SONG OF THE DAY: She Said

Hasil Adkins is an aesthetic mentor of the highest order. This song contains some of the best yelps in recorded music history. I have a crossfader in my brain that often blends this with “Ain’t No Grave” by Brother Claude Ely, during my dreams. It’s actually pretty great sounding, and helps me forget that I’m trying to find a clean bathroom that I can piss in in my old middle school. Anyways, if you've never seen The Wild World of Hasil Adkins, set half an hour aside and do yourself a favor.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rain and Snow

I am not sure there’s a more perfect song ever recorded. This dude’s wailing singing is just beyond reproach. It is like a full moon over snowy expanse, etched into vinyl. Just perfect.

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: 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: Katy Hill Instrumental

I think a lot about how much cultural history was lost by white people who got swallowed up by American concepts of whiteness. Whiteness pretty much just depends on wealth and you can buy up whatever identity you want as it becomes cool, like a capitalist version of colonialism really. But all of us, even “white” people, originally came from some tiny corners of the Earth, and had an indigenous tradition of some sort, somewhere. And I don’t say that as an excuse for white people so much as because lolol a lot of white people should not feel so inclined to call themselves white people. Fuck whiteness, to be honest, as it seems to be the bland absence of culture, and even has bleached it out of people who are considered white.
I also think a lot about how there’s deeper genetics involved in addictions and inherited traumas. Look at how North America’s indigenous population was so susceptible to both diseases given to them as well as alcoholism later on. And as I’ve seen some recent struggles in my own family, where my entire immediate family unit of 5 people all have suffered with addiction and alcoholism deeply, it’s strange to me how some families seem so much more susceptible to that than others. I’ve known folks that can abuse all sorts of drugs, shit way harder than I could ever handle, and it never seems to cause them to go off the rails. But I know my people are highly susceptible to that, and won’t casually survive those dabbles with self-destruction. And it becomes a chicken and egg thing where bloodlines like that suffer more traumas so the susceptibility becomes compounded. I don’t know. There’s got to be a deeper science to it all than we really know, and likely science doesn’t give a fuck to know the real answer because western society at its heart is judgmental as fuck, and wants to paint people who fail as inherent failures who couldn’t excel. If it was scientific why some of us fuck up and fail rather than an entirely free will exploration of existence, then that undermines the foundation of how western culture is this alleged closer step towards the perfect social system construct.
This all relates to bluegrass music because it is pretty obvious that it takes the exact same type of broken mind to play amazing bluegrass music as it does to think methamphetamines are great. These are both white trash qualities that blemish western culture’s hopes for utopian whiteness. Some of us are just too fucked up to be accepted, and we play music too fast and love drugs that make our brain spin on fast cycle. And I’m almost certain there’s got to be some sort of science underneath it all, but the only people who can afford to support that type of research would rather all the rest of us just keep looking like pieces of shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Going Back to Bed

Few songs truly get the Greater Appalachian hillbilly mindset, but this one does it and does it well. Fuck all those people talking about bootstraps – that’s bossman talk. Never trust a man who lived in a gold-plated apartment in a big ass city.

SONG OF THE DAY: Skunk Funk Go-Go

Where I live is in the country, and there’s a sharp ass hairpin turn that descends pretty steep too, heading down to a bridge that got washed out in a flood in 1969, and being it’s country, it’s always either crazy rural fools flying through here, or rich folks who bought giant houses out in the country because it was cheaper and they’re not California or Northern Virginia rich, just Blue Ridge foothills dilapidated county rich. Anyways, I try to do a good bit of yard loungin’, so I watch the cars fly through, slow down, almost hit each other, sometimes for days on end, just pausing the sun in the sky by shoving a forsythia bush against it and holding it there, and enjoying the vibes. There’s an old tree cross the road in the not clearly owned clump of underbrush full of decades of litter, but some old boy from down the road keeps the grassy part cut. There used to be a birdhouse nailed up to it, but that came down (sadly), and there’s a hole in the tree that you can see now that birdhouse is gone. I got a nice small Bluetooth speaker that I like to charge up on really nice prop the sun up high days, and put the speaker in the tree hole, and load up my iphone 4s that I use as an ipod full of go-go music, and just bump that shit. It makes the hairpin curve even more enjoyable as drunk on life fools are forced to slow down, and their unmuffled machines quiet for a second to coast downhill through the curve, and there’s go-go music blasting from a tree at the edge of nothing. One day, one dude even circled back and looked again, then circled back his first direction again and stopped, looking out the window, trying to figure it out. I was just sitting there watching. I got to be worried he might get out to go find the speaker, but also if he did, I was just gonna yell, “Now, you know that was my speaker!” at him from up in the yard. Years ago, my boy found a nice baseball hat on the ground at a gas station, and picked it up to have, and some dude walked from across the other side of the parking lot and said, “Now, you know what was my hat!” I’ve always filed that one away to use later in life, because that shit was hilarious, but I never got a chance to use it yet. I thought that one snooping ass redneck dude in the Civic was gonna be my chance, but I guess he didn’t feel like climbing all the way up out that seat on deep recline. Anyways, I only play go-go music in the speaker in the tree in that hairpin country curve, because I’m blessed enough to live in the space where the fringes of Appalachia share a Venn diagram with the fringes of the Go-Go Belt.

