J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #1: "Ritual Of The Nile" by J-Boogie's Dubtronic Science

My eldest daughter's name is Gypsy and she is flowering into an insanely artistic and obsessive little young adult. She often asks questions about the methodical madness that is her father, like why do I have notecards with strange little phrases scribbled on them all over the place. Why can't they throw magazines in this one pile of recycling until I look through them for pictures? How come nobody but me can rate songs on the Itunes and why do I only allow for one star to be added at a time? She understands, and is as obsessive as me, because she's pretty much been working exclusively on knitting projects for the past 200 hours of her life, talking about knitting crazy things, piecing it together. But she understands the J.J. Krupert process of songs being played the most and getting on the list, and sometimes plays songs pretty much constantly in the hopes of making me write about them. Then I explained to her that it can only be songs on my gaypod, meaning a lot of the things she forces into the mix won't make it. So what we did was put a batch of songs on there at one point, and she forced her way into my Krupert dorkness. This was that song that made the final list, that she played for like three days straight in her every waking hour, to get on the list. She has been pretty deeply into Egyptian culture the past half a year or so, making paintings and clay structures in honor of it, talking about mummifying a roadkill animal if I'd bring one home if I hit it, wanting me to find Egyptian meditation music, being stoked when I made homemade falafel and told her this was an Egyptian street food. Her most amazing development is being about 87 pages into a composition book, handwriting a full novel based on Egypitan mythology, which is even more insane and ridiculous than I was at age 12, but hey, this is what we have been fermenting on our Bird Tribe compound. But this "Ritual of the Nile" song was her favorite ever at one point and she made me put on this list after understanding my madness and it's methods and using that to place J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science on the list.
This song came from one of the Deep Concentration mixes which I think was on Ohm Records, and my daughter really digs that ambient/electronic with a slight twinge of funk thing. Not really my cup of tea, though I dig this song well enough (hence it's survival on my little stupid Ipod), and enough so that I dug into getting full-length J. Boogie stuff, which entailed me signing up for their email list and getting a free download, which was not very good at all. But I still get a stupid email from J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science every now and then, and I often wonder if J. Boogie has any other possessive bands, or just the Dubtronic Science one, and who the fuck is J. Boogie anyways? Nonetheless, this song is an enjoyable electronic romp down the river, watching snake charmers and belly dancers and little TVs plugged into bicycle-powered batteries with a McDonalds commercial where a terrorist jumps out chasing a cartoon Hunger monster with one of those swashbuckling Arab swords, yelling "FALALALALALALALALA" and as he catches up to hunger and is about to chop it with the sword, or so you think, he finishes yelling "LALALALALAlafel" and whips out a McDonalds falafel sandwich in nutritionless pita and that is all what I imagine floating down the Nile through Egypt to be like, just with more hot, and sand in my glasses, which is so fucking frustrating because I forget and clean them on my shirt, which scuffs them up and makes me see even less, but I never go get new ones because I hate finding an eye doctor that takes my stupid eye insurance, which isn't much of an insurance, and usually just end up going to the guy beside Wal-Mart (which means like three times in my life) and the last time I swear the guy was drunk and didn't pay attention to me so my glasses were kinda fucked when I got them, like didn't seem clear, but eventually my eyes deteriorated to where it made sense or I at least got used to it, and that's still the glasses I have, because I break everything and because of that when something isn't broke - like in three pieces broke, not just scuffed and dirty blemished but not quite broke - I won't replace it. That's just how I am.
