J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #1: “The Devil Never Sleeps” by Iron & Wine

Normally I do not get into music like this. But briefly, right as my early 2011 health breakdown started to hit, I got into Iron & Wine, and downloaded a whole bunch of their shit (or his... I don't know, from what I read I could never figure out if it was a dude or a group or both or what). It made perfect sense to me and I played it like crazy for a long minute there, all of it, enough so that I would imagine a couple more songs will show up in the coming couple of months of countdowns, being I limit it to one song per artist each month. Good acoustic-based stylings with some real ass lyrics about normal people shit.
Somewhere in the last 48 hours or so though, a change occurred. It started to sound whiny and annoying to me. I think this is all very healthy though, a good sign that I am actually healing back to who I am supposed to be. And this Iron & Wine was a good soundtrack for that time, that transition from what it was to what it is, or maybe just a solid diversion of my senses that made sense for where I was, so that I could be distracted and undergo the physical changes necessary before my mind focused back in on what was going through my ears. I am thankful for Iron & Wine and their extensive catalog of music for helping me with that. But I wouldn't exactly go out and hype them up to other people or anything. Still though, it's good stuff. And if you are a white person, and a partially moody type, I bet you'd like it. And let's face it, I would bet most of the people still around reading my blog are moody ass white people. That's not an insult at all; I love you all being there. I wish I could somehow turn these words into electric bills, but still having you out there reading my nonsense gibberish (which actually makes perfect sense in a nonsense world pretending to be in order), it is a thing that helps prop me up on the pillows at night, instead of hiding under the covers, hoping the sunshine never comes back.
STEAL “The Devil Never Sleeps”
NEXT MONTH: It's the shortest month of the year, and we are already up in it!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #2: “Hell On Earth (chopped & screwed)” by Mobb Deep

Seems like the world was a ghetto, but then they gentrified the whole thing. Wal-Marts in small towns, and cleaned up Times Square. Everything is neon signs and cleaned up at least twice a day. But it don't feel like that. It's like they keep sweeping it all up, but you know there should be some grime somewhere, so it feels like something's missing. But they sweep it up everyday, sterilize once a month, re-facade once a year. We get certain shit from the Trader Joe's all the way in Short Pump, Va, USA, Earthrock, and when we go into that cluster of predesigned buildings, my heart starts to clench in on itself. They've got a big area of apartment buildings with a Buster & Dave's underneath it on one corner, like a fake urban block but smack in the middle of a planned commercial zone, conveniently located off the interstate, with free wi-fi in all directions, and I get all furrowed brow thinking about people actually living in those buildings and going to that bar and that's their life. Do they live as couples here, and have children and raise them? Or do they move into subdivisions at that point? Does this fulfill them? Do they actually take their own trash anywhere? It's all very confusing to me as an actual human being because it feels a lot like when I ride behind a tractor and trailer full of white chickens for the slaughterhouse, sitting there in their cages, no struggle, just riding along feeling the breeze. And I know that's a somewhat corny comparison, but it feels like that to me, literally. If I am in that environment for more than like 45 minutes, I get all white knuckled and nervous and feel like there's probably a floating eyeball somewhere about to figure out I don't belong. One of the main reasons I have never seen any sort of psychologist or psychiatrist is because I know little things like that that make perfect sense to me would get me on brain drugs right away. So that I could live in a place like that and not freak out. Immunize me against my own humanity I guess.
Anyways, music follows this predesigned gentrification. Rap music has become highly gentrified, and the perfect example of this is Kanye West. I know he is the critic's darling and everyone is supposed to recognize how cutting edge and avant garde he truly has been for hip hop. But it's just gentrification. Same thing with everything else that has been popular - Drake, Rick Ross, shit man, you name it and pretend it's hip hop and I will just shake my head inside my heart. Life isn't like that though. You can't just live drinking champagne bought on a credit card, which is what that music basically is. It's background muzak, but with an alleged hip hop vibe, and it eases you into those predesigned communities. You are being immunized against your own humanity.
Life is dirty, no matter how much you sweep it up. Scars, scuffed shoes, leaky roofs, gunshots in the distance at a time that means you wait to see if any sirens come because it didn't feel right. Life doesn't feel right a lot of times, and that's how you make it right. If everything feels right all the time, then you're no longer actually feeling anything. It just doesn't add up.
This is why I can't stand that shit they call hip hop now. Can't stand Kanye West. I have given him many many chances because everybody around me keeps pointing out what a fine robe this new emperor of hip hop music is wearing, but I still can't see it. Life is not like that music, although I suspect for many people - many of you even - who have been immunized against your own self, life is like that. It makes me sad, but whatever. We all have our own paths, and sure many of them might be predetermined or engineered by others who play us like pawns, but whatever. I'm just a dude. I can't change the world.
But do me a favor, will you? Life is not like that. Life is dirty and grimy and feels nasty sometimes. Hell, sometimes the dirt and grime and nastiness is actually rather cleansing. So hopefully wherever you are, it is cold and rainy. Take this song here, this screwed and chopped version of a Mobb Deep song, and put on a heavy coat, and get yourself high on whatever you like to get high on, and go outside in the cold with the rain falling, and stand underneath of an overhang somewhere, out of the wet if you can, but hearing the rain clack clack clack on tin, drip drip drip against something piled up somewhere, cars rumbling nearby or just every so often if you're in the wilds, and just stand out in the cold and rain and grime of the real world, and pump this fucking song through your highed up brain a few times. You see what I'm saying? The world ain't like Kanye West. That's Gap commercials and Visa cards. But let it go. Breath in the dirt and grime for five minutes, and feel good to your goddamned soul.
