SONG OF THE DAY: Aww Shit!

I used to play a lot of Tha Alkaholiks and used to be an alcoholic. I actually got the 12-inch single that was the first beat Madlib made that got released on wax, when he was still part of Lootpack. Tha 'Liks used to be an absolute favorite, so though I don't drink no more, I never gave up them. And I still say, in old head way that references archaic media, Side A of King Tee's Tha Triflin' Album, where Tha Alkaholiks made their debut, is one of the all-time best hip hop tape sides ever.

SONG OF THE DAY: Glad Tidings

I bring you glad tidings of the beginning of the end of this false age of hyper-awareness and hyper-productivity and hyper-speed expectations of the human mind. The wind chimes of destiny should be all you hear once the outage has spread through enough machines to silence the white noise we've pretended was progress towards utopia all this time. Do not be afraid, though I know many of us will be, with real questions about the logistics of post-epoch distribution of survival ingredients. Have faith in the Universe, as well as all the wonderful humans already blessed with universal magnetism that have been silenced by all the buzzing we were trained to believe was comforting. The men who have led us led us astray, way further back down the line than most of us realize. It's okay though, because the Universe always recalibrates into balance. The Earth is only a small piece of the Universe, but it too can recalibrate if allowed to. Man is only a small piece of the Earth, and we too can recalibrate if we let ourselves. But we are also a small enough piece that if we don't let ourselves, we're expendable, in order for balance to be maintained. Let's hope our egos don't get in the way and we continue to claim a false dominion over all the we are able to sense.

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Hear Music

One of the main reasons I don’t get all caught up on “Oh, gotta listen to this new music right away!” is there’s always a false sense of immediacy attached to capitalism, that we all gives ourselves because we act like we’re supposed to be curators of culture when actually we’re mostly just getting tricked into consuming a bunch of shit. There is no must-watch TV or must-see movies or brand new albums we have to hear, and if any of that shit is actually as good as it’s being hyped, it’ll still be around when we get around to it.
I say all this because I had no idea this song existed six months ago. I never even heard of Debbie Deb that I can remember. And if I had heard of it back in 1983 when it came out, I was a little aspiring delinquent metalhead, so I probably would’ve been too cool to give a fuck. But this song did come across my experiential radar this year, and it immediately became a favorite. The 45 also went to the top of the list to acquire, because I could tell that beat slowed down was gonna bump like crazy. And it does. I can’t imagine not spinning this record already whenever I have a slowed down 45 gig. That doesn’t happen often because most people don’t want things they don’t recognize. They want nostalgia or basic, and usually a combination of those two. Shit, even when I was at the stupid local community radio station, when I was getting run off for daring to think I could play records in the daytime, the rock programming manager lady was like “We just prefer to keep weird stuff late at night.” To a basic ass fucker, a slowed down beat is weird, especially if they don’t already recognize the song.
We live in such basic times. We need more Debbie Debs.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take Me In Your Arms

I am not a music nerd so I didn’t know “Latin freestyle” was a genre of music that bridged the gap between disco and house music. But since I been collecting 45s the past few years to play them all slow because fuck regular speed anything, it’s too damn hot, one thing I realized is my all-time favorite beat when calculated at 45 at 33 rpms is “Let the Music Play” by Shannon. And apparently because of this whole ass compilation of “Latin freestyle” I downloaded from a bootlegging music blog (because I still play mp3s like an old ass man who isn’t that old because mp3s are fairly new in the grand scheme of things), there’s a whole genre of that style of music. So I’ve been playing the shit out of it, and now trying to find all this shit on 45 as well. I do not have Lil Suzy’s “Take Me In Your Arms” on 45 yet, and Suzy used to be my ex-wife’s name, but after we got divorced she took her herbalism more seriously and became Suzanna. I thought about texting her this song but didn’t because it’s better to maintain good boundaries now. A weird fact of 21st century life is it’s usually them folks who always be talking about boundaries that you need to be practicing having boundaries with. She’s not Suzy anymore anyways, so the song no longer applies.

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Been Having An Affair

If multiverse theory is true, somewhere in the endless expanse of universe, there's a whole planet full of humanoids who all look like Latimore. I wanna go there. That has nothing to do with this song, other than Latimore and Tonya both recorded for long time Mississippi record label Malaco Records. But a planet full of Latimores probably gonna have some hilarious cheating scenarios too though.

SONG OF THE DAY: Let Us Pray (kudzu'd)

Praying to the hidden Gods of Greater Appalachia for rain, both real and metaphysical. The ground is brown and dry and thirsty as fuck right now. But we need a metaphysical rain, too, in the unseen realms, which have become extremely dried out by the over-application of heart pesticides. I'm sure it's been going on longer than I can feel it like I have, but definitely the past decade or so, the heart pesticide usage has become so heavy that life itself feels toxic. Nobody should be existing like this, especially not a people that love to wave flags and proclaim their freedom, in the name of the false gods of money and ego and pride, and killing off their grandchildren to have big things that are unnaturally cool. Not sure how folks don't see how this contributes to how dry our existence is, but also I can't entirely fault folks who have been bombarded with brainwash for so long. Yakubian engineers tinkering with the neurology of 85% of us, still.

SONG OF THE DAY: Catching of feelings

(sounds of dog barking)
BEEN CAUGHT FEELING
ONCE
WHEN I WAS FIVE

SONG OF THE DAY: Eternal Ridin' (XL Middleton remix)

