J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #1: "Fortunate Son" by Lyle Workman & Bob Thiele

This song actually came from the episode in the first season of Sons of Anarchy where that Mexican bike gang leader dude was having his bro get stabbed in the park, and this mellow ass version of Creedence Clearwater Revival was playing, and both me and the ol’ lady were like, “oh shit, that’s some next level awesomeness,” meaning the music not the Mexicans stabbing each other in the park, though with the influx of immigrants into the further reaches of Virginia, I guess it is potentially some next level shit on that front too. Most of the Mexicans around here are first wave hard-working types, occasionally a little hip-hoppy, but mostly salt of the wretched earth types, not the full-on 39 people around a picnic table on Sunday afternoon at the park and seven of the guys have their shirts off and are covered in tattoos and they look cool as fuck but if you try to go play horseshoes on the horseshoe pits they will make you leave because the one guy in the tattoo shirt is the winner and he’s got the next game and he doesn’t feel like playing right this minute because he’s eating, meaning he’s drinking.
Anyways, I googlefinded the song in question, and upon googling about Sons of Anarchy, I partially ruined the show for myself by reading what a giant self-important prick the guy who writes the show is. (He’s the Big Otto dude who is in jail, and in real life is married to Katey Sagal aka Peg Bundy aka Head Ol’ Lady.) The writer guy is kind of like if you took Kevin Smith (who sucks), but made him grow up somewhere far less stupid than New Jersey, like a fake south place, meaning not the for real south but somewhere like southern Indiana or rural New Hampshire or the whiter parts of Arizona up near Colorado where people are flying confederate flags except they are not in the south. But you have a Kevin Smith type grow up in one of these places, get addicted to heroin and then find salvation from drugs through creativity not Jesus, and he will be a giant overly sensitive jackass about his creativity, because it his personal salvation.
That being said, I really like Sons of Anarchy, and I hate most everything ever. In fact, when it comes to TV, Sons of Anarchy is probably the only currently active pretendery show that I do not hate. Which sucks for me because usually I jump in on a show long after everybody else and I can plow through its entire existence on Netflix. Sons of Anarchy was so overloaded with a long wait when the second season came out that I actually bought it (meaning stole) from Best Buy, meaning walk out right in front of a sketchy kid so when the door alarm goes off, they wave you on and start harassing the sketchy looking kid. Sorry random black dude, but I had to get Sons of Anarchy Season Two! It ain’t my fault they racist.
The whole bluegrass remakes of different classic rock things was a good idea like the first four minutes you heard it, but then they wore that shit to death. TO DEATH. But mellow acoustic guitar instrumentals of that stuff, that would be tight as fuck. I’d just play it on my genetically engineered cyber-horse, riding around Fluvanna County, dragging home women and chickens to add to my growing flock. That’s what would happen in the future if Lyle Workman does a whole collection of CCR acoustic sunrise greatness like this. Which would ultimately lead to me getting stabbed by a Mexican in a park, bringing it all full circle. That is the beautiful ebb and flow of the universe we live in, brothers and sisters.
STEAL "Fortunate Son"
NEXT MONTH: Last month!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #2: "The Ol' Lady" by Blue Globe Beats