STEAL "Ritual Of The Nile"
NEXT MONTH: we will celebrate our American freedom in the rear view mirror of my mind!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #2: "How Long" by Charles Bradley

Charles Bradley is straight up baby-making music, and if you are broke and can't afford things like satellite TV or internet that can be the internet at a modern pace, then what is there to do but lay around on lambskins at night and make babies? When you are broke, and from the underclass of America, but upwardly mobile with your spirit and soul, you should be making babies as much as possible, every twelve months at the worst, preferably with a couple ol' ladies. Homebirthing is always the way to go, and how we've had all three of our chilluns, making each experience an amazing memory even beyond a new human popping all up in our faces after standard belly incubation periods. The great thing I discovered about homebirths, after our second kid, is you can be really adamant about not taking your kid into the health department when they are born and you need to get shit set up to prove you have a kid born. I used the "You are a health department, administering flu shots to the sickly... I am not bringing my newborn into this place," and brought a signed letter from the midwife to prove that I had actually had a kid. That's usually enough for the low level government drones who work in a rural county health department. So I've done this six times since then, when we've only had one actual child. I usually used to ramble about The Creator and the lessons of Samson in the Bible and shit like that when I still had long dreadlocks, and when we actually had our third real kid, my dreadlocked wife sat outside in the car with the baby so I could point them out and give visual proof to the religious kook anti-hospital anti-everything crazed dude story I would hint at when getting these rural birth certificates set up. What this means is we have 8 children in the eyes of the government, but only 3 actual kids. This bodes well for us during tax time, especially in regards to maxing out our Earned Income Credit, and also allows us some nice food stamp benefits as well. We don't have the bodies to prove they exist, but we have the birth certificates straight from the Virginia Department of Record Bullshit, and we have SS#s, and those two things count for more than being an actual human.
This caused me to test out a neighboring county as well, using a friend's address, to get three additional birth certificates and social security numbers, with a fake woman, so that the kids have a different last name. I did this to have aliases to give my own three children when they turn 21, as a present. It could be used to start a new life of credit at some point, or to travel anonymously to foreign countries, or really for whatever they deem it necessary at that point in their life. We are raising them right, so I trust they'll make the best decisions they can for themselves by that point. No one really should be stifled by one single alias in this cyber-optically complicated 2011 world. And though the government has tried to make it more complicated, especially after 9/11, it's important to remember our government is still entirely incompetent, and where competent it is outright corrupt, so you there's plenty of cracks to sneak between. If you only have one social security number in 2011, then you just are even trying to be free anymore, and deserve whatever bullshit predatory credit bankruptcy laws they burden you with.
But back to the baby-making music... I may come off as preachy, but it seems to me one reason there are so many fatherless children being raised in this world is because R&B music got so computerized and soulless. That is considered baby-making music nowadays, but the blip bloop synthesized backbeat is nothing like the actual live bass and drums of older soul. I'm not getting all old and crazy, saying this isn't music because of blah blah blah, because I love the collage nature of sampled music. But for baby-making, something is amiss (unless of course DJ Quik produced it, but that's a whole 'nother story). Because of this, there is less attachment to the baby-making involved in the baby-making music, because it's actually just electronic workout music and people are mistakenly using sexual intercourse at a cardiovascular stimulant. Procreation is not simple exercise of the body (though it is a great workout if done well and regularly, which I hope it is, for all of us, even you ugly people) but a connection of molecules to hopefully smash together into a new DNA machine that will be not only you combined with another but also hopefully a superior physical child, losing the weak genes and keeping the strong. The human is a highly emotional creature as well though, so both parents ideally should have a good amount of involvement in emotionally shaping the offspring as well. Without that, we have physically stronger children who are emotionally stifled, and I think if you look around you for the rest of the day, there's certainly a lot of that going on, ain't it?
STEAL "How Long"
NEXT: my daughter's enthusiastic influence in the J.J. Krupert process!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #3: "Too Early" by Son Volt

I've been drinking herbal smoothies lately, sporadically, and going into a store like Whole Foods really just is a completely painful process. In Charlottesville, they had a Whole Foods over in an old strip mall with a budget shoe place and auto parts store and Chinese buffet, so even though it was a Whole Foods, the fact there was a McDonalds like right beside it sort of made it feel like a part of a larger world. However, they just finished building a new shiny one in its own location where you have to backwards down a side road to enter the parking lot from the back end because they jumble the building up against the road on the back end in that pseudo-urban fashion a lot of high end sprawly developments do now, to pretend they are sustainable and geared towards controlled growth of humanity's alleged civilization.