[Wrote this all out because XL Middleton is the purveyor of a genre of funk I like to call "driving a customized van through the hills of Appalachia in 1978". It's an unparalleled vibe.]
As some of y’all may or may not know, I got a time machine behind my mom’s house that’s an old ’69 Chevelle Supersport. Unfortunately, like most things in my life, it’s raggedy, so my time machine only goes to the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky, around 1978 now. (You can keep turning the dial to the left to go further back in time, but now that I’m not floating bad check at the Food City for groceries, I hadn’t been turning the time machine dial back anymore, for fear of hitting the end. 1978, where I’m at, is about 91/92 on the old school FM dial, so it ain’t gonna go too much further back, and I don’t know how to calibrate timeframes on my haphazard time machine.)
I think at some point, while getting mad about vintage clothes resellers, specifically selling old biker and wrestling t-shirts at astronomical prices, I got to thinking about old school customized vans from the 1970s. (No diss to vintage resellers, but I just can’t abide those prices. I know folks can get it, but just as there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, not sure there’s ethical vintage reselling either. But I also accept the fact we’re all just trying to survive capitalism, too, so I’m more pissed off that this is the shared collective existence we have, more than individuals selling old school redneck shit at astronomical prices to extremely online hipsters.) And since I could always go back ton 1978 Pikeville, Kentucky, I decided, what if I got a custom van?
The problem is, well first off, money. Today money don’t look like back then money. But I had found a meticulous workaround (buying old money) that took a lot of time. I saved up money to get a car, but they didn’t have a lot of nice custom vans in Pikeville, Kentucky, back then, at least not like what I hoped to get. So I bought a ’72 AMC Matador instead, blue, because I briefly had one in the ‘90s, and it was an awesome car, even if I pretty much blew it up the first month I had it. Once I had my ’72 Matador in ’78 Pikeville, I realized a much quicker way to get old money that worked in those days was to steal it, not really robberies, because that’s not cool, but stealing it from unsecure stores because they didn’t have the same surveillance technology back then. But I usually tried bigger places away from Pikeville, kind of finding the sweet spot being going up 119 toward Charleston and hitting bigger towns in southern West Virginia (Williamson, Logan, Madison… where I contemplated trying to find a young Jesco White before realizing I probably didn’t wanna get involved in some 1978 White family chaos and derail getting back to nowadays indefinitely over some stupid shit). I mostly did my robbing there, and right before coming back to the time machine in Pikeville, so I’d park my Matador, and come back to now with the old cash, which remained old. Later, in a few days, after I knew any heat that might’ve arrived at the time died down, I’d go back. Eventually I’d built up enough of an old money nest egg through various robberies in southern West Virginia, I could go looking for an old school customized van.
I was hoping for the full deal – bubble windows, shag carpet, wizard murals on the side… all you’d imagine if you used your now brain which has been polluted with the faux infinite possibilities of digital imagination. But that type of van, customized to that level, wasn’t easily found in Kentucky. I also didn’t wanna go looking for vans in West Virginia with money I’d stole there (because maybe I was wanted, which also lolol imagine my simple 2024 ass being wanted in 1978 West Virginia). I started creeping up 23 on the look, and actually found the first cool customized van I wanted in Prestonsburg, not far from Pikeville. It was basic customized, with captain’s chairs and nice powder blue shag, and a spade bubble window, but no mural, nothing too outlandish. So I bought it.
The problem was, my time machine was just a ’69 Chevelle Supersport, so I couldn’t bring the customized van back in the time machine. So I bought it and left it parked at the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky. And I’m not really gonna be able to bring them to now, ever. But I did keep looking. Well actually, I started going to Ashland, Kentucky/Huntington, West Virginia area, more to draw dirtgod monikers on the coal and freight cars there. I hadn’t done it ton, maybe only a couple thousand monikers there in 1978, enough that’ll be known to train riders and railroad workers of that time frame, at least there, but not wider. I hope to eventually get thousands and thousands more in those yards. That Ashland CSX yard was just a Chessie yard back then, so it’s got those beautiful yellow cabooses, which I never mark on, out of respect for the workers, and to keep them off my ass. But hopefully eventually I’ll hit enough freight cars back then that the dirtgod moniker will become known as a famous old school one like Bozo Texino or Palm Tree Herby, and the ones I do now will be disregarded as some new school hipster copycat stealing from the old legend. I don’t mind getting cancelled in the nowadays if I can thrive in the past though.
But I found a really nice customized van for sale, with a Frank Frazetta Death Dealer style mural on both sides, which this was even before Molly Hatchet had come out, so that was ahead of its time there in Huntington. I definitely bought that one, and got it back to Pikeville and parked it by the other one at the Food City, on the far corner of the lot furthest from the road, so kind of out of the way to be safer, although leaving a car parked somewhere like that was way safer back then I think. The worst person around was most likely modern me when I went back looking to rob stores in West Virginia lol.
I tried to be happy with the two vans, and my time machine fits another person, so occasionally I’ll take one of my homies with to go driving in the vans, but only certain people, because most folks can’t handle time travel and will blow up the whole thing by telling too many folks about our secret spot. Mostly, it’s made best sense to take the graff crew homies, one at a time, because they enjoy going to the Chessie yard and doing panels on old school freight in ’78, putting them way ahead of the freight graffiti movement, and actually happening at the same time graffiti was blowing up in New York City on the subway trains. Eventually, that’s gonna fuck with somebody too, to “discover” there was full-blown graffiti happening in Appalachia at the same time it was blowing up in New York City. But the graff homies know how to not run their mouth, and it’s fun to drive the vans around the mountains, even though instead of each of us driving one, it’s more fun to both ride in the same. Kinda weird to have one dude per van tooling around like that, lol, but we did it for a while before realizing that shit was weird.
But I did get to wandering on my own, and once I got to Lexington, Kentucky, the customized van scene was strong enough there were more options. I actually bought two more in 1978 Lexington, also now parked in Pikeville at the Food City, because again, I can’t transport them back. I actually put the first one I bought up for sale again, by the road, but I’m never actually there in 1978 for the most part to meet anybody to buy it, and I don’t have a phone number back then, especially not one that would work now so I could answer it here and be like, “Yeah, I can meet you on Saturday morning” to somebody from 1978 Pikeville. It’s a lot to juggle. But I’ve got it parked by the road, with a For Sale sign on it, and the other three just sitting there in the back corner of the parking lot, chilling, three nice ass customized vans, like the nicest vans in all of Pikeville.
So anyways, if you end up having a weird ass time machine that’s calibrated all fucked up like that to go to Pikeville, Kentucky, and you see the three vans parked in the back corner of the lot, with the Frazetta mural and wizard mural and bubble windows and purple to pink fade glitter paint on the one, those are mine. Leave a note for me if you want.
And even though already having four old ass vans in the parking lot there feels like a lot, I’m already contemplating driving all the way to Louisville, or maybe even taking a long week off and going up to Cincinnati and seeing what I can find. I know there’d be some wild shit in Cincinnati, for sure. But again, as always the risk with that type of trip is knowing how I am, and I could get too intricately wrapped up in some 1978 bullshit that I never make it back to 2024. And while that can seem enticing, the lack of family support and real roots in that time period leaves me feeling very out of place a lot of times driving around. If I got stuck there, it’d be way worse. And I guess once I started thinking about, “What if one of my vans got stolen?” from the Food City parking lot, it dawned on me that while I was galivanting around robbing stores in West Virginia or cruising in a van or looking for shit to get into somewhere further away, that would be massively fucked up to come back to Pikeville and see my time machine Chevelle gone. I’d be trapped, and limited to whatever I had on hand. I’d have to get a job in that time and live the rest of my life in the past, which would absolutely suck. A lot of people act like they might want that, but it’d drive them crazy if they actually had to do it. Trust me… visiting for a day or two is more than enough.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cuando Vuelves

“I’m Your Puppet” in Spanish is a special kind of banger. This doesn’t appear to exist on 45, at all, which is really disappointing. I guess the market ain’t that fuckin’ free after all.

SONG OF THE DAY: Is It Because I'm Black (kudzu'd)

Just another slowed down old school 45 reissue, because that’s what we do.

SONG OF THE DAY: Chicken Heads

Now I might not be the sharpest throwing star in the ninja fannypack, but I think this song might be a metaphor for something else.