After getting a stack of old Easyriders magazines from the ‘70s, and watching too much Sons of Anarchy (see the next listing in the J.J. Krupert saga), I have really been making an extra effort to going back to calling my wife my ol’ lady. We live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and hang out with too many Whole Foods-shopping, square ass white people who do not understand that it makes sense sometimes to just stay up all weekend long at least until Sunday afternoon. The two terms are very different, and I think my relationship with my wife would be more secure long-term if I only referred to her as ol’ lady.
First the term “wife” refers to a legal agreement more than anything. In the eyes of the government, your “wife” is your acceptable partner. This of course is our American sectarian way of rethinking the old “yoke-fellow” Christian notion of husband and wife being bound for eternity in the eyes of Da Lord. Now I am not really a Christian (actually not at all, but there’s so much Christian bullshit in this country, I still say “not really” because I fear they’re gonna jump out from behind the cabinet in the corner and start holy rolling me into a small package for Jesus), and I’m as anti-American as the next guy (at least when it comes to American govt.), so neither of those really do justice to my ol’ lady and me’s relationship.
“Ol’ lady” on the other hand, is a fluid term. There’s no legal paper between you in this, yet you are already insinuating she is your “ol’” lady, as in you’ve been together forever. And will be together forever. Now, we all know forever is a rare thing when it comes to relationships, but it seems to me that one reason the divorce rate is so high between “husbands” and “wives” is that they have this convoluted Hollywood notion of what love is and how it is magic and requires no work and when someone gets flabby or annoying we bolt for some new legal agreements to free ourselves up to not break our old legal agreements. Essentially, this is fucking ridiculous. An “ol’ lady” can be an ol’ lady without losing that luster. If she hits you upside the head with a 2x4 because you were out with Deric drinking and driving home from Richmond while drinking with professional wrestlers in some dive bar in Shockoe Bottom, well that’s just how the ol’ lady is. It would be grounds for a separation or counseling if it’s your wife, but with the ol’ lady, whatever man, she was pissed, you deserved it, walk on eggshells the next afternoon, and then fuck again the next night, like good fucking where you start in the dark when you go to bed at the same time, but it’s so much fun you cut a light on so you can see what’s going on. That’s just how the ol’ lady is.
My wife is a pretty good ol’ lady. One morning, as I was getting ready for work, she came out from the bedroom wearing nothing but a yellow tank top, which made her look gooder than hell. I was about to just quit my job for the day, but she was only walking through to get one of children some milk with two other children circling around the house on the insides like inside vultures. There would be no need to stay home from work because we would not be left alone to our bedroom to be an ol’ man and ol’ lady together and wrinkle up the sheets, which to be honest were probably already wrinkled because usually we don’t make our bed until we go to bed the next night so that the bed is made for about seven seconds perfectly before we pull the covers down again.
My wife is also kooky. She was telling me about how all these people are showing up now allergic to red meat and pork because ticks are biting other mammals, have a little bit of that blood in them, and then bite the human, so that foreign mammal blood gets into the human immune system and it starts to fight the substance as an intrusion and breach of security, and from that point on whenever you try to eat a hamburger you get violently ill. It’s some crazy shit, and true, and happening right now, and you will hear about it on the news in like four years once the regular world cares, but my wife meaning ol’ lady told me about it this week. In great detail, too.
Back in the day, I used to joke I needed a Mexican Redneck Hippie girl to be my wife, and in my ol’ lady, I got about as close as I could to that. She’s not Mexican, but very olive-skinned, and from the looks of her dad, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some dirty Spaniard blood in there somewhere. And though she is herself a Whole Foods shopper, she also likes to drink beer and get wild. She did a joke thing one time when we were hanging out in this public square in college about how I should meet a chick with a little scrap of paper that said, “Do you like Raven?” and had a box for yes and a box for no. I kept that shit, just because. And fifteen years later, we have been married for eleven years in the eyes of the government and in the eyes of fake Christian gods, but oh man, we’ve been ol’ man and ol’ lady for ever. So much so that I’ve got her name on my forearm and she has my name on her upper back, except we didn’t want to get names because I guess we were brainwashed on a “husband” and “wife” kick and afraid to have names. I have an owl, which is her bird spirit, and she has a raven, obviously, and that’s how we roll. But I very well could have just gotten big bubble graffiti letters of SUZY on my arm because she’s my ol’ lady and always will be, even if I end up with some other ol’ lady down the road. There are no such things as ex-ol’ ladies. They are always your ol’ lady still.
Plus, if she ever does decide to just be my wife and leave me instead because I am retarded in some unforgiveable way, well then I get to be a hobo. Win-win, in my opinion.
STEAL "The Ol' Lady"
NEXT UP: A song from a fucking TV show!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #3: "Man About Town" by Charlie Rich