STEAL “Hell On Earth”
NEXT UP: Whiny man musics, for a dude who was on a low spiral!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #3: “Central Park West” by John Coltrane

A good road dog is hard to find, a dude or ol' lady you can just jump in a ride with no real direction but general, head out into an early weekend, and wander through shit towns and cheap hotels, looking for whatever might have been calling you in that direction, and get back by work on Monday, maybe Tuesday. I haven't had a weekend like that in a while. Me and my boy Boogie Brown had some epic trips out to the midwest, to see death match wrestling tournaments and four-day long demolition derbies. My ol' lady and me, that used to be our main activity was to wander the weekend away, staying in crappy hotels and vibing on the strange sights and sounds all around. Solidified why I love her because she is me, we have the same soul, just in different bodies, that luckily are sexually attracted at each other like universal magnetics.
My man Boomer and me had a couple of jaunts that were memorable enough. They always seemed to involve strange encounters with crackheads though. I have been blessed/cursed with something we call the retardar, which attracts whatever person has some sort of strange story to tell, he finds me, and tells me. That always happens. Boomer has the same thing, except with crackheads. But we had a weekend wander where we drank beers at a dirt track and ended up closing down a bar by the hotel in some dead end North Carolina town, and my retardar kicked in and we had people buying us beers and Mexicans in soccer jerseys kept playing AC/DC on the jukebox and some drunk redneck dude was on the bar dancing to David Allan Coe and the bartendress seemed to be sweet on me or Boomer or us or whatever, and when her boyfriend showed up and the bar closed down, they shut the shades and we were allowed to be part of the select few who could keep on drinking. That's quality friend-making. Rest of the night involved laughing at crackheads sneaking around the building to rip each other off from the ninja spy confines of the shut down swimming pool.
Next day, I don't know, we were gonna go to some bullshit wresting thing at an armory in some other shithole North Carolina town, and it looked all burned out, like they had a Southern Krystalnacht and set half the town on fire, and it looked pretty dead end in every direction, except somewhere had to go out, didn't it? We couldn't find no hotels, so we pulled into one of those awesome country/city southern convenience stores that always have the best fucking fried chicken on earth, and sell crazy amounts of peach blunt wrappers, and I asked for directions to any sort of hotel. The lady looked at me like I was crazy, and pointed us all the way back up to Rockingham, which seemed a little out of the way, because a town with this many buildings clustered together, no matter how boarded up and run down, had to have at least one hotel. Right? No. So off to Roxboro it was.
On our way out the convenience store parking lot, stopping to let some gully ass dude in a Caprice plenty of room for entry, there's a roadside marker, slightly bent from one too many drunk drivers, in the most anonymous and perfectly inglorious place ever. It said, to paraphrase, "One block from here John Coltrane was born back in the day." Hamlet, North Carolina. Blew my fucking mind, the greatest jazz wacko there ever once was came from the polluted loins of Piedmont North Carolina. But it made perfect sense.
This "Central Park West" for me is the greatest jazz song ever made, and maybe the saddest song ever made. It's one of those songs that's so fucking sad, it makes me feel good when I listen to it. I don't think most humans really have a clue as to how to capture emotions with sounds that aren't words. Words are easier, because people understand the associated meanings of all the parts. But with straight sound, where you're digging into something that was in us before words came about? No, most people can't do it. They just learn how to pluck strings or push piano keys or whatever. If you played this song for cavemen chewing on raw Manchurian Beast meat in a fire-lit cavern, they would get it. In fact, I hope when I am King of the Universe, they let me go through the microfiche of the future, and I can look at when the earth people all blow themselves up in a fabulous frenzy of philosophical goatheadedness, and when all that is blown up and busted down to ash and rubble with the charred refuse-to-die-easies staggering around for a few months before the nuclear ash chokes the last of us away, that they let me listen to this song with headphones on while I'm listening to it. I've not gone there yet, so I'm not sure if they allow headphones and music devices in the microfiche of the future room in Universal Heaven or not. We'll see.
In case you were wondering, the hotel in Rockingham was nasty as fuck, looked like the door had been kicked in multiple times and there were bootholes in the wall by my bed as well. Boomer ran into some crackheads somewhere, and I went to the Huddle House to get us some food. The waitress was one of those sweet sad short-haired hard life ladies with eyes that put cobra clutches on my heart. The cook was a wigger dude who was drawling something about peaches and cream, and she rolled her eyes and walked off, and he looked at me and said, "She like that." It was perfect. The whole fucking thing was perfect. That's how you get to be John Coltrane. You steep yourself heavily in all that perfect, and then it just flows right back out of you.