SONG OF THE DAY: Chains and Things

This came off a “Wu Tang sampled this shit before” collection I took off a music blog somewhere or another. RZA’s mom’s record collection must’ve been dope as fuck, to be honest.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Glad You're Mine

One time I fell in false love with a woman because I woke up in her empty bed in the morning (we didn’t do anything) and she was blasting Al Green while frying potatoes. Al Green really makes me feel some kinda way.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings (kudzu'd)

Bearings being gotten, on a daily basis, except I don’t go by the calendar, I go by seeing the moon in the sky. Much easier to get your bearings when you go about it looking up towards space (which also reflect inwardly, towards equal space). My crown’s been feeling a little extra stardusted lately… the beneficial effects of sitting my ass outside watching the lighting bugs create aura arrow doodads to better focus my visions of the future. Shout out to the lightning bugs, and the moon. Shout out to the future.

SONG OF THE DAY: Bills Be Gawn (kudzu'd)

Yesterday was payday, and more so than most paydays, I had more bills than paycheck. (Most of us know this feeling. It’s more common than not.) Today, my bills do not be gone, but my paycheck is. I don’t think people randomly end up on internet sites anymore, mostly just scrolling social media for a simplified corn feed of actual information, but in the off chance anyone is, and you have discretionary income, consider buying a railroad haiku spike at my online shop my online shop. Or a book. Prices are always cheaper direct to me with cashapp or venmo too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Surreal

The wonderful thing about music on Earth is it’s so vast, you can’t possibly know it all. There’s always amazing shit out there to find out about. I never really consciously knew about João Donato, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist. I’m guessing that despite that, I’d heard him on songs before, being he played with so many jazz heavyweights, like Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamria, and others. But he has a vast discography from Brazil, and for whatever reason, I downloaded this album he made with his son, Donatinho. Actually, I’m pretty confident the reason I downloaded it was because I saw it on a music blog (I’m one of the 19 people that still goes to those) with this album cover, which might be the most amazing father/son art I’ve ever seen. I DREAM of being the kind of father where my children would think art like this portrays our relationship. It was a surprise banger on my old iphone 5s working as an ipod in the past year, as I’ve gotten more and more into synthesized funk chaos to combat the AI cybertron battles with (as a soundtrack). “Surreal” is probably my favorite track. And apparently, it exists on a 45 from Japan, but I haven’t found an affordable copy as of yet. But one day, I will.
Sadly Donato passed away last summer, at the well-earned age of 88. That also means he was in his early 80s when he made this album with his son, which is also something to aspire to as a human being. We need less weird 80-something billionaires who want to control presidents to stifle current generations, and more weird 80-something kooks making space funk for future generations. That’s just textbook Futurism 101.

SONG OF THE DAY: Keep It Moving

At some point this was something I wrote on this very blog. And then Boogie Brown used text to voice to make it into words that he dropped behind this Southern Gothicc Futurism Appalachian Boom Bap beat he made. And that came out on a Blue Globe Beats release, which I played this track a lot in the car, so it reappears on the blog as a song of the day. On one hand, it could be called “meta” if you think of it in digital terms. But it’s also just regeneration of thought seeds, with some pieces dominant and others recessive, and a re-creation of creative genetics. Nothing is original, and you can’t own art, even if it comes from your own mind. You can’t own anything. I mean, we tell ourselves otherwise, but we’re lying like a mufucka most of the time. Yes, to ourselves. But you already know that most likely.

SONG OF THE DAY: For Those Who Love to Groove (kudzu'd)

Posting slowed down song videos to youtube has been an interesting foray over the past few years, especially as I snag mp4s to use for the videos. I learned a long time ago that you can’t use actual videos for actual songs that have been slowed down, because there’s dueling copyrights between the song owner and the video owner, and youtube just shuts it down completely because they don’t know who to direct your views to. So I tend to try and find performances of songs rather than the “official” videos to use.
Some of the old Sonido Dueñez rips that I made videos for have been illuminating, because youtube reveals to me what the actual song originally was, because Dueñez’s mixtapes were notorious for not having the actual song title written on them. But some of those sneak through and I guess nobody owns the U.S. copyright or some shit, and I don’t even get a copyright notice where any profiteering acquired from the data accumulate while you watch the videos I made can be sent. So it goes to me (adding to my lifetime youtube earnings of $0, lol).
I had one especially great song I ripped and made a video for, Karthago’s “I Give You Everything You Want”, which was a 45 reissued by Fraternity Music Group in 2016, but copyright owners wouldn’t let the song live on youtube, regardless of speed or video added.
Anyways, all this is to say there’s a lot of weird behind the scenes data analysis going on, and sometimes I have to make 2 or 3 videos before one actually clears youtube. But in the process of slowing down this amazingly funky song by Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio (his band from before the “Ghostbusters” era), I got the normal copyright notice where someone else was taking the profits off it. Except it wasn’t Ray Parker Jr. & Raydio. Somehow, some rapper/producer from Texas named Six2 basically took this old “For Those Who Love to Groove” synth funk, and claimed it as his own beat, and had some woman throw a hook over it, while he raps. Not trying to hate on nobody’s art, because normally I wouldn’t, but his song ain’t all that to where he needs to be claiming the copyright of me slowing down the old Ray Parker Jr. jam. But he did, which tells me he ain’t my kinda people. Out here playing lawyerball and calling it art. The release the song that claims it’s this comes from also features a couple of features from Big Mike of the Geto Boys and Timbaland, so maybe Six2 had financial backing and was throwing money at features and actually cleared the entire rights to the instrumental. I don’t know. I do know when I spin that motherfucker live, slowed down, next week while DJing, can’t nobody say shit to me in real life. And art is more for real life benefit than filing legal paperwork and attempting in vain to stack some coins like Scrooge McDuck.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down

This is such a wonderful song (even if this is a cover version). It seems too simple that it got co-opted for zombie movie/show soundtracks, but that also just goes to show how entertainment lacks nuance and doesn’t really see beyond the one line of the song. Anyways, a clean copy of Brother Claude Ely’s original 45 of this is probably the highest of high on my holy grail list of 45s I hope to come across some day. But I tend to get any cover of it I can find that’s at least 20 years old. (New ironic religion lacks the holy ghost spirit.)