I was walking between two places related to work today and a helicopter flew off behind me. I watched it like a six-year-old kid, taking off and mussing my hair, which is always mussed because I am not used to cutting my hair on the regular and force my wife to do it instead of paying some old ass white dude to do it. Then as I continued walking the half a mile to wear I am allowed to park near a hospital inside a medium-sized city, I passed a sexy woman, but her left arm was a stub right below the elbow. And right behind her was walking a man who looked like he would’ve been good friends with Philo Beddo. He had a button-down shirt, with a few buttons undone, and 1970s tough redneck white guy hair, and was wearing jeans, and he said, “morning” in passing with a husky voice that had seen a few broken knuckles before. (I assume he said “morning” though I guess maybe he was on some next level shit and just saying “mourning” to everybody he passed while dressed like a 1970s tough guy because his wife, the woman who saved him from a life of hardscrabble street tussles and endless struggles with her strong yet pliant ways – the same qualities a vagina has – and she saved him from this all, and now she’s in the hospital with brain cancer, and he is sad so just goes “mourning” all day long wandering the streets waiting for her to die so he can start teaching all these punks he sees a lesson or two.)
Anyways, I immediately thought, “Wow, what a great day to be an American.” When people talk about that melting pot shit, they all too often just think of foreigners and how black people can get rich if they stop being so street scary unless they can play sports but even then they are eventually tricked back out of their money by white devils (of which the Jewish are part of… well white people, not necessarily devils automatically though we all have that potential, do we not?), but the Great American Melting Pot where helicopters just take off and we have sexy cripples and 1970s people and a guy like me who doesn’t know how to cut his hair in an appropriate way consistently but can still get a decent job if he knows the right people. America.
(And actually, it might be my bad hair that made 1970s tough guy say “morning” to me in the first place. He probably thought I was walking over the diner on Cherry Avenue for a late breakfast of fried eggs over easy, corned beef hash, a jelly biscuit, and a cup of coffee that tastes like iron filings but that is perfect because that is what you get in one of those diners that still exist like that. I would have a thousand of those diners before I had even one fucking Applebees or TGIFridays. Strip mall chain stores are the eugenics of the Great American Melting Pot. I know that is not a popular opinion, but fuck popular opinions.
I bet 1970s guy and me could have a wonderful discussion about how you can’t work on new cars anymore and why, even though fake breasts are larger, you can’t really get the same use out of them like old school large breasts, while drinking our crappy coffee while Charlie Rich played on the radio sitting on a shelf behind the counter. Sexy cripple wouldn’t have set foot in that diner. In fact, sexy cripple is the perfect example of what is wrong with America – we attach ourselves far too strongly to our sexiness and try to pretend we aren’t inherently crippled.
STEAL "Man About Town"
NEXT UP: Yet more Boogie Brown beatitudes from underneath the Blue Globe!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #4: "Wood Wheel (screwed & chopped)" by U.G.K.

So odd the things that become pimp-worthy in a vehicle. A wood wheel, as in steering wheel, although that would be pretty tight if somehow you could have actually wood wheels. Personally, I’d prefer a wood car. Shouldn’t be impossible to attach that to a steel frame; the choices we have for fastening things together nowadays is amazing. That would be my dream car, a tight ass sedan shaped like those old Caddies with the slanted tailgate, but covered in cherry and mahogany wood instead, like ten coats of clear on top to keep it clean, and heavy on the chrome in the front and back ends. Actually I guess that gold chrome style would look better next to the wood, with as dark a tint as you could get on the windows. But if you couldn’t get a super dark tint because of government overregulation of how you pimp your car, you’d have to start over, and go with a mirror tint, switch back to the regular chrome, and then put a dark stain on the wood to get it closer to but not at a blackish color. You’d probably want to switch from cherry to walnut in that case though. Wouldn’t be good in crashes, but shit man, I ain’t gonna crash anyways.
We also live in the age of genetic engineering and computer nonsense going on, so maybe I could just have me a horse genetically engineered to fade from black on top to white on the bottom like a spotlight was shining underneath him at all times. And then they could cyborg him too so he had speakers in his hind legs and a subwoofer pointed out from somewhere too, or maybe just emanating from his rib cage. He should have some side view mirrors on his head too, even though he’s a horse and I could just look over my shoulder, because I love that shit when your side view mirrors vibrate from the bass, although I guess your car works as a cabinet for the sound and that enhances the effect. Still though, side view mirrors coming off a horse head would be tight. And all his hair braided, but with no bows. Any time you see kids riding horses in parades, they braid the hair and almost always put a fucking bow in the bottom. Why can’t a horse just pimp a straight braided style like that’s how he wants to roll, with a simple ass rubber band at the bottom? Fuck a bow.
In all likelihood though, even when science catches up to my next level thinking, I’ll just be riding a donkey with like a Zune jammed into an old Ipod dock duct taped to the donkey’s forehead. And I’ll be pulling a cart full of produce I took from behind the grocery store, trying to sell it to the mutant mulatto people living along the edge of the corpse-stained road, because if science gives us stereo cyborg horses that you can choose the color of beforehand, then most likely we will armageddon ourselves too. This is why we as mankind can’t have nothing nice.
STEAL "Wood Wheel (screwed & chopped)"
NEXT UP: Some every day old school music that makes me feel good to my heart!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #5: "Kissin' And Cussin'" by The Carolina Chocolate Drops