STEAL “Central Park West”
NEXT UP: Murky muzik!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #4: “Forget You” by Cee-lo Green

Ceelo Green caused an internet sensation with that "Fuck You" video last year, which carried him all the way into a San Diego Chicken on crack costume on the Grammys last week. And God Bless that fucked up little black midget dude, because I love him. Have always loved him. I thought his first solo album was a mightily slept on classic blend of warped hip hop/soul. (By the way, I refuse to hyphenate hip hop as is the accepted English spelling. Who the fuck decides that type of shit? What makes it a hyphenated word? Was Kool Herc or Afrika Bambaataa consulted in this declaration of proper English? Definitely not I would bet.) And when "Crazy" blew up in your grandma's Buick AM radio a few years back, and everyone was like "greatest one hit wonder" about Gnarls Barkley, I felt some sadness to my heart, because I knew the solo Ceelo, and I knew how awesome "Soul Food" was, or "Cell Therapy" of course, though Khujo may have stole that show. So when he threw out "Fuck You", I wasn't shocked at all. Ceelo got in bed with the insiders of the record industry, who told him if you put string arrangements behind things, it spoke to ancient man and make it naturally more poppy and loveable. The insiders helped him groom indistinguishable pop groups like Pussycat Dolls and make himself some more money from behind the curtain. My biggest problem was that "Fuck You" was so goddamned catchy, so easily singable, so needed to be played like 19 times a day for a few weeks in a row, and then eased back to a few times a week probably, that how was I gonna get around doing this around my offspring without them learning bad habits. My wife had already exposed them to Lily Allen's "Fuck You" song pretty consistently, but navigated that territory by telling them it was a bad word, and they had to sing it as "thank you... thank you very very much." I was not entirely comfortable with this arrangement, but usually the ol' lady is the more sensible of the two of us, so I went along with it. But I knew I couldn't get by with this Ceelo "Fuck You" in wilded out street mode without my 3-year-old rolling by the dog while dressed in ballet clothes, yelling in broken toddler talk "FUCK YOU MINGO" even though we gave away the dog named Ringo and only have Artemis still. We don't need that going on.
So to the interwebz I went, and snagged the radio version, clean as a dilly bean, so we can pump it the fuck up in the house, and it is what it is. My kids are gonna learn the dirt of the world easily enough. Hell, the world is only too happy to shovel its shit all over your children, as quickly as possible, and then blame you for not putting them in a bubble. My kids know them words, because we've said them at times. But I don't want it put into catchy jingles. What's next, heroin jingles?
Sadly, I heard Pink made an allegedly awesome pop song called "Fuck" or something after this, and I thought to myself how sad that was, regardless of how awesome the song might be. The shock value was dulled, and it just seemed pathetic. We really move too fast nowadays for our own good. I suggest everybody take a big swig of cough syrup, ease off the gas pedal about 15 mph, and point out five things they see on the side of the road that are interesting.
Also, if anybody has a solid mash-up of Ceelo's "Fuck You" and Lily Allen's "Fuck You", hook a brother up.
STEAL “Forget You”
NEXT UP: My other favorite jazz song ever!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #5: “Waiting Around To Die” by Townes Van Zandt

I will readily admit that I have overslept on the country doom and gloom of Townes Van Zandt, mostly because I have found in my listening experiences that a lot of that Gram Parsons style old kinda country but more real type shit is overrated, and more geared to fake ass hillbillies like Johnny Knoxville PBR drinkers than someone like me. I don't wear straw hats, ever. But I read an interview or something with Steve Earle that talked about Townes Van Zandt back in the day, and how he was throwing beer bottles at Steve Earle while Earle was trying to play a show, and I can relate to that type of belligerence, so I stoled some Van Zandt music to give it a fresh shot. Most of it still doesn't speak to me that greatly, though I do find his original "Pancho & Lefty" to be vastly superior in emotion to the Merle and Willie version. Mostly I got into this track, because it is codeine death in a country song. I can dig that. I feel a real drag to my life right now, and am glad that I have minimized the external poisons, because I feel they could consume me at this soul vulnerable state I'm in. I can understand the philosophy of "Waiting Around To Die" because you are not the type to do it to yourself, but goddamn, seems like you've been swimming upstream your whole afflicted life, and it's pretty easy to just stop fighting and let the current pull you wherever it wants.
I am really tired. I don't say that as a cry for help or some bullshit call for attention. I could really give a fuck if anybody cares (although to be honest, and unrelated, I have been enjoying having more comments going with posts lately). I'm just tired. Tired of what I came from and trying to sort through it and make myself into what I think I should be, tired of fucking struggling all the time, tired of fighting to find a five minute window of sunshine to sit in and smile with the headphones on. My brain feels duller than it was a year ago, and that was duller than the year before. How do you resharpen yourself? I mean, it feels and looks like things are about to start happening, about to break open, but damn, it's felt that way forever already. Not sure if I'm stuck in a holding pattern or just swirling around in endless circles before finally getting flushed into the ground.
So yeah, this is an uplifting song, and one that sounds pretty appropriate in my plastic chair by the pigpen, recovering from whatever it is that has poisoned my insides I've been recovering from for two months now, smelling the pig shit in the spring-like breeze, looking down across the field, ghosts of old dogs and goats running around in the bottom. The stump to the old goat tree I used to nail dead work boots up is my table. It sits next to me, I stare at it and think how I wish I could draw pictures as pretty as the schizophrenic lines of decay and tree fiber that go everywhere on it by natural accident.