SONG OF THE DAY: Play At Your Own Risk

The history of racism in America affected the segregation of musical genres, which is a shame. It would’ve been nice, in retrospect, to have music jump those borders more easily. A great example of this for me lately is Planet Patrol’s “At Your Own Risk”, which was made of extra tracks not used in Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”, so has a similarity to it, like an alternate third jersey version of Planet Rock almost. But there was a time in my life, when I had just gotten my license, and on Saturdays the liquor store in Farmville would close at noon, but the one in Drakes Branch was open ‘til 6. And my dad would get his weekend’s liquor supply Thursday after work in Farmville, because that was payday for him, and the liquor store was usually the first stop. But generally speaking, folks would show up on Friday night to play cards at our trailer, and bottles would get passed, and if anything was left at the end of a long Friday night, it wasn’t gonna go long on Saturday afternoon. So we’d drive to Drakes Branch to hit the liquor store, so he pops could restock for the impending long Saturday night (which would basically be a repeat of the previous night most times, with most of the same characters). If it was football season, he might even have to double up on the Saturday run to make sure Sunday afternoon was covered for the Redskins game.
In retrospect, that drive from our trailer in southern Prince Edward County, to Keysville, then turn by the abandoned factory on 59 to get to Drakes Branch, turning left onto Main Street of a town that was already dying even then, that close to Reagan’s politics of doom that turned the doomed into The Doomed, “At Your Own Risk” would’ve been the perfect soundtrack. And it’s a long enough song it could’ve ate up most of that 10 mile or so stretch on 59. I do recognize and appreciate my dad’s constant wishful thinking back then, that one bottle liquor on a Thursday evening was actually gonna be enough to last the whole weekend. Too bad he never got the help to get closer to making that equation actually work out. That too is the byproduct of all our segregation and division, where we get fractured into our little silos of self-destruction and think we’re out here going through something entirely on our own, when in actuality in that 10 miles we just drove down the road, even out in the middle of nowhere, we just passed 50 motherfuckers going through the exact same shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nous Savon Stout (kudzu'd)

One time a friend of mine stole a spaceship in high school, and had it hidden down a logging trail near where we lived. Getting in was really cool, because you realize you’re climbing into a spaceship, and also we were really high, plus had like two cases of Miller Genuine Draft with us, which is what we drank back then. But I remember the windshield being really hard to see out of, like it had a fucked up angle, and I guess whatever radar screens a normal spaceship uses to see ahead of itself was broken in this one, so we couldn’t really drive it in the daytime, because then somebody would’ve seen us, but we couldn’t really drive it at night either, unless we went super slow, because we couldn’t see shit. Luckily, there’s not a lot in the sky, but even then, a couple bowls too far into 1990s homegrown and more than a handful of empty MGD bottles clanking around on the ground, it wasn’t as fun as I would’ve expected. Plus we couldn’t figure out how to work the stereo, like in retrospect I think it had some sort of aux cord we haven’t gotten to yet, but back then we were just like, “How the fuck do we put a CD or tape into this thing?” I think the second time we went out, I took a little boombox with, but for whatever reason batteries die faster in the sky once you get outside the atmosphere. Shit never works out like you hope.

SONG OF THE DAY: A&W

I listen to newer music, too, especially when I think it's love songs to root beer.

SONG OF THE DAY: Get Thy Bearings

Sometimes I dream about releasing bootleg 45s of things that absolutely should’ve been issued on 45 at some point but never were. I’ve got a cover version of this by The Sand Dollars on 45 that’s pretty great, but the OG is the OG. How did Donovan have a beat like this in 1968?

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm In The Mood

I used to have a knockin’ boots situationship with a woman who always dimmed the lights down low and played old blues music, like every time. It actually was nice and created quite the vibe, plus her bed was small, like an old school twin bed which is great because you gotta get serious, no room to escape and dilly dally. Because of this cellular memory in my physical body though (with serotonin exclamation marks), when I hear certain old blues music, it gets me all riled up. And of course it does, because just look at this song. That was sexy ass music, designed (by divine minds not actually purposefully designing too hard with the brain) to make one inclined to do just what we was doing while we was listening to it.

SONG OF THE DAY: What A Funky Night

Love bumping shit like this as western civilization falls apart (as it should).

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Never Found a Girl

Cultural mainstream is still pretty strong, even in these faux quirky digital times. Folks like to think we have access to everything and know about more stuff that ever, but the algorithm is still driven by pre-conceived biases, and so much shit exists outside the mainstream. There's all these non-mainstream living legends who exist, and do their thing to a big successful scale, and it's integral to certain scenes, but the mainstream still has no clue. Sunny Ozuna is an example. Dude has been making the brown-eyed soul bangers for decades, probably most famously with Sunny & The Sunliners (or Sunny y Los Sunliners, depending on your heritage). A lot of his classics have been reissued through some modern souldie labels, but Sunny himself is still out here, at age 80, playing big Chicano car shows and regional festivals, and pretty much still a staple wherever there's a large Mexican-American population.
It's summertime cookout season, and I remember being at the neighbor's cookouts back growing up, blessed to have experienced a non-white majority environment at an early age (to learn humility and how to shut the fuck up and get along better), and I think about this cultural mainstream vs non-mainstream norms with cookout season, because Frankie Beverly & Maze feels like cookout music to me. Just hearing certain Maze songs just bring those vibes, completely, like I can imagine the potato salad and barbecue chicken in front of me lol. But the mainstream (meaning, white culture) doesn't even know about that shit. Even in all the genres that the mainstream has Christopher Columbused over the decades, certain things like Maze or Sunny seem to somehow still escape the nets.
Anyways, Sunny is a classic, and for the most part, I've ended more DJ sets I've had than not with the 45 of Sunny & The Sunglows "Smile Now Cry Later" played at 33. It's my "turn out the lights, the party's over" song. This ain't that song, but it's still a banger. Sunny's got a deep discography of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Summer (kudzu'd)

Summertime means slow down. Any time means slow down. Time needs to slow down. Time is a social construct. Slow down and live longer. On one hand, I may be older than I once was. But on the other, fuck it, I like this side of the dirt better. I think I’ll stomp around on it a little longer.

SONG OF THE DAY: Two of Hearts (12" version)

It apparently is 12 inch version week here at the old blog nobody reads that still writes about music as if people still download mp3s and want music recommendations and don’t just let spotify suggested playlists pour music down their throat. This song is great though, and me pushing these wonderful disco beats on you has nothing to do with Pride month. I like shit like this year round. I’m comfortable with that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ring My Bell (12" version)

This is one of my favorite 45s to play slow… the beat just gets so thick and crazy. Then I started bumping this download of the long ass 12-inch disco version, where the crazy beat just gets all the room it needs to stretch its legs and flail its arms. True break beat shit. And a few months ago, that reminded me that during the late disco/early hip hop era, a lot of stuff got released on 12-inch records at 45 speed for singles. Including this. So I copped a nice little stack of 45 rpm 12-inch singles, and been meaning to make a new DJ Honeysuckle Vines mix with them, most likely coming out the gate with this as the opening track. And it’s an 8 minute 10 second song, that slowed down will be like nearly 12 minutes. I know that’s a “simple” calculation if you’re a white guy who loves ska music and keeps your shirt tucked in all the time, but I’m not like that so my brain can’t just calculate that shit all willy nilly; I have to let the beat ride and see where it goes. And whether I make that 12-inch mix later tonight, or later this week, or four years from now, I will let this fuckin’ “Ring My Bell” beat ride as long as it wants. In fact, maybe I need a second 12-inch copy and just juggle this beat for the whole 2 hour mixtape. Fuck it.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Want You Back (Z-Trip Remix)