H3LLB3NT 0N D3ST1N4T10NS...

hellbent on destinations 
where every unseen sign 
shown says, “maybe turn around” 

SONG OF THE DAY: Mountain GOD

Poe Mack is a slept on Appalachian MC. Mountain God is a good introduction to him. So many great musicians who have built a lifetime's discography that most of us known nothing about. Actually, for all we think we know because we got these 0s and 1s in our hands, we really don't know shit still. At least back in the day we knew we didn't know shit. Now think we do but still don't. Or worse yet, know a bunch of false shit and think it's real. There's an epidemic of that right now.

SONG OF THE DAY: Trains

Boogie Brown put together this Appalachian Sci-fi project a while back, and it remains one of my favorite things to have come out this year. He says on the bandcamp page that he loves and respects Americana type shit, but that’s not what Appalachia sounds like to him no more. Americana music has gotten weird, to where it’s clever quirky folks who have questionable at best connection to that true country life, who play old-timey music on old-timey instruments but with expensive tattoos and ironic mustaches and shit. I don’t know, I will never trust a dude with a cop mustache, ever, even if ironic. There’s nothing ironic about the police state, especially in places like Appalachia. That’s why I don’t like Sturgill Simpson, because he’s the son of an Appalachian narcotics officer, and has grown into an old-timey musician with a cop mustache. How’m I’m supposed to trust that shit? Fuck that, it’s music for hipster breakfast spots, not country folk.
Anyways, I digress, because the point is this whole Appalachian Sci-fi project is dope as fuck, and Boogie Brown is one of my oldest and dearest creative co-conspirators, but I also think he’s a musical genius. I don’t even think I can begin to understand how he processes the world creatively, so I’m thankful for these little pieces I do get to enjoy.

0LD S0VL G04T M3NT4L1T13S...

old soul goat mentalities 
run head first into modern 
world's existential bullshit 

SONG OF THE DAY: Lestkal

Sadly there is no freebird synth culture to speak of, at least not yet. You’d think with our abundance of excess junk and born again thrift stores, more back roads weirdos would have taken the electronic Hasil Adkins path in life, but that does not to appear to be the case so far as I can tell. Imagine how great opioid fog greater Appalachian synth wails would be, synthgrass through the foxfire fog, demented gospel synthelations about hellfire upon earth, or just good ol’ base instinct 200 proof synthshine, autotune howling the full moon rising over the mountains like fire. There’s enough junk Honda Civics laying around these nether regions of the American wasteland that somebody’s had to think of how to turn it into a giant Sun Ra-esque Casio creation of madness. Where’s our great American degenerate ingenuity? Is everybody just scrolling memes? What the fuck is going on here?