STEAL “Waiting Around To Die”
NEXT UP: A song my whole family, as well as the world enjoys!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #6: “Hometown Hero (chopped and screwed)” by Big K.R.I.T.

Wanna be a hometown hero but feel no home. Grew up southside Va. which is a fucked little place, armpit of Virginia, no Hampton Roads affluence, no Northern Virginia moneybags made of carpet. Just factories with plywood windows and pharmaceutically agile back in the day friends. And now I live in Scottsville, a river town full of fake asses who have grand designs to pretend the satellite for Charlottesville community we live in is some sort of separate small town entity. They spent thirty billion dollars to bury the electric poles and make the town quaint so you could walk around and see all the empty storefronts or whatever the latest half-assed attempt at a restaurant with a 16-month lifespan is looking like. Could be a perfect little arts town, for real crazy arts, with a public park by a levee wall and an old abandoned building that could be renovated for studio spaces. Fill up the town with fucked up galleries of retard artists and paranoid schizophrenics using electric pencils to decipher the HAARP beams. Instead we don't have shit but old timers pretending they do the arts by taking the same ol' pictures of the same ol' things people been taking pictures of for the past 67 years. I want Bread and Puppets running down the street. I want graffiti monsters climbing over the levee into town from up under the bridge, spanning the pylons. I want beautiful chaos. I want the goddamned Dew Drop Inn to be the Dew Drop Inn and I can go in there on a Friday night and drunk grandmas with tattoos will shake their flabby titties in tank tops to second-rate blues music being played by long haired dudes I saw smoking Winstons in front of the Dollar General last Tuesday afternoon. Nobody gives a shit about architecture or little slices of history you have to drive 45 minutes to go see. Give us crazy chaos and turn the town into performance art gone wild.
So yeah, I think I finally cleared all the Big K.R.I.T. off of my J.J. Krupert machine, so this will probably be the last offering of a single slice of his K.R.I.T. Wuz Here screwed and chopped you'll get. I hope you have enjoyed this phase of my life as much as I have. Album of 2010, and it was a free mixtape. On top of that it was a screwed version that most folks never caught on to.
Now, let me find a goddamned home to blow up.
STEAL “Hometown Hero”
NEXT UP: Punks jump up to die!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #7: “People In The Country (instrumental)” by Prolo

Boogie Brown can multi-track harmonize with the best of them. His hook parts of this song he pre-manufactured and sent to me to fill up with a couple verses has so dazzled me over the past year that I still haven’t written shit for it. I enjoy working relationships like that, where the other guy can throw something at you that is so intimidating that you don’t want to let them down by doing some chump ass shit. I need more of that in my life. I do not feel there are many people within my daily routines or weekly interactions that are creatively driven by anything in particular. Hell, I’m not sure I’m creatively driven anymore sometimes. I have felt at times the passion for things dwindling in me as the shine and hum from the technobabble around me gets brighter and louder. There is never real darkness nor total silence. There is also not a group I can toss ideas off of and who toss them off of me to spiral each other up into the creative chaos necessary for good things to be born from.
Of course, I’ve been infected with demons for a few weeks now, as part of the process of cleansing myself of the poisons of my previous life. In fact, as this thing has dwindled, I am realizing that I’m not even sure how many generations this poison inside of me comes from. I’m not sure how hard I have to sweat to be clean again. But I know I am excited to see the sunrise on the other side. And I know that once I get there, the creative chaos that has curled up into a safe little ball inside of me will stretch itself back out and really be able for the first time in my life to fully unleash itself. And I am confident I will get there, without turning back for fear of the rocky path I’m walking, because people in the country do know how to get by. I have always been instilled with a survival instinct, from the same people who instilled in me a get drunk technique. But all I can do is take the good and let it grown and weed out the bad and make myself awesome and then totally skull crush the world. “As simple as a bird flying high through the sky…” Things seem complicated at times, and I’ve definitely not hit anywhere near my highest arc just yet. But it’s coming. Once I get out this hospital and this three-inch deep wound in my side the are packing twice daily and draining the demons from deep within my soul starts to seal itself back up, I’ve got three whole CDs of Boogie Brown beats to do a project with. It’s gonna be spring time, so I can plug in the camper trailer and get my out-building on, late at night loud as fuck. Then hopefully we can find a weekend to get the key ingredients back together one weekend down in Newport just under the railroad bridge from the New River, and make this Prolo thing happen one more time. Really, it usually only takes us three days of well-connected loungin’ to get a CD together. Perhaps I should start a kickstarter page for someone to rent a rundown farmhouse and financially enable me and Brown to work on music for three months straight. We’d probably make twenty albums worth of stuff, with various theme projects and strange offshoots. Or we’d build weird sculptures out of scrap stuff we found alongside the road. Either way, the world would be a better place.