I went to the first Bonnaroo, which feels crazy now because I’d never do no shit like that. Even took my toddler. We got good camping spot right behind the main stage field, so a lot of times, me and Boogie Brown just sat on the roof of his Dodge Prospector truck and watched shit. The final headliner was that Trey dude from Phish, who by that point I had already become painfully tired of. My ex-wife wanted to go in for that one though, so we had the toddler, me and Brown, and were chilling at the truck. DJ Z-Trip played the transition set between whoever was before Trey and the Trey dude, and I guess mash-up DJing wasn’t huge yet at that point, and to be honest, Serrato Scratch probably wasn’t even out, so he was working from records, and it just cracked my skull wide open. It was like the promise of a genre of music that didn’t exist yet. Unfortunately, mash-up culture didn’t pan out as wonderfully amazing as originally hoped for, and is pretty limited by copyright ownership anyways.
I actually kicked it with Brown last weekend, working on some new Prolo material, and we were talking about music, and how there’s gotta be some new thing eventually, doesn’t it? But where will it come from? Has the digital age overexposed all the world to the rest of the world and no absolute mind-blowing newness incubates in some weird creative corner by itself? It seems like all possible combinations of genres has likely been tried, and anything brand new can’t be thought of as easy as a common combo. Hip hop has become so boring, which makes sense because it’s 50 years old. Rock-n-roll pretty much died after the early ‘90s, and just turned into boring ass indy rock or throwback vibes, and that was a rough half century after it first exploded.
The ultimate problem with trying to come up with something that’s never been done is most of our brains only think of what already exists. It takes a mad flash of universal lightning spark genius hitting, not just one person, but a collective, where the idea happens simultaneously in a few different minds, but close to each other, and they power each other further up into some wild ass new thing. I’m too old for that, my mind far too saturated with worn edges and fuzzy fissures to be struck like that by the universal magnetics. But I’m still pretty wide open to enjoying it. I’m bored with culture. It’s too goddamn predictable.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sorry (I Ran All The Way Home)

A super underrated genre of music is old school doowop groups that featured 3 or 4 white guys with one black dude. It’s an exploration of how a good player-coach can hype up the rest of the team. I wish we still had the old internet and there was a whole ass blogspot posting chopped and screwed doowop music. Instead, nobody sees anything except unclickable links on social media feeds, where they poke a heart button and it creates statistics that don’t mean shit. Did you know there’s no doowop music about social media? Weird, right? Makes no sense to me. If multiverse theory is true, I gotta really think humans are an even smaller part of it all, because through free market capitalism and “tech innovation”, we’ve given ourselves less shit. No chopped and screwed doowop. No purple dominos. No Vaughn Bode Cheech Wizard embroidered patches. No pH mineral water in blue glass bottles. Just a bunch of the same useless basic shit, everywhere. Humans are like the opposite of multiverse theory… basicverse theory, where everything becomes a shittier version of what it could’ve been because it’s too inconvenient to bother with, but at a mark-up in cost somehow. I can’t wait to write doowop lyrics on the inside of a spaceship in Elon Musk’s blood. Sorry. I'm sorry sorry sorry.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Wanna Say I Love You

Ain’t nearly enough love in the world, at least not the one I’m seeing. Maybe it’s my fault and I’m entrusting my time with the wrong circles. Gotta re-tune my vibrations, not to blind oblivious positivity, because you gotta acknowledge all the fucked up going on in order to hope to create a better version of life that doesn’t have so many suffering in their existence. But even if you acknowledge the fucked, you gotta keep your vibrations attuned to love and hope. I got a good dear friend, who’s been battling various illnesses for a while, and they’re one of the strongest people I know, not like in fists in your face type strong, but biggest heart acting in the world with the intent of that heart type strong. Standing up to things that will kill you because they need standing up to type strong. Anyways, they sent me a haiku about how if we lose hope, our ancestors survived for nothing. I think about that shit all the time. Without hope, it truly is end times. And without love, you can’t have hope.

SONG OF THE DAY: Imperio de Traficantes (chopped and skrewed)

Any time somebody tries to convince me streaming services are chill and not a complete and total rip-off to both the artists (who don’t get paid) and the listener (who has limited selection which can change without your realizing), I remember there’s no chopped and screwed norteño music on streaming services for the most part. In fact, streaming minded music listeners are more likely to think “slowed and reverb” is an actual thing. We never know what we have until it’s gone. RIP good internet.
Shout out to the Skrewed Up Meskins blog, which is nothing but dead links at this point, abandoned into internet purgatory until the blogspot servers purge inactive sites eventually as a cost-cutting measure. So much great shit buried into those dead links. I'm thankful I got a bunch of it on an external hard drive still. Once it's gone, it's gone. I still wonder about once a month, "Whatever happened to DJ Dreemz?"

SONG OF THE DAY: Cool Me Off

Still see grown ass dudes who seem to be trying to share social circles with me who say “FTW” as “for the win”, which just boggles my goddamn mind. Then I remember it’s a blessing, because what if I accidentally trusted one of these types and said some real life shit to them? It’d be immediately compromised by their unreal nature. And then I am also reminded more of the world is plastic than not, which is exactly why the traditional meaning of FTW is what it is.

SONG OF THE DAY: Muñequita Blanca

Too many people got record collections without ever thinking about sound systems. And I don’t mean stereo components so much as haphazard pieces of equipment strung together in ways they might not have been designed to do so. Anybody with money can buy a bunch of records and pretend they’re a master curator of unique vibes. It takes fuckin’ skills to string a bunch of cheap ass shit together in ways they wasn’t ever meant to go together. And I guess that applies to DJing too. A true old school DJ mind is spinning easily affordable shit to themselves that got overlooked by the masses. Everything’s become too predictable. I’m bored. Let’s go set something on fire.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Little White Cloud That Cried

There’s a flag design that’s sort of become the unofficially accepted flag of Appalachia, and the person who designed it was reddit user Opossum Fucker 1863. Fun tidbits like that are what make living in the post-digital age so ridiculous weird, so that it feels nothing like the dark dystopias ‘80s sci-fi movies inclined us to believe. It’s all so absurd in actuality. Anyways, I hope you have founded a tiny little autonomous zone today, even if only for a few hours. Dirtgod loves you.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take A Look At Yourself

Been feeling off kilter and not on top of my own universal magnetics flow lately. Trying to take a look at myself, and also trying to eliminate the hating, even if of self. Hating ain’t healthy. Been feeling like I’m trapped inside clouds, and can’t get a clear look at what’s ahead, and it’s been so long like that I’m starting to doubt I’m still on the right path. But I can’t tell if the path is wrong either. Probably just been too much thinking and not enough trusting heart to lead the right way through the clouds.

SONG OF THE DAY: Poison (kudzu'd)

When I was a kid, they fed us poison through a garden hose then offered their cures in the bed of a pick-up truck with no seat belts. And even though it flipped over because drunk driving was still legal or at least acceptable or at least neither but got did anyways, I turned out okay, because I was wearing my standard issue country boy overalls, with one strap flopped sexily off my shoulder, and "yung dirtgod" airbrushed on the left leg. I never would've gotten that airbrushed on the right leg. I mean, no offense to people who airbrush nicknames on their right leg, I'm open minded and know times have changed. But I never would've done that. Just wasn't raised that way I guess.

