J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #8: "Satan Is Real/Straight To Hell" by Hank Williams III

If I could have one piece of music on vinyl to add to my collection, it would be Straight To Hell double LP by Hank Williams III. I first bought this on CD when I was painting an old dinghy building in downtown Richmond at night, riding a creepy ass freight elevator upstairs to haunted floors, alone by myself in this cavernous building. I bought Straight to Hell, pretty stoked for it, as I dug Lovesick, Broke & Driftin' a lot, even if Tricephus didn't. Man, little did I expect that Hank III would make a drug-addled masterpiece of modern American music. Seriously, I don't think there's ever been a better encapsulation of what it means to be southern small town proud but fucked, and endlessly talented but hopelessly doomed, than this double CD. The thing is the first CD is normally broken down into different songs, like you would expect, but the second more experimental CD is like the greatest shit ever done, and I wish there were whole genres of music like that CD, but instead there's been nothing else like it, ever, not even from Hank III. That album was done on the exact same type of recording equipment that Prolo used to use too, so me and Boogie Brown always felt an added affinity for it. When you make music in haphazard old ways with hardware not software, you become attached to those methods as not just method but ritual, precious artistic rituals that unlock what it is you are truly trying to do through rhythm and word patterns. And though that description is far too pretentious sounding for Hank III to ever agree that's what he was doing, he knows that's what he was doing.
But this double CD echoing through that cavernous fucking old warehouse on Franklin Street in Richmond, working through the night into the early morning hours, to where when I loaded my equipment back up so things could dry before regular work crew came in during the day, the streets of RVA had that beautiful ghostly silence broken up only by distant sirens or the shuffling of a drunkard and/or homeless dude across the street through the chill overnight air. Shit made sense, and it would always be after midnight, plus I had an hour and a half drive home, so I didn't have beer in the ride to travel home with, but this album would make you want to have just that.
In fact, this song - the first off the double CD, pretty much creates a Pavlovian response in my household. The ol' lady will crack open a beer and have extra sashay to her walk, and I will think about how great music through headphones sounds when you've taken 500 mg of oxycodone for a minute, but realize that's not where I'm at right now, and smile and act like I act, doing something like wrestle the dog playfully and say she hadn't earned that white patch on her belly yet, pretending to be an Aryan in jail, or putting on wrestling masks and running around the house with the little ones, and sneaking up on unsuspecting people to mumble "LA MOMIA LA MOMIA" which is Mexican for mummy. I still understand getting fucked up as shit, and appreciate it, and often miss it to be honest with you. But at this point, looking at how many chilluns I've made and the crooked ass world they're gonna get left to live in, I'd rather fuck up the world than leave it at fucking up myself. So I do what I can, when I can, and try to stay calm with that, hoping it's enough to quell my inner-demons.
STEAL "Satan Is Real/Straight To Hell"
NEXT: Some serious ass sangin'!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #9: "Nomads (acoustic)" by Howlin' Rain

We are neural nomads, stifled into sedentary physical positions, but letting our minds wander nowhere in a thousand directions at hyperspeed cyberpace. We feel more connected than ever to our physical disconnect, and pretend this is empowering. Though it's nothing like the old B-movie sci-fi flicks looked like, with us blank-eyed, soaking in a body-sized cylinder of amniotic fluid with sensors and gadgets hooked up to us, unconscious zombies to be harvested by some higher power that sees societal chess moves we aren't even trained to understand, that's exactly what's going on.
My mind wanders constantly with questions and concerns about what the fuck I'm doing, where I'm headed, why am I where I am, and does it ultimately serve my larger purpose as a person? The answers are all over the place, as my brain has been shifted by the algorithmic shackles of our today world. Nothing is processed at human speed, with gut intuitiveness or chance encounters anymore. Your google search results, your Netflix suggestions, your Facebook friends, your twitter feeds, your sidebar advertisements and other items you might like on Amazon or Ebay or Half or whatever - all algorithms programmed by smart people with no realization they are ultimately doing the work of the worst, most vile marketers man has ever known. It is becoming a relentless barrage of consumer stimuli, even if there doesn't seem to be a price tag attached.
It sort of occurred to me today that just as the fast food movement that still occupies most but is seen by some as a slow death mechanism towards failure exploded across the American landscape, and still is far more prevalent than anyone actually slow cooking food in their own house for hours a day, because our pre-packaged grocery store options are just microwaveable fast food anyways, our internet-led information overload is fast food knowledge, little tidbits of alleged intelligence or knowledge about the world around us that actually is lacking in spiritual or scientific nutrition. We are actually making ourselves stupider by thinking we are smarter.
I guess what I am trying to say is run the fuck off into the woods, find yourself a sit spot, and read a book, motherfucker, read a book. I've got Ecology of a Cracker Childhood to dig into (thanks to a suggestion in a comment on this page, so please, comment and interact - it feeds us both in this nutrition-less internet), plus I'm back into my Red Pine translations of the hermit poets of China. Also, there's still some passages in my Outlaw Book of American Essays I want to get into, but I've also wanted to go through the boxes of old books in the camper this weekend to dig out both Hell's Angels by HST and a few William S. Burroughs books. I definitely feel like the way my mind has been lately, I could use some of Burroughs prose to ground me back to reality. Good lord, what kind of fucked up cyberworld have we wrought where William S. Burroughs grounds us? These fucking lizard alien overlords are real beasts.
(Also, props to the always awesome Aquarium Drunkard site, for first exposing me to this, or this to me, or whatever it is that we do in this internetted age.)
STEAL "Nomads (acoustic)"
NEXT: The most fun anthem to reckless endangerment to one's self that has ever been made!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #10: "Fool Yourself" by Little Feat