STEAL “People In The Country”
NEXT UP: When will I run out of Big K.R.I.T. songs on my J.J. Krupert!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #8: “Sunny Meadowz” by Del The Funky Homosapien

Happy rap tends to be crappy rap, which is sad, because I’d like to be able to enjoy more positive rap music. For some reason positive rap music just doesn’t have the same kick though, which I guess would be the case with conscious rock music as well. There is something very raw and rude about certain musics, and being all conscious and concerned for things dulls that raw edge. Nonetheless, a few months back, I decided to DL a whole slew of older rap, including most of the Native Tongues classics, and some west coast stuff that would fall into that same classic milk crate of vinyl as well. Most of the Native Tongues stuff fell to the wayside, just not speaking to me at all. It seemed so gimmicky and contrived, especially considering the clustered nature of east coast life, even if you did come from the suburbs.
Del’s first album though got heavy bump, and still does. Still does. I kinda let it fall to the wayside because when I was in college and it got popular, too many chump ass dudes I would not want to psychologically associate myself with were way too into it. But damn man, it’s a solid album, all the way through. Really, in my humble expert whiteboy opinion, Ice Cube’s most classic album ever was Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, and every solo record he did after that was about half as good, suffering from some sort of creative radioactive decay factor. But when you think about how good that Amerikka’s Most Wanted was, and that Del – Cube’s cousin of some sort – got his deal off the back of being associated with Cube, and that served up I Wish My Brother George Was Here, it’s a very strange one-two punch from an alleged crew of individuals, though it’s hard to imagine Del sitting around smoking blunts with Yo-Yo and Da Lench Mob, sipping on a 64 oz. bottle of Olde English. Two albums with very distinctive sounds to this day that essentially came from the same distant family.
“Sunny Meadowz” is probably the more over-the-top positive vibes song on the Del album, and somehow, despite the corny chill vibes, is an actual good fucking song. Maybe it’s the fact it’s California and not east coast, or maybe the P-Funk backbone to the sound (those two things could go hand in hand though), but, to put it simply, I enjoy the fuck out of this song. I hope that wherever you are, whether there has been feet of snow or simply standard winter cold, it is a warm beautiful day, and you will download this song, and pump it the fuck up, and sit outside in the sun for a little while today. Get that vitamin D soaking up into your skin and let the natural cleansing rays of solar aura washes vibe you upwards instead of downwards. It is almost spring. It is almost time to reblossom, motherfuckers. Make sure you grow your proper bloom.
STEAL “Sunny Meadowz”
NEXT UP: A Prolo instrumental but with the hook just no verses because I ain’t never done it yet even though I love the song already!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #9: “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman

Originally obtained this on an Atlantic Jazz: The Avant-Garde LP I bought at Plan 9 in Richmond’s Carytown. Just recently heard that that record store was shutting down, which ends an era. I mean not continuous, because the orginal Plan 9 I knew was a few doors up the street, but it’s all connected. The place I fantasize about digging through albums or 7-inches is always the basement of Plan 9, because you can always stay ahead of the record store dork curve and find awesome shit for cheap. Last time I was in there (over a couple of years now), I got 12-inch singles of “Life is Too Short” by Too Short and “Cell Therapy” by Goodie Mobb and “Cadillac on 22s” by David Banner, all for a buck. I can’t even begin to imagine all the wonderful pieces of vinyl I got from Plan 9 over the years. I actually was busted one time, because of Plan 9, when me and a guy stole a bunch of CDs from a guy back home who we didn’t like, split up the CDs, and I sold a bunch of them to Plan 9, carefully taking apart the CDs to mark out where the dude had discreetly placed his initials inside the CD jewel case (obviously a paranoid fuck). Still though, they found CDs at the other dude I did it with’s house, he snitched on me, and Richmond Police found records of me selling CDs to Plan 9 that partially matched the list of what was stolen. That was enough to arrest me, and Richmond PD had a warrant for my arrest about to get faxed to them, to arrest me coming out my freshmen dorms, or perhaps at the room, I don’t fucking know, when a local detective who had gone straight and narrow after drinking a lot and racing hot rods with one of my uncles as teenagers, he intercepted the warrant, said he was a friend of the family, and would handle the arrest. I plead down to misdemeanors, took the full fall (being I wasn’t gonna snitch out my friend, even if he did me… In fact, my dad said that was something he was proud of, and I matter-of-factly told the cop, “You know who did it.” And he said, “But you have to say it.” But I didn’t.), had to pay restitution which involved me borrowing a lot of money from my grandfather, and taking a good chunk out of my financial aid reimbursements each semester for the following three years to pay him back.
Even before then though, we would skip high school, get high, and go to Richmond to find some sort of adventure. I would always want that to involve going to Plan 9 to buy music we’d never find in Farmville, because the first time I ever skipped school after getting my driver’s license, me and this dude Dave took my ’69 Ford Future, beat-up beige beauty it was with the speakers that rattled like tambourines all the time, and rode up to Plan 9 specifically. Richmond was this insane city to me at the time, a simple-assed country kid who thought the one elevator in town was an amazing thing when he was five years old.
Richmond still is an insane place to me, bred a lot of my creativity into me, and I was surrounded by a lot of similar types who seem destined for things. There’s a lot of people who formed cliques and seem like some sort of alternative fraternal organization to this day, and I’m an outsider because I didn’t just have kids and buy a house in a gentrified southside neighborhood and support my local Waldorf school or whatever. But Richmond is a special fucking place in my life, and it’s had that effect on a lot of people, and Plan 9 was one of its Power Sites, for sure.