SONG OF THE DAY: Birds

I love a good cover version so goddamned good it actually makes you forget the original even existed, and the cover takes on this weird familiarity owned by the remake. Previously to this Meters’ cover of the Neil Young song, probably the greatest example of this in my life was Swamp Dogg doing John Prine’s “Sam Stone”. This version of “Birds” is great, and for some reason, was only issued on 45 in the Caribbean. It’s on my wish list, for when my pockets ain’t flat.

SONG OF THE DAY: Just Me And You

Numero Group is my favorite label. All their reissue sets are so fuckin’ great. I ain’t had discretionary income lately, so the ol’ record collection has been put on pause for a while. Thankfully there’s a ton of good Numero comps, including all their variations on the East Side Story comps. Haha, my dumbass was looking at the back one day, actually hoping there were actually 19 volumes of the South West Side Story. Magic realism is way better than actual realism.

SONG OF THE DAY: You Made A Fool Out Of Me

I've been drawing The Fool card daily for 7 months. Not like pulling it from a Tarot deck (mostly because I pull from standard deck, as is the way of my people... though I have pulled the Big Joker pretty often in this same period), but drawing it. At first it was on paper, then in a black book, but I've begun drawing it on the walls of the third bedroom which is sort of my studio since the oldest kid is filling up a passport as ex-pat. You can't have too much The Fool iconography in your life, dancing at the edge without consciously acknowledging it, so it seems. But true Fools always know the edge is right there, and understand the potentially horrible repercussions of going over that edge. But we dance anyways, because fuck it. It's the only way we know how to be.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sin Control (kudzu'd)

Just vibing to the rising temperatures in this old house in rural America, about to break out the window fan arsenal to point in at night and out in heavy sunlight. Got a couple window units upstairs in the kids’ rooms, but I don’t fuck with the conditioned air. If it’s gonna keep getting hotter and the electric grid eventually fails sporadically, gotta get used to it. It’s weird to me folks that think survivalism is having an expensive generator that they financed. That’s temporary survival at best. You gotta have life skills and the ability to deal with bullshit. And hot ass days is dealing with bullshit.
But this is also the sweet spot, because even as it cracks 90 degrees god awfully early in the calendar year, the house still has that nice cool earth floor basement shooting cold up through the floor. Winter hadn’t been baked out the house’s bones yet. Come August, it’s gonna be different, and my sweating ass will probably be cussing the heat and wondering about getting one of those new-fangled mini-splits. Anything that’s gotta get financed though is out of my price range.
I actually hate that about green energy and generators, or getting solar panels. All it is in America is a financing scam, and you don’t save money, and you don’t save the environment unless you got the money to throw away on it, and everything is filtered through the prism of “how can we make an industry off this that can extract additional wealth?” It’s such bullshit. That’s why I look forward to grid collapse some days. All this bullshit won’t last. It never does. Wintertime comes for every self-important empire.

SONG OF THE DAY: Phukeng Special

My stomach was fucked up all night last night, I think from too much old ass turmeric in the peanut noodles I made, so I called in sick to work this morning, and went back to sleep. Woke up at like 9:30, and thought, "The heater sounds funny." It wasn't the heater, it was the toilet, which didn't latch shut after an overnight flush. This happened to time perfectly with a slow drain for the whole house due to likely root in the sewer line out in the yard. Anyways, the whole downstairs bathroom and hallway was flooded, and water was dripping into the basement. Luckily this is an old house, so the basement has a dirt/gravel floor and everything is off the ground down there, and none of it was directly beneath the drips through the floorboard. I mopped up the hallway, first time in a while, so it was a reverse blessing I guess, and will figure out the rest of it outside the house. Anyways, that's how my Monday started this week, which would seemingly be a bad sign. But what can you do? A lot of things are breaking right now culturally, some by design, others from neglect. Those who can afford to fix everything want to hoard those resources only for themselves, and are getting stingier and stingier with that wealth, whether conservative or progressive. Nobody at the top of the pyramid scam, no matter how rainbow flaggy their front yard is, wants to give up their spot up high. That ain't on the ballot this year (or any year). It never will be. So the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves, more and more. It is what it is. Life is still a blessing, even if the manmade systems we have to navigate are devilish as fuck.

Haiku Spike Sale

It has come to the point that I either need to sell more art or get a second W2 job. So I've cut the price of haiku spikes (for now) to $50 each, including for custom ones. How a custom one works is generally you tell me what you're looking for, and often times I carve more than one and let you pick. Sometimes I carve more than one but one in particular feels most like it needs to go to you.

I'm offering the same sale price of $50 apiece, or 3 for $125, on all the ones I currently have as well. At one point, I was getting $125 apiece of these, but they are a hard to explain piece of three-dimensional art, and the market for weird art shit seems to have shrunk pretty badly. I don't doubt the value of these magical art objects, and know they have great metaphysical value, and will likely have a much higher material value one day, likely after I'm dead. But I'm trying to survive capitalism while I'm still alive, unfortunately. Here is the dedicated Instagram page, as well as my website page for them.

I've been making these things for many years, having written thousands and thousands of haiku as a regular meditative practice to unwind the tangles in my life. I started carving them on found railroad spikes over a decade ago, and have improved on the process over the years. Some of them are painted, some are left natural railroad spike color, all our clear coated to help preserve the finish. But they are industrial detritus, so rust and decomposition happens. Nothing is eternal.

Railroad spikes have been used in Southern magic practices for a long time, usually as a protective device for the home. I have made a number of these with intentional messages that I've driven into the ground in various places where those haiku messages are important, with the point of the railroad spike pointing in the direction I'd hope the energy of the words would flow.

Thus, you can make a request for a custom spike with this in mind. My father used to talk about "The Power" that ran through our family, which I've come to know better and better the older I get. My art has always unconsciously accessed this realm, but as I've gotten older, I've practiced consciously doing this work when necessary. So this haiku spike could be far more than a piece of art, depending on what you're requesting.

I honestly have no idea how many haiku spikes I've made. I know it's well over a couple hundred, and probably nowhere near a thousand. But I don't know for certain. I don't believe in archiving the art that comes from me. Dandelions don't count their blossoms; they just keep blossoming for as long as possible.

It's also hard to explain the haiku spikes, because they're three-dimensional art meant to be held and read all the way around, and we've mostly been trained to look for flat art to hang on walls, because we've boxed ourselves in with how we live, so that seems most obvious. These aren't flat, but brings energetic life to your space in a far different way than flat art would.