I already hated going into the Whole Foods, but the new one is complete molecular pain for me. The people and the consumer psychologist layout and the exorbitant prices, it really pains me on a spiritual level, as spiritual as I get. The costs are not justified either because the type of shit you get there that is available at other grocery stores - exact same brand and item and packaging size - is usually almost double the price at Whole Foods. So you are paying a tax on overhead and feeling good about yourself and just straight up exclusion of the lower classes. And I think when I see that, that's what gets me.
I am always struggling with money, from the day I was born, and job-wise I'm clocking a better grip now than I have most of the adult times in my life, but it's still a goddamned weekly struggle to even try and pay half our bills. Seriously. And we try to eat better and not poison ourselves with conventional food poisons, but when it comes down to real butter quarters regular is like $3 and real butter quarters organic is $5.50, and you multiply that by everything across the board, or even just the basics you want to make a change with, it equals unsustainable financially. Seriously. Not just difficult but it would mean I can't fucking live in a house anymore. But other people do it, including people who are our friends who seem to be on financially equal footing (or lack thereof), and they pump up the pantry with the Whole Foods items (meaning from the store, not actual minimum ingredients style "whole" foods). I have a line in a song I did a couple years back that says "how'd y'all get all them damn things, I don't understand the math." Because I don't. It doesn't make sense with a limited income to keep up those paces. Only thing I can think is most people are operating on something more than the limited income and have access to additional sources that me and my ol' lady don't. There's only so much sacrificing and simplifying we can do and it still won't free up enough money to do this or that. But when you walk through the new Whole Foods, you can definitely see a lot of folks there who are at a different class of dollar bills than I am or probably ever will be. It is not only in their clothes but the lines of their face - they were born in a position I will probably be lucky to scratch and claw my way up to.
All this is in my mind as this economic downturn continues to trifle with us all, and the Republicrats kick this whole, "No more taxes on the wealthy" because it would stifle business development, falling back to that "trickle down economics" fallacy, that the wealthy, when allowed to use their money, are smart and forward thinking and great and magnanimous and they develop new business ventures and then create totally awesome jobs for the rest of us to do and benefit from. Ultimately, the thinking is instead of the wealthy being taxed by government and being a benefactor for the rest of society, they will build businesses and become a benefactor for the rest of society that also furthers their own wealth and makes America a more vibrant economy, instead of a socialist state. The problem with this is the wealthy have never exactly followed through on that end of this myth's bargain, and usually just horde shit, or when they create something new, they are not exactly magnanimous in hiring up the rest of us, instead going for the cheapest, crudest labor possible that does not empower the rest of society at all but instead treats them as a cogwheel in the entire process to be considered overhead, constantly adjusted and replaced when a more cost effective source comes along. But the wealthy, during this slow demise of the American Empire, can't just straight up be like, "Yo, we're not going to bankroll our society with higher taxes because we'd like to hold onto our shit so that we can be set for the next go-round, whatever that may be," and they can invest in China or Africa or whatever the fuck.
A lot of liberal types get pretty upset by this, and do the whole "Republicans are evil devils but I don't believe in God" schtick, especially now that Rick Perry has jumped in the 2012 campaign. But I have no problem with the wealthy deciding to not fund the rest of us maintaining basic standards of shelter, food, and health. I mean, I can't make someone do right, and ultimately neither can government (although government is rarely an enforcer of right & wrong so much as an engineer of its own self-fulfilling end goals).
Here's the thing though, shit is real right now, and getting more real, and will get far more real by the end of this slow decline. And a lot of people - not the Whole Foods shopping type or those who would pay higher taxes if taxes did get raised - are going to be hit pretty damn hard. And even a lot of those barely sheltered by middle class status are going to feel some hunger pangs and uncomfortability they've not felt before. And all these "entitlements" are going to be dropped because of whatever tax refusals and bad spending habits by our engineered leaders over the past couple decades, and shit is going to be ugly when a lot of folks look in the mirror in the morning.