Shit man, I go to Richmond now and hardly recognize places I knew so well. The VCU area has been pretty heavily commercialized/sterilized, which I guess is good for the big business of going to college. Oregon Hill seems like it wants to be a better place, but seems like it’s half empty still, and the crackheads and miscreants and 14-year-old mamas with weasel faces will take it back over soon enough. Downtown doesn’t seem as vibrant as it once was, and I don’t mean businesses, but people. Used to be people around, and activity. Seems slower now, or more geared towards something else. I’m not sure. I think Church Hill’s natural flow was disrupted by all the new stop signs, but that’s probably a good thing because parts of Church Hill were something else, like The Wire but with different architecture using lots of asbestos siding shingles that looked like fake bricks.
Anyways, the song “Lonely Woman” is fucking amazing. I am not a huge jazz fan by any means, but I dig some stuff. Honestly, this song is one of the two that are all-time faves of mine, because they transcend music into just pure emotion. This Ornette Coleman song is such a truly sad song, so deeply and painfully sad, that I just can’t help but gone drawn into it, every fucking time. I have listened and tried other Ornette Coleman things, and a lot of it sounds like normal jazz – kind of annoying and the type of thing that makes me feel white as fuck to be listening to. But “Lonely Woman” – this is a fucking real deal song. It is the fucking truth.
STEAL “Lonely Woman”
NEXT UP: Happy rap!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #10: “River” by David Allan Coe

River is the name of my youngest daughter, and she is the wide open spirit amongst our children, most reminding me of myself when I was little, both in wacky style and looks. Her name and mine, in fact, I have noted in my nerd brain are 60% exact replicas of each other (R-x-V-E-x). All of our children have copied what my parents did with me by giving me the name Raven – we have a Gypsy, a Phoenix, and a River. Thus, they can tattoo their names on themselves graphically when they are older (though my oldest has already said she’s never going to drink or get a tattoo because she doesn’t want to “pollute my body”). The go-to name for a son was going to be Nation, which would’ve been fine, but I’m kinda glad it never happened. That’s a heavy fucking name to be saddled with. I know my life has probably been altered plenty by carrying the name of “Raven” on my birth certificate, and being known as that from birth. The name was inherited from a friend of my folks’ who had a sort of infamous ’57 Chevy muscle car back in Cumberland County in the late ‘60s. He suffered a mysterious death involving wrecking his car along a road he had driven blind a million times before. He had previously upset some people from up north in a money race, so the theory I heard most growing up was he had been ran off the road.
I feel that some of their names have automatically influenced all of my children in similar manners. Gypsy is quiet and artistic and a truly beautiful and cerebral person. Phoenix is young and struggles to find comfort in her self, and even wants to be called Charlotte at times (her first name). We have not said no, but instead said if she still feels that way in two weeks, we’ll start. She never does. She is Phoenix, and will eventually find her rebirth from whatever internal struggle she was born with as the center child in this family. River just goes. More than any of other children, she leaps before she looks, and if she lands head first on hardwood troubles, tends to find laughter in that as often as tears. As a parent, this can be distressing, because you’d like for your child to protect her skull. But at the same time, with such a seriously psychically powerful household with multiple fifty-foot auras crowding around each other, it’s nice to have that “don’t give a fuck” youthful goofiness shine into the mix with a little bit of purple to mellow out all the lime greens.
I just found the Heartworn Highways this version of “River” comes from, and every time I play it, I go, “Hey River, here’s a song about you,” and she’ll take her wooden noisemaker thing she uses for a microphone and sashay around the kitchen singing barely intelligible 3-year-old songs from her pure little golden head. In-laws who respect money more than aura bought her some high dollar record-your-own-voice doohickey microphone for Christmas, nice enough to leave the price tag on it as well (how tacky – and what a waste at $75). That sits in a moldy basket on the bathroom floor with some dollar store mermaids. When she is singing her soul out, River uses that same wooden noisemaker thing as her microphone. And if she’s really getting into something, she pushes this purple turtle footstool we have into the middle of the kitchen floor and stands on top that to get everyone’s best attention.
STEAL “River”
NEXT UP: One of my two favorite jazz songs of forever!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #11: “Live Free Or Die” by Hayes Carll

I saw Hayes Carll on the Jay Leno Show the other week, and actually tuned in to see it specifically, of course waiting until the end of the house, because who can tolerate fucking Jay Leno without wanting to stab America in the fucking throat with old railroad spikes? The song he did was off his new album coming out later this year, and it was a lot of song and I couldn’t get the real total feel for it, but I have faith in holmes. The fact he’s getting pre-release buzz and his record industry insider handlers are getting him onto the Jay Leno Show means something I guess (although it could just mean he’ll be deeper in debt to the record industry after this album).