Old Little Feat is a good thing, and I often forget them but then they sneak in when I'm feeling all back roadsy and chillospective. I think music like this is dead because the times it came from are dead. The 1970s/early 1980s rural world where things were actually at a slower pace and styles took years to filter through sometimes, that's gone, from the explosion of cable TV in the '80s and then the internet's spiral towards oblivion in the late '90s, and now with robot phones attached to our fingers at all times and people walking around with shit attached to their faces to ramble out loud to imaginary robot friends about pointless shit while in the midst of their real life going ons, we may be too far gone. I even got an email from a Rojonekku affiliate talking about retailers setting up facial recognition software to work in tandem with smart phones so that coupons/ads/offers could be shot at you as you walk by places. What the fuck man? The heavy hands of corporate capitalism has decided it can never reach into our pockets enough, not even after we've run out of real money and use fake credit money, at least most of us do, and they just make it so you can be fleeced of your credit but still be forced to pay that back despite bankruptcy declarations, so really we are getting fleeced for generations now. It fucking sucks.
But music like this doesn't get made any more. We've listened to a lot of Zac Brown Band in my house lately, because the ol' lady loves it, and it's good stuff, but still polished Nashvllle. Another Rojonekku affiliate knows dudes associated with the Zac Brown movement, and apparently one thing Zac Brown said is if you don't know who you are before you go to Nashville, they'll eat you alive. You can see and hear that with today's country music, which is more like somebody crunching formulas through data than actual songwriting and touching on real shit. I mean it gets there at times, and that song will be a hit, but that's more luck of the robot program than actual human feeling being involved. That's why shit like Zac Brown and Jamey Johnson seems so great, even though I don't think it's where either of those dudes would really want it to be. But in this new-fangled cybertronic world, you can't really be free completely. You can either try to play the system and carve some independence out for yourself little by little, like a Zac Brown or Jamey Johnson, or you can just go completely off the grid and be happy that nobody ever knows you. The problem with going off the grid is that type of behavior is frowned upon, and seems insecure to the homeland most of the times, so you run the risk of alienating authorities, even if you ain't doing shit.
I'm not sure where I stand in all this. I feel like I have greater words that need to get out to greater masses, but I don't really have the time to go beyond the distractionary ramblings I write now. Perhaps that is the grid forcing me into position and I should break off that routine. But I don't know how a lot of times because much like our money and credit being fleeced by prying hands, there's a lot of time vultures, usually attached to that monetary struggle, that peck away most of my livelong days. I do this website stuff to tell myself I'm being productive, but I think I'm fooling myself half the time. The other half of the time, I don't give a fuck. Feel like I am already a beaten man, my Universal Potential locked up behind some bullshit that I can see through and know is there, but I don't have a rock big enough to break the fucking glass.
STEAL "Fool Yourself"
NEXT: Some whiny ass awesome shit that's not from 19 years ago like most of what I write about!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #11: "Whiskey River" by Willie Nelson