Part of the same reason the divorce rate has become so high is the reason you can’t punch people without getting charged with assault. People have been trained by movies to think marriage is this perfect match that works out wonderfully and is nothing but honeysuckle juice, firm titties, and clean cotton sheets with a high thread count. You’ve got to work at a relationship just like a friendship just like dealing with any other human being on this earth surface because every brain is all tweaked out in its own very special way. A man and a woman, in the comfort of their own house, should be able to get their fight on, preferably not physically but sometimes you know how it goes (so long as no one over-steps their physical domination, if it exists, like a father shooting basketball with his kid and not shooting from inside an imaginary line), and fighting is fighting. I have good long-time friends who come from similar backgrounds and we know it’s perfectly okay to punch each other from time to time, to work off the tension that builds up in a relationship, and get on with it. Now me and the ol’ lady don’t go around hitting each other – I’ve never laid a hand on her (at least not that way, hurr hurr hurr). But things build up and we’ll blow the fuck up like the World Trade on each other at times, and it clears the air, or at least allows us to freak out how we need to be freaking out.
This is a great relationship song, because relationships, six times out of ten, are a pain in the fucking ass. When three relationship involves sex, it’s nine times out of ten, and that’s rounding down from 9.4.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, I’m not real sure yet how to take them. I heard them on NPR one day, which means I have to be wary of them. They are genuine black-ish people playing genuine country-ish music. Out of every album they’ve made, I’ve found about three songs I dig. And we have some friends who come around, and the mama of the family, she digs her some Carolina Chocolate Drops. But she also hates Hank Williams III and the idea of screwed norteno music. Plus, she’s a black chick with skinhead tattoos. I guess that’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops perfect demographic.
STEAL "Kissin' And Cussin'"
NEXT UP: Cough syrup sippin’ and mom’s car steering wheel grippin’!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #6: "African Herbsman" by I Roy

Hippies catch a bad rap because of how bad the really clueless trustafarian type hippies are. But I grew up around redneck hippies who were the salt and brown sugar of the earth, and those were righteous ass people, and really gave me the moral foundation I live by to this day. Thing is, none of those types really listen to reggae music. With guys, reggae music is really the start of the slippery slope into unloungin’ ass hippie guy. With chicks it’s harder to tell, because vagina is a powerful force upon this earth, regardless of the rule of men in tight suits, and the possession of a yoni sort of alters how you roll through this world. Honestly, I can’t speak upon it because I rock it penis-style when it comes to gender, but I can respect the power of it.
But when it comes to dudes, the overwhelming love of reggae music by a hippie-type dude is usually a red flag. Although this can be confused by a love for dub music, which is like extra drugged out reggae music basically. Reggae is to fat joint as dub is to fat joint plus washing down a painkiller with a fat Guinness bottle or something, although those types don’t usually take pharmaceuticals very obviously, so it might be wild lettuce tincture or mushroom tea or something to give that extra echoey plucking sound the proper environmental conditions inside your brain. Nonetheless, I’m not sure what I was talking about except how hippies catch a bad rap in this world.
Basically, I am sitting outside at my picnic table smoking eight giant slabs of pork belly into bacon with apple and maple wood chips, and I’ve been drinking for about three hours now, pretty much since we got home from soccer this morning. Last time I coached the U-8 kids (under 8 years old), it was all I could do to get them to go towards the goal. Now, with this batch, I’m teaching them corner kick plays where they rush the goal and shit. It’s another level, and I’m not entirely comfortable being that guy. I think I will just buy them all pizza and be like fuck it one weekend after a game.
Soccer is a great joy of the borderline unloungin’/loungin’ reggae guy. The redneck hippies I grew up around, they didn’t even know soccer existed. It was pretty much football and horseshoes. But that was a different time. There wasn’t Wal-Marts or Islam back then. And for as fucked as Africa is, god bless them motherfuckers for having more Islams than Wal-Marts.
STEAL "African Herbsman"
NEXT UP: Bi-racial hipsterism!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #7: "Still Gonna Have Music" by Prolo