This “Live Free Or Die” song is off of the Trouble In Mind CD, which if I was to be an opinionated asshole inside the internet, I’d tell you was the best americana/roots country album that’s come out since Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams. If I wanted to go all out and be a contrarian asshole about it, I’d say something like, “Trouble In Mind is what all those neighborhood gentrifiers lining up to eat whole wheat bagels at 11 in the morning at the same retro-kitschy hole in the wall they were drinking PBRs at at 1 in the morning last night want to think Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is. But what does it matter anyways? All they’re gonna be playing on the house speakers while you wait for your whole wheat chocolate chip pancakes or avocado and sour cream free range omelet is either Johnny Cash or some sort of bluegrass version of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.” But mostly I just want to say this is an awesome song about going to jail in New Hampshire, which has always seemed to me like one of the better places to go to jail. There’s a lot of biker types up there, and my immense fear of being man-raped seems less overbearing when in a state without a large black prison population. Not sure why that is. Perhaps the tossed salad guy from that one HBO special being so goddamned scary, or maybe just the general stereotypical mandingo sexual appetite mythology perpetuated everywhere I look. Or maybe I’m just racist. I mean, white guys would probably rape me just as easily as black guys.
This is a feel-good jail song though, about stamping out license plates after stabbing a guy who was cheating with your wife. There’s no man-rape involved whatsoever. Jail songs would not be so feel-good if they were all talking about man-rape, though I read a stat one time that said for every one rape of a woman in America, there’s four rapes of a man in jail in America. Jesus, no wonder I’m so freaked out by that shit. Why would I read something like that and then hold onto it as gospel fact? Sad thing is, I probably read it in a Loompanics Unlimited catalog or something anyways, which means it was probably a freestyled fact made up on the spot by some wackjob writer. But I tend to do that myself, so I can’t fault freestyle factmakers. To be honest with you, there’s no such person as Hayes Carll. And when you download this song, it’s just going to be a virus that sends pop-up ads for Season 3 of Sons of Anarchy into your computer.
STEAL “Live Free Or Die”
NEXT UP: A song that makes my sweet little brutarian daughter smile!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #12: “Blinded By The Light” by Jackie Chain

Jackie Chain is a great thing that exists – a longhaired weedhead Asian rapper from Alabama who pretty much raps about nothing other than banging chicks, getting high, and having diamonds. He also looks like my buddy Partin from RPG.
This is a recombobulation of that stupid fucking Manfred Mann song that you can still hear on classic rock radio every third hour to this day. That song sucks, and is mostly known as the song where it sounds like the dude says “wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night.” Jackie Chain takes it, owns it, and makes it something far less annoying for truck rides back and forth to work. I imagine Jackie Chain is probably pretty good at shooting pool, but not obnoxious about it. Like he plays up or down to his competition, and could have a nice rousing game of partners where each side has one chick, but if some dude got all pool table alpha male trying to flex his gamesmanship muscles, Jackie Chain could play a serious game of 9-ball and fuck that dude up, and then go right back to shooting pool with chicks and barely winning. That is the ability to get along well with others, yet show and prove when necessary, but only when necessary. This is probably because he has magical Chinaman blood inside of him, the effects of which are further enhanced by heavy weed smoking.
Did you know most weed you buy nowadays is mad sprayed with pesticides and chemical enhancers? It’s not a common meme out there, but when possible you should really buy local and organic weed. Know your grower, which can be tough because growers are natural paranoids not wanting to get to know a lot of strange ass people. Still though, if you smoke a lot of weed, you owe it to your long-term health to do just that.
STEAL “Blinded By The Light”
NEXT UP: Another catchy ass Hayes Carll song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #13: “Shorty The Pimp” by Don Julian & The Larks

I am currently in oxycodone zony land, so it’s hard to know where to start with things. I take my painkillers, sleep for two hours or so after they hit, wake up in excruciating pain, shift around for two hours to try and find positions that are not frustrating to be in, flip through crappy TV channels, think about writing on my wife’s laptop since my laptop is too heavy to sit on my lap, but don’t feel like logging out her accounts on her laptop to log mine in because that’s frustrating, and usually about that time, I’ve ate enough time up to go ahead and take another pair of painkillers and go back to sleep for two hours. The only real excitement is this next time-round will be one of the two times each day that I also take stool softener pills. Hooray.
This is old obscure soul song that was on one of those Crypt Records compilations of fucked up old obscure songs. Crypt mostly got famous for their Back From The Grave collections of ’60 garage rock smarminess, which are righteously good and deserve the infamy. But they put out a bunch of wacky comps, including country and soul. The one I first heard this of off was Cryptman or Shaftman or something and had a white dude dressed up in blackface on the cover with a giant fake afro and he was supposed to be a Shaft character and they had all these corny ass skits scattered throughout the album. It kinda sucked. But there was a bonus 7-inch included which had this song, so I guess the fact they wasted all those grooves with corny ass skits forced them to include an extra 7-inch, which separated the Don Julian & The Larks song from the rest of the comp, which gave it physical separation to match how it was such a supremely great song.
Also, this song is obvious to Too Short fans as the source for his intro to the Shorty The Pimp album, which is probably one of Short’s better albums, as it has the great combination of common man’s social consciousness (as opposed to college-educated consciousness, which can be pretentious at times, but I guess everybody has college degrees now or at least inside the interwebs, so that’s probably as common as it gets) and goofy yet groovy (as in “groove” not as in “Wavy Gravy”, yet it’s probably hard to avoid that type of connotation of that word) simplistic pimp rhymes. Plus, perhaps the most immense beat to ride to ever, stretching for a full 8 minutes or so at the end of the second half, creatively entitled “Something To Ride To”, which was probably the last peaceful co-existing that occurred between Too Short and MC Pooh-Man.