I don't know what to say in regards to Willie Nelson and this drunkard anthem what which he starts every show for a thousand years. I am overwhelmed by feeling stifled and wanting my hair to shoot out my head again and to end the senseless shuck and jive and ride shitty motorcycles over the edges of horizons that dance just out of reach like solar flares for eternity, but always chasing, with tools wrapped up because all my shit is broken or cobbled or pieced together and I'm sure I'll either have to tighten up something that life has loosened or learn to fix something that's beyond my frame of reference from yesterdays but always expanding. And how would a song about alcoholic over-indulgence to escape thinking about emotional entanglements in the here and now make me want to drink again? But it does. It's been ten months, and I don't exactly wrestle with it because I'm better off, but without the bullshit trust in Jesus route, I am left to fend for myself. And honestly, sometimes my self needs crazy and needs chaos and needs reckless mistakes. Or maybe I don't and I'm just enabling myself. Who the fuck knows?
Anyways, I quit drinking liquor long ago, long before I quit drinking completely, because I did not know how to not go full-speed (still don't) so cutting liquor out of my life meant I maintained more of my knuckles and received less chances of misdemeanor assault charges on the strange streets of late night Richmond. Man, I don't fucking know. Something is amiss right now and I can't put my finger on it and usually giant reckless binge indulgences allowed me to make a giant mess to occupy myself internally and externally long enough to ignore whatever it is that was missing. So right now I'm just like, "???" without an escape clause written into my routine. No whiskey river to take my mind. Just me and my goddamned always on brain.
STEAL "Whiskey River"
NEXT: Old folks boogie music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #12: "The Deadbeat Heartbeat of a Hobo" by 1000 Feathers

Not much to speak on this song because it is my own song, done in pitch shifted Ancient Hobo style out in the camper a couple summers ago. I had started writing a hobo left his family song in the truck while riding around, playing this Edie Brickell loop constantly, and was getting tired of it, but my daughter Gypsy was riding and enjoying hearing me work these concepts out loud while riding to and from ballet or soccer practice or whatever, and she actually asked me to finish the song to hear how the story ended. That's the only reason I finished it, because I was starting to hate the song. That's why there's a dedication "to all the gypsies out there" in the beginning. And I really love the first pair of lines: "It's so hard to get lost along roads you've already been; I'm so tired of gathering moss with these so-called friends." That's a real ass lyric right there, and I've always been proud of how those two flow, and what they say, and how they flip metaphors around, and I've always wanted the world to know what the fuck I'm doing. Except I don't know what the fuck I'm even doing, so how can the world know?
I've been writing song lyrics lately a lot, with people other than myself in mind to ultimately perform them. Also been playing a lot of Boogie Brown's more twangy beats from the 39 Blue Globe Beats CDs I've gotten over the years. I've not done hardly any music recording in the past year, which on one hand sucks, but on the other hand makes sense because I haven't had the music wanting to explode out of me like some of these other word demons have been fighting to get out my brain. But I've been feeling the songs welling up inside me. And plus, our youngest - River - tends to sing really loudly about whatever is on her mind. Last night she freestyle-sang some crazy song about "You're not a teenager! You're not a teenager! You're not a human! You're not a human!" and it was hilarious to see this little sassy toddling 3-year-old make up words to a song she was creating in her young little mind, and she sang it as loud as she called, with feeling and the appropriate body movements, and I'm stoked I am the father of a household where that is what happens, and what is appreciated, and encouraged, and even expected. So I guess I'm not so tired of gathering moss along these roads I've already been.
STEAL "The Deadbeat Heartbeat of a Hobo"
NEXT: No thanks, Willie; brown liquor makes me fight people!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 #13: "World of Mine (screwed & chopped)" by Big Mike