I was about to talk a bunch of negative shit, but this is not a negative song. Contrary to my cynical nature that comes across in the written word, I'm a pretty hopeful dude. I still have dreams and wishes and think I will be wildly successful before they chunk me in the ground and cover me up with some rocks. I very much miss making the type of back roads hip hop music me and Boogie Brown made for country ass fools with an open mind. Or open ass fools with a country mind. Actually, mostly we made music for ourselves. I need to clear all the shit out of the camper and hook up my I.E.D. looking recording set-up and start fucking around again. Life is far too short to pretend you can wait until next month.
STEAL "Still Gonna Have Music"
NEXT UP: More like reg-gay, am I right?

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #8: "Diamond In The Back (screwed & chopped)" by Curtis Mayfield

I do not have the heart of a gangsta. I'm far too sensitive about too much shit. One New Year's Day, we were finishing a keg off, and somehow a guy fresh out of prison, my old mullet neighbor, and a guy who did tattoos out of a van who had a guy who owed him $200, plus like two other guys, all rolled up to this $200 in debt dude's apartment to bum rush him, and his girlfriend ran out the bedroom window to call the cops, and I had to run and grab her and drag her back inside, and she was just in a tank top and panties, and it was fucking weird. She didn't really fight, which was good, and I was all like, "It's gonna be okay." Then prison guy knocked the $200 dude out in the kitchen, laid out on linoleum. We went back and got high as fuck, and I was tweaked out by it. One of those situations that if it had gone a different direction, could be a far worse story today. Life altering.
Weird thing was I lived with this hippie chick at the time, and I came home and went to sleep in our bed and acted like nothing was up. "Sorry I'm late, me and my boys you don't like busted into some dude's house and beat him up and shit," is kind of a dealbreaker for chicks who have VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS bumper stickers on their Subarus.
I am very thankful those days are way in the rear view mirror for me. I am also thankful that my wife, who does drive a Subaru, does think VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS is a clever bumper sticker. That's kind of a dealbreaker for me. I am also glad she has a good amount of wild assness to yang up her hippie yin.
STEAL "Diamond In The Back (screwed & chopped)"
NEXT UP: Another goddamn Prolo song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #9: "Synthetic World" by Swamp Dogg