Which brings me to my warning with this whole line of thinking - calling providing basic human support to all members of a society an "entitlement", as if they shouldn't necessarily feel privileged enough to have food and shelter, that's not as true to the dictionary definition of that word "entitlement" as is hording your wealth to yourself, your neighbors be damned. And I'm not denying these wealthy people may have made that money themselves, although the way our laws and systems are set up certainly help enable them to do so, which makes sense since it is that level of financial American who gets in the position to make the laws. But the true false sense of "entitlement" is that part of a country's human make-up should be allowed to keep everything to themselves while a large number of others outside the gated communities struggle, suffer, wither, and die. If you enter into a social contract where everyone says, even if only by birth, "We are all part of this place and will work mutually to make this place The Best Fucking Place Ever," then you are tied to that, and should ultimately either support or mindfuck everybody involved to be down with it. But when you straight up just say, "We're not paying more to help fund this entire operation anymore," you are breaking that social contract, in an obvious manner. And although there's massive brainwashing operations under way to keep all the lower castes thinking this is the red, white, and blue thing to do, there's plenty of us who see through the bullshit. And once you break that social contract from above, there's absolutely no need to expect those from below to follow it as well. Which means if you the upper doesn't want to support the lower through financial taxes or economic benevolence - which they're failing on both right now and only promise worse input - then the lower shouldn't support the upper by obeying and behaving and using their washed brains to override the hunger pangs in their soul to keep them from slitting the throats of those at the top. It's a basic two-party transaction being broken, and a very basic response system to be expected. And I'm good with that, if that's the way those at the top want to go. I can live with this new deal bargain being established.
STEAL "Too Early"
NEXT: modern soul music by a Bernie Mac looking-ass dude!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #4: "It Probably Always Will" by Ozark Mountain Daredevils

The Ozark Mountain Daredevils album this song comes from - It'll Shine When It Shines - is the true pinnacle of redneck hippiedom albums, and a lifelong classic in my brain as my folks used to pump this up back in the day, and when my folks separated after a drunken violent incident I had to step in between when I was 16, only about 20 records from the collection made it up the road to the trailer my dad and me lived in, and this was one. My dad loved that "E.E. Lawson" song to death, man, and this whole album always reminds me of my dad, but also my youth, as the blue willow china pattern (or whatever the fuck it's called) is mimicked on the cover. Me and the ol' lady actually saw some of that china at the antique store today and I wanted to get some even though they only had two plates, just for memory value, thinking about how I was mesmerized by the pattern as a kid, living in a shitty cinderblock house full of field rats on the edge of a farm in Rice, Virginia, staring at the design with my little ass yet to be growed up and mind warped and the whole deal. Very formative times for me, but then again, all times are formative for all minds, which is why you gotta be careful in the age of the cyberwebs, because once you see something, you can't unsee it ever again. The electrosmog also clogs up your psychic abilities.
Hadn't dreamt of my dad in years, not that I can remember since my dream where he was doing crank in hell, happily, with a bunch of dudes underneath the house in Victoria he shared with his second wife. Got to hang with my sister the other weekend though, and there was an incident with my dad where he was putting some mind fuck on me, claiming I had passed on accepting my rightful hereditary ownership of The Power, or familial psychic abilities, and that my sister would get them. Shit was hurtful, in our country fucked sort of way, and I knew he was just drunk and pushing my buttons, and I think those types of "lessons" by him have fucked her far more than they fucked me. But she had seen my dad in dreams in recent years, and he was doing better than when I last saw him, even was gaining some weight for the first time ever. And I realize talking about seeing family members in dreams and knowing it's real and feeling all these planes are connected and not blinking an eye about it might seem crazy to the scientifically inclined or those grounded in what is conventionally considered reality, but it's truth. I feel bad for my dad and the internal struggles he had, and I do not think I would be where I am without him walking the path in front of me, which has allowed me to chop through shit he never got around to chopping at, and I'm still ten years to go before equaling the age he was when he died. And I can look at my oldest and see she's already walking a path I didn't get to for another five or six years at that age, and hopefully that'll mean she can chop through even more shit than me, and we will be doing work as a psychic lineage, for both my side and my ol' lady's side of the family tree. That's all you can hope for. Just like there ain't get rich quick schemes that pan out, and your numbers never hit when they draw the MegaMillions, there ain't no easy path towards psychic salvation. It might not even happen in your lifetime. But you've got to set the overall effect of your DNA on the best path possible instead of garbling it up with self-destruction and endless wrecks into the same guiard rails you done wrecked into sixteen times before.