Finally, even though I have that Crypt Records comp, I never ripped this through my MP3 turntable into robot candy because I hate having that thing set up by my computer as the kids might bump it while I’m ripping, or it gets too much feedback from sitting on the wooden desk, and even if I set it up on a towel, it still has some hollow sound to it; plus I use the USB turntable as part of my jerry-rigged recording system of half-wittedness out in the camper. So I actually got my robot version of this that plays inside my robot translation aural device of tiny sizes from a dude named C.T. and his wonderful Wigger Mortis blog. (It should be in the sidebar to the right.) He is a dude who apparently used to go to high school in the same neighborhood where me and the ol’ lady homebirthed our firstborn, and used to get the stupid zines I did way back when. It is also of note that he is bi-racial, because that particular neighborhood, before it was sullied by gentrification, was a strange place of nothing but white people, who hated black people, yet mimicked black culture. There was one dude who had rims with spacers on his car, but he’d get flats on his tiny ass tires and couldn’t fix it for a few weeks, so you’d see him on his rims sometimes, weasel faced girlfriend in the passenger seat (all wigger white girl chicks who hated blacks from that neighborhood looked like weasels, like Sondra Locke women but with hoop earrings), or he’d have a pair of regular rims mixed in on either the front or back side. And there was one dude who looked a lot like my man Boogie Brown, but more jailhousey, who I’d see walking around the hood or coming out of Fine Foods of Oregon Hill with a couple of forties, and he was one of those dudes that put off this aura of insane chillness. I am not sure if everyone is attuned to that, but I’ve noticed a couple of people like that where I live now, and that dude was like this back then, but it’s a guy who seems like he might be the most chill and party guy ever to hang around, but there’s that trigger of chaos that lurks that you can’t really tell how it gets knocked on, but the dude is probably capable of doing mean and nasty things you don’t want to have on the inside of your brain’s memory chips, so you might give the dude a cigarette or say “what’s up” in passing, but you’d never willingly cross through thresholds of buildings together to hang out.
So yeah, C.T. used to get the old Confederate Mack zines, and now he’s a wonderful young aspiring writer, pushing short stories and trying to wrap up a first draft of a novel, and on one hand I beam with personal pride that perhaps my fucked up writings over the years could have somehow helped steer someone towards being a fucked up writer, though I would imagine he was born that way regardless. And then on the other hand, I get all “Man fuck this, he’s almost done with a novel draft. I need to stop going to work for three weeks and finish a novel draft.” And then I stay home for three weeks from work, but my brain is draped up and dripped out from pharmaceuticals, and I can’t even sit a goddamned laptop on my lap comfortably. And I also remember that between nonsense gibberish for this blog, guard rail poetry, and this project I’m working on for an April launch, I’m still finger tapping about 10 to 30 thousand words of mind devilry a week. Yet for the most part, it all seems unintelligible in book format. Perhaps I am more of a doomed obsessive compulsive soul than actual writer. Or perhaps that’s not doomed at all. Who the fuck knows?
Well, it’s time for oxycodone dosing. Talk to you later.
STEAL “Shorty The Pimp”
NEXT UP: Alabama rapper turns douchebag song into catchy ass banger!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 Intro

It is January. Life is life. It is never easy but it’s better than the alternative, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Much like the world around me, I feel like something major is about to bust open and a new era is gonna dawn. But it’s fucking difficult to see through the haze of the day-to-day. But that doesn’t matter because music distracts your fucking dumb ass, and that’s why it’s for sale everywhere. That’s why I help you steal it. One morning we’ll all wake up and this blog will be gone because the Cybertronic Overlords will deem it a piracy endeavor. And it’ll all be gone, like it never existed.
This month there is old soul on the list, more Alabama rap of course, country and country-ish things, blasts from the past, and a few jazz tunes believe it or not. It is the same stuff I am always listening to, and if you have been following this long enough, it may be boring as you’ve probably seen my prejudices by now, or noticed how I repeat myself. If that is the case, then I suggest you suggest to me new musical directions to go in. I am bored as fuck. Life is boring, and not fulfilling. Unfortunately I have turned myself upside down by debt so I have to maintain my wage slavery. But when I am riding over the James River near New Canton, I always ride down to where Bremo Bluff is, and take that farm road on the right to where there’s the CSX passing zone where the Buckingham Branch line connects, and a lot of times there’s a train idling there. I see the open doors and think, “Man, fuck it.” But I know I’d get cold feet in a few hours. That stretch of double track railroad goes all the way to my Power Site at the end of the road near Shores. I always want to hike the tracks all the way to Bremo Bluff, but there’s a lot of activity there, and I don’t need to get hassled by some old ass white dude who’s worked for the railroads since 1967 and thinks everyone with hair longer than two fingernails is a nigger. But I have an inflatable boat now, and I think once it gets warm a couple good recon missions through that area are in order. Just have to make sure not to touch the toxic mercury water around the Bremo Bluff landing, due to the Dominion Power Plant right there. It is true, you can’t fight progress. But you can sneak around it, mark it up with spray paint, and take pictures of it.
FIRST UP: Old schoolery!