Synergy is a too much thing sometimes. I had been stuck on holding pattern, with this the next song to write about, and had all these "crooked ass world spinning awkwardly" type things in my brain, but nothing forced itself out forever. But last week after I had hauled my two pigs into a rural butcherman to slaughter and slice into appropriate parts, I just kinda got stuck on sore and beaten by this world. Friday afternoon, I cut out of work early to go down to Buckingham County and get my animal parts. This butcherman dude was a real kook, so we talked shit around the bed of my truck for a while, including about how some of the ridiculously wealthy in our general area of the world were actually solid people, just rich as fuck. He said at one point, "He ain't nothin' but an ol' shoe like me or you." I had never been called an old shoe before.
So I had three full-sized coolers full of pig in the bed of my truck, two whole produce boxes full of it behind the seats in the cab, and two more produce boxes in the passenger seat, all of it wrapped up in butcherman paper, except the top box, which was the pork bellies for making bacon and the belly fat. I'd have to salt and sugar the bellies myself to baconify them, and the fat was gonna get cooked down to medicinal lard. (I like saying that because apparently there is such a thing as "medicinal lard" which my wife can sell for $15 a pint.) But riding back north 20 to Scottsville, with a giant box of meat seating directly and openly beside me, in fact from animals I had taken care of for the past 8 months, it was odd yet felt good. Then I plugged in the gaypod and hit play and "Synthetic World" came on. Perfect.
Then, yesterday as I waste my life with a job that does not feed me spiritually or creatively even slightly, I was poking around the interwebs and went to the Wigger Mortis blog, and C.T. there mentioned this very song and having discovered Swamp Dogg on my blog. Strange coincidences, as I'd been waiting to write about this stupid song for two weeks.
It also, however, reaffirmed something in my purranoid ass brain. There's a lot about the butcherman, as well as taking the pigs down there with the help of my neighbor, that I didn't feel like sharing with the interwebs, because this is a fake ass place (the interwebs) where people find salvation from their own social shortcomings. Except of course, this shortcoming philosophy becomes the mainstream and shit changes. You have Comic-con become part of regular news, and shit like that. For me though, I am still old school enough in that I think if it is something you could not stand around the back of a truck and proudly talk about to solid bros of your's, then you should never take pride in it. This means the 7 Real Dolls or collection of 4000 Japanese wrestling DVDs or having digital files of every New Orleans rap tape ever made, none of this is a prideful thing. And the internet is the opposite where those are wonderful things, where your freak flag can fly with as many off-kilter colors as possible, and that only makes it better.
I think in my brain I too often assume the internet is the homeland for that, which it is, but without the presence of real people anymore who do real shit like kill pigs and talk to weird dudes who call people "an ol' shoe" and just have general real life experiences. It feels like more of a synthetic world than ever to me. I actually can feel electromagnetic frequencies weakening the sharpness of brain's creativity lately. I've been experimenting with taking yarrow tincture internally to try and slow this effect, but there's no doubt it's a synthetic world. (Side note: the "tinfoil hat" thing was misinformation, because the aluminum foil actually increases the effect, as opposed to blocking.)
But there's still plenty of real shit, too. Real shit never goes away, although you can't easily find it on a smart phone app. You are better just wandering around aimlessly, because there's real shit around every corner if you wander far enough off the electronic path.
STEAL "Synthetic World"
NEXT UP: A warbled down ass whiteboy classic!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #10: "Easy Wind" by The Grateful Dead

You know what I've said like a million times to be contrarian? How awesome the Grateful Dead would've been if it had been Pigpen who lives and Jerry who died, because then it would be a shitty drunkard blues band. But you know the truth? Either way was fine. Chicks with no underclothes and their breasts hanging out who liked to do drugs and buy you a Newcastle because it was one for $3 or two for $5 so they were saving money and just general overall fuck it vibe. Hippie chicks are Raven kryptonite. I cannot help it. The colorful skirts and unshaved yonis and turquoise jewelry and oh man when they have dreadlocks too? Raven Kryptonite.
This is still, by about a thousand miles, my favorite ever The Grateful Dead studio song ever. I have listened to a billion times in my life. I have sang it walking railroad tracks drinking wine. I have let it twang in my vehicle and cause me to pull over and buy two double deuces and go sit by the river. It is that type of song, brah.
STEAL "Easy Wind"
NEXT UP: The greatest R&B madman that the state of Virginia has ever produced!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #11: "Sweet Virginia" by The Rolling Stones

