punctuation practices be damned. Oddly enough, that Sergei google dude was outed at the big Bilderberg meeting this week in Switzerland, which saw public protests for the first time, which I guess makes sense as the Greek economy might just collapse (there are riots in the streets there right now, which are a little more newsworthy than shitty hockey fans being drunk in Vancouver), and that could (hopefully) set off a domino effect of collapsing economies that ultimately would fuck the world's money system and pretty much prove that, for whatever reason, everybody cannot continually get richer and richer and better and better in a capitalist system. Also of note today, there was some weird rolling cloud HAARP beam chemtrail bullshit on youtube that got pulled almost immediately. Now I understand pulling questionable material under the guise of protecting the public from pornographic images, but some clouds rolling in a fucked up way? I don't know man. People tend to have this misguided notion that only right wing Republican dudes want to be world overlords. The leftist elite of wealth certainly have their own world domination faults in abundance, and one man's Bill Gates African health initiative is another man's Bill Gates eugenics campaign; it's all in how you look at it.
Anyways, "Free Born Man" is a great great song, and different from the Google street view knowledge of things because let's say you decide to drive through Google street view on U.S. 1 from the Canadian border all the way down to Florida (which I actually started at one point, before realizing it was fluoride for my mind so to speak)... you are not really knowing anything about that road at all. It's all just a distraction. And why the Wyoming kid brought this song to me and the lyrics behind Jerry Reed's little ditty (which he may or may not have written) is a lesson from the Rojonekku training where you can't ride the interstate and know the path from Virginia to Wyoming. You can't ride the back roads and "know" that path. You can't even walk it and truly "know" it. On one of the properties we use for Rojonekku schools, there are seven trailers/campers/Unabomber shack in a row, and the kids (who I refrain from calling "students" because shit man, I learn more from them than they do me, especially since there's only one me and there's always at least four or five of them, if not twice that) are expected at some point to move through those seven structures, starting with the first trailer (which is actually the nicest probably), and then moving on as they are told to, to really get to "know" that little community as much as possible - every nook and cranny of every trailer, every thin corner of the two camper trailers, the lack of protection felt in the pop-up camper, the strange comfort of the Unabomber shack at the end of the row - because in your travels, you don't know shit except right where you step, when you step it. If you haven't touched that mile of back road, then you don't know it.
That's the essence of this song to me, and that's why it's such a great goddamned song. Fuck your airplanes and interstate system and most definitely fuck your Google maps and smart phone directions. You're just getting yourself further and further lost, and farther off the needed path.
STEAL "Free Born Man"
NEXT:
Slowed down by the master!

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