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.

Wednesday, January 30

SONG OF THE DAY: Crying in the Chapel



The metaphysical veil is thick today… I can feel the pressure pushing in on all fronts. The fog machine malfunctions and you can hear the cogs and gears grinding because the oil of forever progress is not sustainable and the mechanisms are struggling to keep up the pace we’ve all been forced to depend upon. Metaphysical land mines are everywhere, exploding into unseen crises, damaged people going about their days as if nothing has happened but inside they are mangled, missing limbs, bleeding to a psychic death, but afraid to admit it on the external level. I rode the bus this morning, simultaneously about to cry and about to smash the shit out of anybody who looked at me wrong. Some kid was in the back with me, playing his fucking phone out loud, blip bloop noises, and there was no fog to hide in, I refused the electronic opioids in my pockets, and stared out the window as construction continued unabated on Main Street of Charlottesville, Virginia, the busy town pretending everything was moving along just fine, everything’s fine. But you can feel it… it’s all really close to breaking down. I wish you well.

W3 D0N'T 4LW4YS R3C0GN1Z3...

we don't always recognize
how sheltered from our culture's
manufactured storms we are

Tuesday, January 29

W4LK3D 4L0NG TH1S R1V3R 4LL...

walked along this river all
my life, at various points
(for both me and the river)

SONG OF THE DAY: Chambea


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You can pretend you’re better than all that, which most people do who share songs extremely online and write little half-clever blurbs to go with them, but I’mma be honest... a lot of times it just makes sense to be blasting some trash ass reggaeton with twenty chicken nuggets from the Burger King drive-thru riding shotgun. You might not have anywhere in particular to go, but you’re still gonna go the long way because fuck it, even moving nowhere is better than being stuck. [Please note the Nature Boy in this video.]

4 M1LL10N F-150S...

a million F-150s
slowly becoming human
version of honeysuckle

Monday, January 28

4N0TH3R M0RN1NG 4W0K3...

another morning awoke
on the only planet I've
known; still hoping to escape

SONG OF THE DAY: I Only



Your Ol’ Droog is a rapper from a futuristic dystopian era of post-empire America where people carry handheld computing devices which monitor and share all their activities with the corporate authorities, who exchange data with the military industrial police state. The corporate authorities maintain revenue streams, all the while advertising the majority of their services as “free”, because the people have been enculturated to fetishize freedom without critical thinking. Thus the mere mention of “freedom” or “free” triggers positive chemical releases in the brains of the people, thus supplicating them, and also pulling them further into the mechanisms in place. Most humans in this futuristic dystopia actually openly snitch on themselves, revealing publicly info that would better be kept concealed, under the guise of being “woke”, and that revealing as much as possible is empowering, when in actuality it only further narrowed down their own potential outcomes, as well as being used to microfilter the neurological advertising directed to them individually.
Your Ol’ Droog’s offering here, thus ironically refrains, “I only play the games that I win at,” which performatively acts in control of the rapper’s larger life, which works to give dystopian era inhabitants the momentary dopamine release of denying reality, pretending that choice is still a possibility in an increasingly engineered everyday world. While seemingly an exercise in independent thought, it actually works as an affirmation of the mechanisms in place, and keeps individual inhabitants off their oddy knocky. All of our Gullivers seem to us to be traveling a worldwide web of various places, when in actuality we are prisoners in our own metaphysical pens, suffering from solitary confinement of the heart, and numbing ourselves to the pain through as much digital fog as we can ingest, each and every day.

Sunday, January 27

Saturday, January 26

L0V3 T00 B3 3XP3R1M3NT...

love too be experiment
in creating cyborg mind
to replace my machine one

SONG OF THE DAY: Wrestlemania 20



The wrestling storylines today are mostly just the WWE storylines, and that storyline’s largest manufactured arc is that somehow the Royal Rumble leads up to Wrestlemania season. This of course is all trash storylines compared to back when wrestling was a myriad of regional promotions ran like degenerate improv theater, where the writers were basically outliners and the ridiculous characters who fell through the cracks into the wrestling business fleshed out the details, often times outlandishly. What I’m saying is despite the resurgence in digital appreciation for the wrestling arts, the WWE is fucking boring. And it always has been. But if you tell somebody that, they get mad at you, if they are a wrestling fan. But being a wrestling fan and thinking the WWE is great is akin to saying you love having sex but all you’ve ever had is straight missionary. You have barely even explored what it means, and to be honest, haven’t even gotten to the good stuff.
But we are also America, a prudish culture that has built this myth that we are bold because of our freedoms. Yet most people are afraid to express themselves in any true fashion, and thus the repressive expression of the WWE is perfect as a performative act of quirkiness. But in actuality, it is no coincidence that Vince McMahon’s wife Linda is part of Donald Trump’s governing team. The WWE and Donald Trump are fraternal brothers, and the pretend change “drain the swamp” antics of Trump which have given us open fascism are the result of years of social conditioning that the WWE’s professional wrestling has given us. All this didn’t happen overnight – we were primed for decades.
Anyways, it’s Royal Rumble weekend, which is a buffet of boring chemically enhanced performers, mixed in with faded stars of yesteryear, meant to create a nostalgic pop in the greater markdom, in order to spark a desire to give half a fuck about the upcoming Wrestlemania, which pretends to be a Super Bowl of sorts, thus tying the Royal Rumble to Wrestlemania build-up into Super Bowl weekend, and the twin sports entertainment arms of American fascism (football and wrestling, neither of which is actually what it claims to be).
We are not doomed, but we’re way more fucked than anybody seems willing to admit. There will be a period of nihilistic degeneracy, as exemplified by this Westside Gunn (and Griselda Records crew) track named after Wrestlemania 20. I am too old now to look forward to this period, but fuck it, you play the hand you’re dealt, even if the dealer is dealing from the bottom of the deck, your entire life.

3STR4NG3D M0TH3R S3NT PL41N3ST...

estranged mother sent plainest
greyest towels for christmas;
it's the lack of thought that counts

Friday, January 25

SONG OF THE DAY: tH3 r4p (45s on 33)



Millie Jackson has it down pat, recognizing the space needed in alternative relationships, and also setting her own boundaries, specifically the lack of washing other people’s funky draws. But mostly listening to this classic vinyl rip into cyberworld reminds me I have my turntable hooked up again, and purple christmas lights, which I should just call life lights because they’re more for regular life than christ things, and I’ve got a giant stack of 45s over there across the room, just begging to be slowed down to 33, to manifest an intention to slow down this life itself. MP3s don’t have speed, so we think this rapid-fire pace is the way the world is. Shit man, J. Cole just dropped new tracks yesterday and already half the world has declared them a triumph or failure and people steadily cranking out thinkpieces about SHIT THAT CAME OUT YESTERDAY. Slow the fuck down y’all. Slow the fuck down.

S3ND1NG 0VR CH1LDR3N 0FF T0...

sending our children off to
broken schools, hoping somehow
against all facts it works out

Thursday, January 24