You can go to my website's haiku spike page, and most of those should be available. You can message me (ravenmack at gmail dotcom) if you are interested in one, or more.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ozali

Space synthwaves are a good example of how you can’t always be entirely grounded. I mean, you need some grounding so you don’t float away completely (although, who’s to say that’s bad?), but many of the ties we apply to our lives are tethers more than grounding ourselves. My freestyle mind hasn’t been as strong in recent years, repetitive vocabulary, redundant experiences. Saw a dude freestyling in New Orleans who blew my mind on his immediate recall factor, so I’ve been trying to freestyle a little more each day. Almost made this a “space synthwaves” sonnet off the head, but didn’t because I’m waiting on a ride and was afraid I wouldn’t finish it before they got here. Since I didn’t do it, of course I would’ve had enough time. The Universe is a trickster, always and forever, which is why you gotta balance the grounding yourself in Earth thiccness to letting yourself float off into space, chasing the stars that humans could never be, though we are their children.

SONG OF THE DAY: Fences

I have a pretty good ability to sense metaphysical fences. It’s both a blessing and a curse. The worst side of it is how easy to see throughout my life where I’m not welcome even though nobody outright says it. That shit weighs heavy on you, because outwardly identifying open-minded types that have hearts full of hate will be hating on you, and those metaphysical fences are up big time, but they’re not physical so they’ll deny them even if you try to point it out. So you gotta just abide what you know to be true, and accept they’ve kept plausible deniability in the physical realm. America’s full of that shit, metaphysical fences behind neighborhoods where you’re just walking along, saying what’s up to random people you pass by, when all of a sudden you realize you’re about a block and a half into territory some sort of security force is gonna show up and ask you what you’re up to. Fuck it. I cut holes through metaphysical fences with haiku spikes regularly. Just drive them in the ground right at a weakened edge, deep enough into the ground the grass covers the head and nobody realizes it’s there, and a hole gets ripped in the invisible walls, and next thing you know the neighborhood is ruined. It’s like reverse gentrification. I practice it a lot actually.
By the way, this is a Blue Globe Beats song my boy Boogie Brown put together off an EP full of songs where he had computer voice read blurbs from this very blog. So this song’s words are already on here somewhere or another. If there’s a track Brown hasn’t put up on Youtube that I’m supposed to write about, I usually whip up a video just like I do with the kudzu’d 45s. For this one, I found video of hedge laying back in the day, which is the old school method of cutting hawthorn to build natural walls. Video lines up pretty amazingly a few times. I consider this art, even if it’s just me throwing a bunch of various shit together. It’s a digital mosaic, and only like 19 people will ever see it. Thank you for being one of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Killing Time

I will still listen to shit like this, and drive down back roads with the windows down, and it’s still a reckless life, but in different ways than it would’ve been thirty years ago. You gotta change, and challenge the universe is different ways, because if you were lucky enough to roll the dice certain ways and never crap out (die), you’d be pushing your luck too far to keep it up. So I’m still getting stupid (because I know how), but I try to keep it fresh. Just killing time until eventually I’m freed from this spiritual prison of a body.

Y0VTH FVLL 0F R3CKL3SS F1R3 WH1CH...

youth full of reckless fire which 
ain’t afraid to burn bright (but 
those moments leave telltale scars) 

T1M3 L4PS3S, 4ND S3D1M3NTS...

time lapses, and sediments 
of experience clog our 
brains with what we think is truth 

F34RS 0F TH1S W0RLD PR0DVC1NG...

fears of this world producing 
more problems than solutions 
forget it’s beyond our grasp 

SONG OF THE DAY: Shu Ba Da Dum Ma Ma Ma Ma (kudzu’d)

[A critical micro-analysis of the final chase scene from White Lightning, as submitted to The University of Universal Magnetics by Raven Mack, as part of my thesis on Southern Gothicc Futurism.]
White Lightning came out in the summer of 1973, and was part of a ‘70s genre of white lower class antihero movies. Burt Reynolds was in his initial wave of stardom after the success of Deliverance the year before, and played a former moonshine runner who was seeking vengeance in the murder of his brother, killed by local police. Placed alongside current politics, the movie stands in sharp contrast to today’s performative outlaw imagery that many white men have purchased as their identity, that somehow makes the dissonant alignment of “outlaw” with “backing the blue”, or supporting law enforcement. Reynolds’ character, Gator McKlusky, is a true outlaw, and has the prison record to show for it. Gator uses federal agents, under the guise of being a cooperative witness, to get a souped up Ford Custom 500, and eventually lures the corrupt sheriff, played by Ned Beatty, into a climactic car chase. Knowing every back road to the mile, despite his time away in prison, McKlusky is able to slowly lure the sheriff to going over an embankment and drowning in the river. In post-MAGA crime-fearing politics, the notion of killing a policeman would be never be seen in good light, much celebrated as a heroic victory, but White Lightning lays out the tale to our antihero’s benefit.
All media is propaganda of some sort, attuned to the creator’s biases, whether consciously or unconsciously. Rarely these days do we see underclass heroes who are positioned against corrupt authorities that are realistic and present day, thus easily translatable to real life corruption. It’s more often than not filtered through science fiction, against technological overreach or distant corrupt systems of power that are more globalized than localized. But the reality of the American experience is that those of us who suffer abuses at the hands of an ever-expanding police state do so at the localized level. It’s refreshing to see a folkloric antihero succeeding against the type of corrupt county sheriff that still very much exists in far more rural American counties than the average digitally news attuned brain could comprehend. And with local journalism pretty much gutted by venture capitalism and the movement to digital news sources over the past couple decades, any stories of local corruption are mostly word-of-mouth.
The end of White Lightning is a memorial parade for the dead sheriff, which Gator watches before driving off into the sunset. He didn’t actually cooperate with the feds, remaining true to his outlaw nature as a former moonshiner. The local people, unaware of the reality behind the scenes, still celebrated the sheriff, believing he stood for law and order in a decent way. These would be the MAGA people today, who somehow are the political marks standing alongside the parade route, waving flags for a corrupted leader, yet they believe in their minds, due to the propaganda they consume, that they are the Gator McKlusky, and antihero. It makes no logical sense. But in a world where the propaganda’s biases are far more pronounced, yet denied to an even greater extent, it’s hard to avoid. We’ve been culturally conditioned to think up is down, wrong is right, and openly corrupt leadership is a savior from corruption. We need more Gators, but all we seem to be served up are more flag-waving extras jockeying for digital position to watch the parade march by.

P3RS1ST3D D3SP1T3 W31GHT VP...

persisted despite weight up on shoulders (which I aim to lessen with each passing year) 

SONG OF THE DAY: Time To Throw Down (kudzu'd)

Old school electronic boom baptism sermons to send distraction signals to the more modern surveillance bloop blips to become confused by. Analog technology confounds artificial intelligence, committing cultural jailbreak, creating pockets of autonomous throw down, which is always temporary because the more truly free fun any cluster of humans just being have anywhere, the panopticon scanners shift to try and cover it with monetized joylessness. For as long as men have secretly stacked hoarded coins, raw human joy has been harvested and processed into wealth, removing all the fun, synthesizing raw serotonin into watered down dopamine chase, and turned too many of us into worshippers of new, mistaking it for fresh. Heavily processed new is no replacement for truly fresh, whether you speak of summer squash or simple rhymes. The new school attempts at funky freshness are full of polysaturated phats, and only clog the heart with an unexplainable sadness. But the real shit volunteers itself wherever life is a compost pile, and the artificial can’t ever stop it. It will always be time to throw down, somewhere where the mundane eyeballs ain’t been told to blandly scan yet.

