SONG OF THE DAY: Smooth Operator (Chopped Not Slopped)

I know y’all all got little fancy blue tooth speakers that look like friendly robot scat which are convenient and easy to carry about out of doors and easily connect your wirelessly transmitted cybertron devices to, but please don’t forget about the importance of yard speakers. When I say yard speakers, I don’t mean specifically designed outdoor sound systems on some fancy assed rich white people who live in Florida ass patio area with them speakers attached to buildings all up high, which usually also has outside grill that’s essentially just exterior gas-controlled shit that people heat up pre-made patties and sausages and call this “grilling” in the most basic yet consumptive possible fashion. I mean straight up yard speakers – old ass 25 pound wood cabinet speakers that used to be your inside speakers but you got better bigger louder inside speakers now, or maybe not louder because these old ass wood speakers were just too damn powerful inside wherever you rent or live and was turning your entire inside existence into a subwoofer just too damn much to peaceably enjoy. Or maybe you got a baby now and the ol’ lady gets pissed when the baby gets woke up so you relegated the good speakers to yard speakers for the sake of still being able to blast them. Or maybe you got enough speaker cable your indoor powerful ass speakers get transitioned into yard speakers. But the purpose of the yard speaker is to go the fuck outside, and boom music throughout the yard and hopefully beyond. If you’re close to neighbors, either have good taste in music or point the yard speaker in the least offensive direction (or most offensive if you hate your neighbors, which is not uncommon either, because there’s a lot of assholes out there). Obviously a yard speaker needs a source of sound, and that’s what makes all the little robot shit speakers so exciting to new-fangled-minded people, because there’s less work involved. But really if you got a stereo, it’s not that hard to run speaker wire out through a window, back into your yard speakers which are resting on a milk crate off the ground or maybe on a wooden chair you keep for yard speaker pedestal. My best set-up ever was permanent yard speakers (meaning they didn’t go inside any more), sitting on milk crates, with little tarps to cover them up. Eventually the tarps got weathered and wore out, but I wanted to see how tough these yard speakers were – old 1970s thickness tested by legit weather. They lasted a long while, long enough to get new tarps once or twice, but eventually even they gave out. The cool thing is we live in an abundance of old shit in America, at least until they stopped making good shit, but we are still in the closing window of there being tons of extra yard speaker sets available at thrift stores/junk shops/online for cheap and even free. So I got more yard speakers, in my case at the too good to throw away carport at the local rural dump, where I found three sets of yard speakers over the years. Sadly we live in an era of diminishing returns on America’s greatest period of yard speaker production, which it should be noted coincides with the historical birth of hip hop, and that DJ Kool Herc as well as other early DJs were essentially carrying around yard speakers to build loud sound systems that ran off public park power to create early hip hop shows. The communal nature of the yard speaker as well as the historical importance in American hip hop sub-culture cannot be overlooked. Having yard speakers that you’ve sort of stumbled upon, yet cared enough to make loud as fuck and only for playing the best taste levels of music, this is important shit to a true lounger. That’s why the commodity of installing exterior sound systems around your expensive patio set-up at your mortgaged home is not the same. Most loungers don’t own homes, and in fact it is testament to one’s power to lounge that they can build a high quality lounging environment even without the privilege of ownership.

The basic starter pack for any resistant human not about the mundane stagnant normal American existence is tarps, milk crates, and machetes. But if you are forced to remain in place, without accepting stagnancy, a good set of yard speakers is a wonderful addition to your (always) temporary environment, and proves this by still touching on two of those three basics of tarp and milk crate. And as summer yard loungin’ season is now in full effect, and many are in fact enjoying a long weekend right now, I cannot encourage you enough to blast some nice screwed and chopped music through your yard speakers. We’ll save discussing the merits of dominoes vs. Spades vs. small stakes poker next time.