STEAL "It Probably Always Will"
NEXT: a dude who by name you'd think was from 1938 Mississippi, but he's not!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #5: "Pancho & Lefty" by Townes Van Zandt

I wrestle a lot with Townes Van Zandt, not meaning I wrestle with whether he's awesome or not, like you have to do with most alt.country superheroes, because the genre is sort of misled into thinking it is somewhere between T.S. Eliot and Willie Nelson, so there's a lot of academic fluff that gets passed off as greatness. Townes, I have found, sounds better and more interesting when he's less polished, which ultimately is why alternative country was supposed to exist, because Nashville is a hyper-demon beast that polishes everything beyond recognition, fills it full of audio monosodium glutamate, and unleashes it on a cartel of country pop stations nationwide, brainwashing people into thinking things like "Toby Keith is cool" or "I love big pick-up trucks that I don't do anything with other than consume energy" or "fuck anywhere but here". It's just one of those things. But if you look at the Heartworn Highways movie (which I think this came from if I remember correctly), there's Townes playing "Waitin' Around to Die" in some old black dude's kitchen, and it's pretty goddamned cool, which is not to say Townes Van Zandt is pretty goddamned cool, because I'm not so sure.
I actually wrestle with Townes Van Zandt a lot in my dreams, like regularly. For whatever reason, I have a recurring dream thing where Townes Van Zandt has a wrestling promotion, and I am always fighting him in a prominent match in front of a giant crowd full of hipster alt.country PBR-drinkers, in a warehouse somewhere. Townes is himself, and very popular. I wear a red mask just like the custom one made for me by Sexy Sadie and the Wild Irish Rosie down in Alabama (look for Sexy Sadie's Spandex on ebay... they are your hook-up, and very good street peoples of mine), and I am managed by Sly Stone, who is wearing a full-on hillbilly Nudie suit, as I saw on a classic Soul Train a few months back that Nudie made all of Sly's outfits back in the day, but Sly talks with a stereotypical hillbilly accent the whole time, hollering at people about, "Fuck you you white devil piece of shit, fake ass poor folks, from your sheltered cul-de-sac upbringings. I did coke off your mom's ass back in the day." And it's funny because the crowd kind of wants to like Sly Stone, because you know, they are hipsters and like anything that is stylishly crazy. But Sly is so good at plucking their nerves, as a whole as well as picking on individuals, that they end up just absolutely hating him, and thus me. My job is basically to just bludgeon Townes Van Zandt, who demands I don't pull my punches, even though it is wrestling, and he lets me cut him with our little scrap of razor blade rather than him cutting himself. I get the sense he has some sort of self-hatred thing going on, even when dead and in my dreams running a wrestling organization. Usually he's all like, "Make it deep," when I'm about to cut him, and I do sort of, but trying to be really careful, but then I'm stalking around, trying to work the crowd, and I see the windows are dark in the warehouse we're wrestling in, and I get freaked out thinking it might be like New York City outside, which sucks because I am a country boy.
Oh yeah, I never get named in the introductions, just referred to as "One Thousand Aliases" most of the time, though Sly calls me all sorts of gibberish names, and sometimes he'll be like, "Come on Bodhi Sattva Mr. Allah Bama Proclama Jamma!" at me and then turn to the crowd and say calmly, "That's alias number two hundred and nineteen."