C0NFVS10N 0F PVRP0S3 WH3N...

confusion of purpose when demands of modern living get my heart’s intent twisted 

SONG OF THE DAY: Rush Rush (kudzu'd)

This 45 of mine has a skip at the very end, but other than that it’s perfect. In fact, the skip at the end loops part of the hook, off beat, but it’s still even more than perfect because I can just fade out on the skip and the whole song played slow, and I think that’s what trips me out about the yearning for digital perfection. It’s a flawed quest. Imperfect is always going to be better, and thus more perfect than perfect. Also, I’m a big fan of slowed disco. The beat simmers down to a more manageable flow, the percussion inside disco music is insane, and frankly, when it comes to getting into records, you gotta be into shit nobody else wants. Unfortunately, they’ve rebranded disco as “boogie” music and it’s making a comeback. It’s not unfortunate that the music is coming back necessarily, because I love that. It’s just that the cheap ass records a motherfucker like me gets left to pick through is about to lose another genre. Then again, not too many people give a fuck about 45s, so you can still find plenty of record stores that just got huge bins of cheap ass ones in good shape, because it takes too much work to go through them. I been broke lately, so ain’t had the funds to go record digging in a while. I’m starting to fiend.

R3FL3CT1NG VP0N P4TT3RNS...

reflecting upon patterns of thinking which lead me to dissatisfied conclusions 

SONG OF THE DAY: Stellar Fungk (kudzu'd)

The mental spaceship been a bit stalled here lately. All the internal streams seem to be flowing normally, maybe a little bit of back-up, but whatever main line of creative drainage this body has out unto the Universe has been clogged, so it hadn’t been flowing freely, causing that back-up, where the ideas get swirled together even when they don’t mix, and can’t be expressed fast enough to air themselves out properly. And I’m actually pretty blessed with halfway freedom enough time to try. I think constantly about all the amazing creative minds that get stifled by work in our world, who just have endlessly brilliant thoughts in their own mind, but they never get the chance to be turned into some sort of art. And I also think about all the boring artists who have every opportunity to express themselves, get to work as big as their brain desires, and have access to whatever equipment promises to make their plans easier. Art (like all things) in our culture is built on inequality, and inequity, and all them uneven surfaces we’re building everything on. I try not to let it fuck with me, and keep that spaceship perspective, too high to be bothered by this Earthly bullshit. But it does get in the way sometimes. And mostly it just makes me sad, because there ain’t no merit to it, and there’s truly brilliant people out there completely unknown, left and right, while some mediocre ass folks get propped up in local scenes as signs of brilliance, just because they got the right stack of cash nudging them along from behind. I can’t change it, can’t fix it, and probably shouldn’t think about it. But I do, which is probably why the mental spaceship is stalled. It’s good to be grounded, but the surface is full of obstacles, so sometimes you gotta go back to the clouds, to avoid the mediocrity. If you get too caught up in it, you end up the same.

SONG OF THE DAY: It Really Doesn't Matter (kudzu'd)

Every time I listen to Zapp, I think, “wow, I don’t listen to enough Zapp.” And I listen to a lot of Zapp.

SONG OF THE DAY: Jeep 'n Benzos

Loud music blaring from slow moving vehicles in an urban environment, creating ambiance of joy amidst the underbelly of chaos that civilization don’t like to admit is integral part of acting civilized. I’d rather hear loud joy than quiet despair. I’ll never understand people mad about that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mary Jane (kudzu'd)

I grew up on raggedy ass homegrown, so new age weed with its space sciences in both growing and consuming is too much for me. It plucks at the fractures in my traumatized brain, and I end up just sitting there thinking about how much longer it's gonna be. Folks who are big ass weedheads are always like, "Oh you just gotta try this blah blah blah strain, and don't smoke it, you gotta ingest vaporized pellets" or some shit, but it never works; I just sit there cuddled into the bed like a babbling fool afraid to babble because he knows he's a fool, and self-conscious fools make for the worst internal babble. But please, if you are a user, feel free to tell me in the comments how my personal experiences are entirely wrong.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cold, Cold, Cold (kudzu'd)

Riding a train to New Orleans so this track showing up as me writing about it next on my secret list that's always too far behind but nobody sees it so it doesn't matter is just about perfect. I love trains, and looking forward to walking around an alien place not doing shit for a couple days. Keep it slow, forever. The slower you live, the more timeless you are.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Need Some Money (kudzu'd)

Oh hey, I updated the shop on my website. Check it out. Support the dirtgod arts, so I don't end up having to get a second (third) job.

SONG OF THE DAY: Red Dirt Boogie Brother

It’s easy to lament the loss of regional genres and sounds in the digital era, but the negative effect of algorithms is just going to push folks back into cross-pollinating each other IRL again. Digital adds another layer to our existence, but it’s been manipulated so heavily in recent years that it’s almost useless in actually encouraging art, as it’s all so commodity driven. Algorithms got no purpose other than to sell you shit (which includes stifling you selling your own shit so that you buy in to the algorithms, which always has limited success anyways).
And at the same time, in the old new ways, this song came into my playing by an old-fashioned download of a compilation off a music blog. I still do that. I don’t stream, and I don’t fuck with spotify. I don’t judge folks for streaming, because we all do what our generation is used to, but I do judge folks who pay for spotify. They pay Joe Rogan’s fucked up ass millions, but are cutting payments to musicians who don’t stream a high enough amount. Keep in mind, they’ll still be using those artists’ music in their system, but if you don’t reach a certain threshold, you don’t get paid. But also, all these systems we have in place, which were supposed to make everything better and more universally accessible are all getting broken, by capitalist greed. Everybody making a little bit of extra money wasn’t good enough, so they had to tinker with the shit and make it so a few people made a whole lot of extra money. That’s how it always is.
That’s the beauty of human creation, whether art or civilization… no matter how much it changes, it’s all still basically the same. People are gonna be dancing on the ashes of a lot of shit we think right now is eternal. That’s just how it is, and always will be, until it ain’t, but nobody can actually predict that.
Beyond all the shit talk by Mr. Blog Haver over here, this song fuckin’ rules. The pinnacle of my sunshine chaos was my early 20s drunken years when I had a 1981 Datsun 200SX that I paid $500 for and put like 150,000 miles on it. This is exactly the type of song I would’ve blasted, driving madly between nonsenses with a mind going 120 mph. My mind don’t like going that fast no more, but it’s okay. I’m learning to slow down and try to get further down the road than wreck into a guard rail pretending I’m still an old version of me that ain’t real no more.