Some rappers just sound better screwed and chopped. Fat Pat for example. Big Mike is another example as well. Even though he was the replacement for Willie D in The Geto Boys back in the day, he's sort of obscure outside of the south. Down south though, he's known to have a fairly decent cavalcade of player anthems from his solo catalog. Rap-A-Lot Records was always the best for releasing like 9 albums a month, so every member of every group had a solo project and side project and Scarface would appear on everything at least once, and it was all so low budget with pre-pen-and-pixel era covers that looked like somebody used a caveman photoshop program on a Commodore 64 at Kinko's the night before the album was gonna get pressed. And yet it was beautifully perfect, and if I were to pick my favorite all-time rap specific record label, it'd probably be Rap-A-Lot. So many classics in their history, and a funk sound that few movements have ever come close to recreating. The in-house production team for Rap-A-Lot is seriously underrated in this world that rates everything blogospherically.
It really is perfect, and more than coincidence that such a soulfully funky and weird DIY record label would be the elder figures in a city where a guy like DJ Screw would grass roots grow his own legend. Rap-A-Lot made it seem like anybody could do it, and do it well, and gain national respect, so why shouldn't Screw have people lining up around the block to buy his mixtapes every Wednesday afternoon? Why wouldn't screwed music take over the world? Why motherfucker? I'm asking you a question.
And while screwed music has gained notoriety over the years since Screw's death, actual Screw tapes are not quite so well-known. My ol' lady, for my birthday one year, bought me some actual Screw tapes from the Screw shop, and they sent them and there was a poorly written handwritten note about how they were out of one of the tapes but sent a different one because it had an awesome Fat Pat freestyle I ain't ever heard. They were right too, about it being awesome and about me not having ever heard it.
Beyond that, I've internet accumulated quite a large amount of Screw tapes, all the regular ones you see hyped, as well as others that show up on this or that southern blogspot bootleg spots full of tags for 7000 rappers I've never heard of before. This track comes off the Screw tape entitled Syrup & Soda, which along with the standard pick of June 27th, comprises my list of "Best Two Screw Tapes to Acquire". In fact, this is the third track off of Syrup & Soda to make a monthly J.J. Krupert list, and it's a mix where you can tell Screw was in the zone. The cuts break naturally just like you feel they should, the chops match what your innards want them to do, it's just right. I remember one time being high with a friend watching The Allman Brothers play, and we got in some long ass Jack Kerouac/Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums ridiculous conversation about how amazing Dickey Betts was, plucking the same note over and over but it made sense and he knew exactly when to stop and move on to something else. That's how this Screw tape flows, and how this Big Mike song flows, which is standard player talk, but also some serious testifying about the various good and bad people swirling around us all, as well as the good and bad swirling within us. It's a constant battle, for ourselves and against ourselves, and just as Screw is dialed in on this mixtape, Big Mike was dialed into those absolute truths of life when he wrote this song, and was in that zone when he recorded, every perfect slur made even more perfect by the warbled effects of Screw's two turntables. It is street testifying pitch shifted for the proper punctuation and delivery to permeate your insides with that simple and pure truths, about the nature of men, about life itself, about chasing material objects and what's truly important. It's a player song, so it makes no judgments nor preaches to you about how to live; it just lays it all out and says that's how it is, and yeah, that is how it is. No doubt. Sometimes we don't need to be told what's wrong or right; we just need to know we're not the only motherfucker on this crooked ass planet thinking about it.
STEAL "World of Mine"
NEXT: A song of mine's!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '11 Intro

One summer when I was in college I had a May December romance with a French girl named Juliet, which meant she was July, and so fly. She wore airbrushed tank tops with fringe edges that had the Puerto Rican flag except it was the French one but they all look the same to me when they are red and white and blue and un-American. We would go the river and google eye each other and it was nice in the summer, but then when it started getting colder, her pale skin freaked me out, plus she had freckles which is a sign of bedevilment according to the three weeks of Bible study my dad gave me when I was 7 years old. So after about 7 months I started to get that 7 month itch, which it turns out was a yeast infection, at least that's what an old dreadlocked black dude at a herbal store/incense shop place on Grace Street told me, and I had to soak my penis in a mayonnaise jar with 8 drops of grapefruit seed extract in it for three weeks. I mean, I had to do it like once a day for a few minutes for 21 days straight, not that I strapped a jar full of water spiked with grapefruit seed extract onto my groin for three weeks. That would be weird. Anyways, it was fun to watch my penis inside the jar, and eventually the itch went away, and I never saw Juliet again except one time I was riding my bike down Broad Street headed towards downtown the wrong way on the sidewalk, and I saw her at a bus stop half a block away stepping onto a bus, and she looked pregnant. I did that standing coast thing on my bike, which was an old school 10-speed because I'm an old school type, and she plopped down in a seat as the bus was passing and looked out the window and we made eye contact and there was sad recognition in her eyes, and I wondered why she was pregnant, why she was riding the bus downtown, what had gone on with her in our time apart, and where was she going. Not like on the bus going but in her life, where was she going, what was her soul's trajectory? But I never saw her again, and didn't really think about it too much because the mushrooms kicked in. Back then I liked to ride my bike on the sidewalks downtown while on mushrooms; that was kinda my thing to do, because the old Sixth Street Marketplace had this cosmic reflection of the bass bump from passing vehicles when you'd sit under it. That marketplace is gone, cleared out for newer, shinier progress, and nobody even drives a Samurai Suzuki anymore, and I guess some people still drive Jeep Cherokees but usually just white people and not wacky little dreadlocked scary black dudes in Richmond with the bass up 19th degree.
Anyways, these songs made me think of Juliet because it was July when I listened to them, and that was her name, and I bet she's on Facebook but nobody can find me on Facebook because I don't use my real name, much less the name she knew me by.
FIRST UP: Rap-a-Lot empowerment, thickened with syrup!