I look forward to when we have time machines so that when people become old and pitiful and sucky, time machine themselves from the past can come forward and stab them. The Rolling Stones are a perfect example of this, because if Keith Richards had a time machine, old Keith Richards would come and steal shit from now Keith Richards. Or just as likely, now Keith Richards would go back to straighten out then Keith Richards, but would pretend that the same music would still be made, because it already existed, except awesome shit like the entirety of Exile On Main Street would be wiped from existence. Needless to say, conflict and lawsuits and all sorts of mayhem would arise from this situation.
The thing is, they have time machines, up in Quantico. I've actually seen an older unit, and the dude in charge of that research lab was showing me the agreement you have to sign to even be able to use it - no financial gains like gambling or stock purchases, no interacting with personal family or friends, minimal interaction with all humans for the most part. He told me it was mostly used for observational purposes at first, but after a few meetings together, he kind of loosened up on it. The Shah of Iran actually was very charismatic and Iran became a defiant world power, on par with most European countries, and with a manufacturing empire sort of like China, not quite as big, but similar, because they used cheap Afghani and Iraqi labor (they punked out Iraq in the original shit). But they went back in time and overthrew him, which has unsettled the Middle East of course, but it was better than what happened before, though they are afraid to tinker with it further. That whole butterfly effect shit. I really really wanted to ask the guy if we could go back and get me a whole bunch of old Easyriders magazines, and 1970s era Penthouses and Ouis, but these dudes are jarhead haircut military types, and don't have much of a sense of humor for crap like that. There's a square-faced chick that works there though that seems pretty hip, at least relative to that workplace, who I might try to angle a friendship with, although she doesn't seem like the type who would be down with smuggling me porn from the past, although she does have those twinkly eyes like she might be a freaky ass bitch.
STEAL "Sweet Virginia"
NEXT UP: A goddamned Grateful Dead song, because the battle for my soul between redneck and hippie is not a battle because they are a tag team, fighting off the forces of square and nerdy as managed by electronics who is wearing a frilly tuxedo from a Goodwill in the future!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #12: "Take It Easy" by Yelawolf

Man, ever since that Trunk Muzik mixtape came out, I've listened to way too much Yelawolf music, riding around in my fucked up truck with the two tone fenders from where I hit that deer last year and fixed it all myself using genuine fake ass Estonian parts I got off some sketchy car part website. Sometimes it just makes sense, riding around like a dirtbag piece of shit, listening to some dirtbag rapper, aiming it between the ditches, drunk as fuck riding home, hoping that goddamned state trooper ain't going out on some oddball shift while I'm creeping back to the compound.
Early Yelawolf, or at least this one tape he did with this song, uses a lot of classic rock samples, and some of it is great and some not so great. I wouldn't necessarily vouch for this song were you to ask me about it, but I enjoy it. It's kinda like a Kid Rock song, just without all the shitty feelings that come along with something being a Kid Rock song. I mean, that formula makes sense, because there's a ton of pieces of shit out there who grew up while their uncles were smoking joints and taking shots in the front yard with Skynyrd pumping, but they grew up under the spell of hip hop. I think music has moved too far away from catering to all the pieces of shit that tend to enjoy music all day long. The internet's fucked everything up where people think if blogs or full of shit music sites like Pitchfork or Fader love something, then it's like popular with real live human beings. Which it is, to an extent, because we be sheeple. But that new shit that turns the world on its ass, it tends to come from nowhere and get all the pieces of shit behind it in mass and then the safer fringe sheeple (aka college town types) get into it, and eventually cartoon Colonel Sanders is drinking syzzurp in commercials. That's how it's supposed to work, in a natural world. But this is no natural world no more.
STEAL "Take It Easy"
NEXT UP: Like most pieces of shit from crappy places, I've got a lot of pride in where I come from, even though no one has any choice in where they're born!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #13: "Sponger Money" by The Junkanoo Band

I spent some time the other week at St. Pete Beach in Florida, old retro kitschy beachfront, but not on purpose, just old, reminiscing on when Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe would kick it. I dug it, although I was there for an army combat casualty health medical neurosurgery meeting. Crazy shit, and yet again I often wonder how the hell I get into the situations I get into. Like how do I sit inside one of those seminars and then a week later I'm drinking vodka outside a bus station? What happened to me to make me straddle these worlds so easily and feel too much comfort in doing so, until it all hits me with lucidity and I freak out and hide from the world amidst my five acre bird tribe compound?
This song is some old island shit from way back in the day, taken from the After the End of the World blog (should be in the sidebar). The problem with this song is in my head, instead of singing what they sing, I just chant "Tap that ass! Tap that ass! Tap that ass!" to the rhythm. That's still pretty solid, although repetitive, but you know, some for real people beating on things and blowing on things and four-part harmonizing on things, even if repetitive, is three thousand worlds better than digital DJ looping a wav file repetitive. Sometimes I feel myself lulled into a monotonous muzak 4/4 pseudo-hip hop lobotomy that occasionally switches into double time right about the time I'm given the pitch and in that moment of euphoria, I'm like, "Yeah, I would like to taste that or own that or drive that." So it works.
Sponger Money never dies though. Ain't that the goddamned truth old fucking song from some music blog.
STEAL "Sponger Money"
NEXT UP: Going back to Allah Bama again!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 Intro