SONG OF THE DAY: John Brown

I am tired, but the world doesn't stop. Here's the lyrics to John Brown.

my people are from southside by way of appalachia
vagabond spirits always seeking greener pasture
family so dysfunctional no cousins with my last name
my mother's worthless son, all I got from her is blame
so making my own way, about seventh generation
scot irish scandinavian german polish mutt caucasian
with a college education, my path away from the dirt roads
except my trust in well meaning well to do white folks constantly erodes
in this system which ain't giving shit but diminishing returns
the only dreams I'm believing in is I pray it all burns
down to ground, a place built on the backs of black folk
with me rapping in broken english, which wasn't even spoke
on this continent before prominent pyramid plans was established
but the destinies manifest for my bloodlines been tragic
so if I'm gonna think like a white man it's gonna be john brown esque

rough around the edges because I'm southern grotesque
can't be your rural noir hillbilly novelist class apologist
my thinking's too busted up can't afford all the consonants
just a colloquial country yokel with penchant for burning bridges
and walking through back alleys or hiding between blue ridges
I recognize my white privileges since ain't no cop shot me in the back
but I ain't proclaiming america's greatness since all I've seen is lack
of justice and equality from the fuck y'all I got mine philosophy
which is un-American but buried in the etymology
of United States, so I pledge allegiance to the people
this edition is overrated and we're ready for the sequel
so tear down all these monuments and these deeds of dominion
we ain't hit a wall saying end times, it's just a fenceless new beginning

SONG OF THE DAY: Ritmo Sabroso

Global diaspora of various beginnings combined with digital communications has made the world smaller while also not acknowledging the digital gaps that still exist and how there are always going to be shadows for the forgotten. Been thinking on what I am as a human, accepting my status as white male in America, yet also realizing I’m not entirely like a lot of other white males. Been thinking of myself as unwhite lately, because I’m externally identified as white, most certainly, but I try my best to not perpetuate a lot of that shit with my own actions. It’s impossible to detach yourself from how others identify you, including systems built on biases which benefit you, but it’s also very possible to actively not embrace that shit, and definitely you can do the work to not perpetuate the ugly side of that.

And yet I went to a home funeral yesterday, where we stood around the grave that the family dug, and they played a couple old bluegrass songs at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, and there’s a cultural context to all this for me – greater Appalachian roots which came from Scottish highlands… a common theme in the eastern half of the U.S. But also I’m a product of various immigrant diasporas – one quarter Polish with a variation on “fisher” surname, a quarter Scandinavian, part German-ish as filtered through Pennsylvania mountains… but standing at home-cooked funeral, outside, old folks playing old instruments, singing old songs about finally being free, it’s all cultural at molecular and unexplainable level that’s not evil. The history of globalization and empire and dominant cultures, even within the framework of racial divisions, is one where dominant cultures consumed and suppressed even other cultures within what we now see as the same.

It will be interesting to see how this shifts in the near future, now that we have these handheld devices that educate as well as delude us, and so many cultural things are cross-pollinating each other. And yet also, we’re experiencing a vast superficial knowledge of more, while knowing deeply less. Someone once told me about the difference between knowing one square inch a mile deep, and one square mile an inch deep, and how superficial knowledge doesn’t actually allow for root knowledge, and can easily be washed away. As I helped dig a grave this past week, I thought about that, as we dug shovelful by shovelful, down through the silt, luckily not too red clay, far deeper than one normally digs, because that’s how deep you have to go for safe eternal resting space. I don’t come from high and mighty people, despite the privilege I do have, and there’s a lot of cultural pieces that were lost because of that. I knew drug culture better than people playing banjos, although there was crossover, like an old dude called Rocky Top who had drank himself out of Nashville who sat around the poker table at Tank’s house where my folks went every weekend, picking songs. But I do know piecing it together, and how to get shit done when it needs to be done, rather than planning and talking and thinking about it forever.

Humanity is no more fucked now than it’s ever been. But there’s a lot of hard work that needs to be done. Not discussed and delegated and argued and talked over and hashed out and endless circles of discourse and spirals of power hierarchies that destroy actual collective work ever getting done. There’s enough work for all of us to just get to doing in our own lives, daily. And that helps establish new cultures, new cross-pollinations that aren’t appropriation or assimilation or suppression and oppression, but actual shared physical acts of working together. The arts falls into this as well, because the arts is the fun work you do after the hard work is done. And fuck man, nobody wants to just do the hard work seven days a week without doing the fun work too. Every somber Sunday morning needs a feral Saturday night. Life needs contrast in order to not be mundane to the point of just sitting around waiting for death. It feels a lot of times like our one inch deep knowledge of the square mile of today’s existence is severely lacking, at least to me. But ain’t shit to do about it except get to work going deeper.

1GN0R3 TH3 S1GN-SYST3M WH1CH...

"ignore the sign-system which

opposed civilization

and nature as contraries"