I am very confident that even though it is the very tail end of August and I'm just throwing out the intro of the July J.J. Krupert and I have this self-mandated parameter of only one post per theme per day, that I will catch up to myself and what I listen to. One way I enforce this is I don't listen to as much music in the truck when I'm this far behind, so I'm stuck with AM sports radio or NPR, both of which become annoyingly repetitive and will make you crazy and/or misguided.
Meanwhile, at home, I take all the songs that are on my gaypod and create extensively massive playlists on the home computer Itunes and just play it, eliminating one of every two songs, to drum up play counts for the shit that's awesome and weed out the weak shit. This is complete ridiculousness in itself, but factor in my hand-me-down PC's internal fan is fucked (standard on that model apparently) so I have a house fan tilted sideways pointed at the back end of this thing, but a few big ass speakers I found running from the computer, including one with an immense bass factor. But the problem is if I play the Itunes and there's too much bass, something about that one speaker heating up underneath the desk overheats everything else and the computer crashes and I have to wait for it to cool down to restart it and it's all like, "Do you want me to scan for fucked up shit?" and I'm like, "Nah, it's all good, I know what happened," and it takes forever to start, with the little sliding Windows bar thing for loading getting stuck, then moving, then getting stuck, and you walk away from it all and eventually walk through the room and see the blue login screen and think, "Oh shit, the computer's back up. Let me look on Facebook." So you look on Facebook and there's nothing there but a bunch of dumb shit but you still look at it for about 45 minutes and then you should probably be going to bed but Family Guy is coming on, except it's an episode you've already seen too many times, so you try to beat your all-time high score on Wii Golf, and that last hole fucks you up yet again, so you just go to bed. And tomorrow you wake up and waste that one too and that's one day closer until they carve your name in a goddamned piece of stone and a bunch of people come around reminiscing and shit.
But I will catch up. Perhaps by the end of September, I will actually be doing a September list, and then that would mean hopefully by October I could be caught up, just in time to start listening to outlaw country like I always do once it gets cold and I have to cut wood all the goddamned time on Sunday mornings and then root for a shitty Washington Redskins team on Sunday afternoons. These are patterns in my life, ripples that make the same circle unless they bounce off of something else completely in the way, and even then the pattern is only altered directionally, not stopped.
But yes, we shall start talking about the musics I were pumping in the month of July. It was a hot month, and it was boring. I didn't do much as far as I can remember. Bought some chickens and beat on some dogs that killed some chickens. I kept the grass cut better than most years, mostly because we haven't had much rain so it hasn't grown. Still though, that's something.
Look, it's a full moon and the silhouette of my house against the skyline is tight looking. I'm sitting at the picnic table in the back yard at like midnight typing a bunch of gibberish. I really should just shut the top of this laptop to kill the self-imposed HAARP beams, smoke a bowl, and stare at the silhouette of the house holding my family and my life together into one unit, and be about to fall out on the picnic table, but it's kinda cool tonight, so I'd be afraid to just sleep, being I'm naked as well, so I'll go inside, rinse my feet off in the shower, and go to bed, thinking me and the ol' lady might get something going. But she'll be asleep and I'll be too tired to have to break through her "we have three kids and there's too much to do all the time" defense mechanisms and I'll make sure the alarm is set for the wrong time a little too late and I'll turn it to face the wall so that bright green false aura doesn't blind me in my sleep and cause me to grow breasts before I hit puberty, and I'll sleep an uncomfortable and dreamless sleep that rests me just enough to get me through another tomorrow. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
FIRST UP: Wacky island nonsense from decades ago, once again thanks to Dave Quam!