But while I'm zoning out worrying about whether we're in New York City or not, I usually get sloppy and start dropping Townes Van Zandt on his head or shoulder in bad ways, and he never stops though, just all disabled and broken, keeps pretending like he's going to come back and beat me, to make the fans stoked, like a Hulk Hogan match from 1985. Usually I shift in the dream though and never see the actual ending, and we are back in the locker room, and Townes is cleaning up, and most of the time Elvis Presley is back there, getting ready for his match, by putting on a black version of his shiny suit, and putting full-on blackface on. He is a bad guy, and usually me and Townes are talking while Sly Stone is watching through the curtain, and "I'm All Shook Up" starts blaring and out strolls Elvis to ridiculous hatred and vitriol because the hipster alt.country crowd can't stand him. Sly is always laughing it up and being like, "Hahaha, motherfuckin' Elvis... that's my boy. We gonna get fucked up tonight." And Townes is talking to me about how good I did, and usually I realize everybody is a musician except me and I'm like, "Oh shit, why am I here? I don't make music." And Townes, still all smeared with his own blood and sweaty but drinking some sort of microbrew his hippie girlfriend makes him drink, says, "Raven, you know you've got them songs inside you man. Fuck those people out there. We both know they're assholes. You gotta sing them goddamned songs man." And at that point I'm all jostled by the conscious realization of what's happening in my dream, and wake up. It's normally about 8 minutes or so before I have to get up to the alarm and go to work, so I reset the alarm back about 7 minutes because it sucks to wake up before the alarm and not have at least 15 minutes to fall back asleep for. And then I get up, thinking about what dream Townes said after we were wrestling again, and how I need to let my songs out, but then I have to go to work, and work is a soul-crippling affair, and I think about song lyrics until about 11, planning on sneaking off for a break to write them down, but don't get a chance, and then by 2 or 3, I'm like, "I'll write out in the camper tonight, start putting these things on paper at least," but work just stifles and stifles and stifles, and by the time I get out of there at 5:00 or 5:30, the end hopes of my dreams have died already, and I need the few waking hours left after taking care of animals and shit around the compound just to convince myself to bother again with another tomorrow.
STEAL "Pancho & Lefty"
NEXT: a most played remnant from my daddy's record collection!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #6: "Alabama Highway" by Steve Young

Here it is almost the end of August and I'm still working through my June Krupert catalog... Not much love for the cyberbot machine I guess. Not enough real shit on here, or in life anymore, or anywhere really. The big holiday of the year in my little town is the 4th of July and they do a fireman's parade which scars all the little children with incessant fire truck and ambulance siren testing from every volunteer department within four counties, and the politicians glad hand their way through the sticks, which is us. And that night they have a big fireworks display, plus there's a flea market for like a whole week usually, which used to be a lot bigger but is still okay I guess. I don't think flea markets really work anymore because people just junk shit and go buy some new junk shit at Wal-Mart, which kinda of kills the need for a flea market. I mean if your house fan was a giant metal thing that looked like it powered planes back in the '30s, yeah, you might go get a new one of those at the flea market. But now you just get you a new $10 box fan at the Wal-Mart (or Dollar General if you shop local where I live), and get on with your slow sweat.
What always strikes me when the flea market is rolling up around the 4th of July is the type of people we see there - strange, wild people, with jailhouse tattoos and feral good-time looks about themselves and ragtag children wandering behind, wanting to go look at this or that. (Wow, I guess my family sort of fits that description too, which on one hand makes me proud but on the other hand makes me scared because I'm not sure what kind of future there is for people like us, which I'm about to get into, so let me close this parenthesis.) And the vendors are the same, selling military crap or old hot wheels or "water pipes" or whatever. It's really kinda beautiful, and over the years we've gotten many nice functional household things like cast iron frying pans and enamel plates plus nice decor like old herbal medicine bottles and one time I even bought a velvet Willie Nelson painting for a quarter.
I wonder where all these flea market people are the rest of the year though. It's like for that one holiday, they let out all the winter's bone people in our entire area, and they run the streets. Then a week later, it's back to normal shucking and jiving, Joe & Margie Nuclearfamily hustling down the road in their Volvo to their 1.5 jobs with their 2.3 children. The reason I wonder is because it's these crazy flea market people who are the future, if shit falls apart, or they'll continue to be the sheet rockers and backhoe operators and weekend prison population of America if things don't fall apart. But the whole move towards clean Wal-Mart plastic, which started twenty years ago or so, has led to alleged redneck types who look pretty clean and drive clean big trucks, with bed covers (what the fuck?) and shit like that. There's no grime anymore for a lot of people, and it's almost like that shit is encouraged, to always trade in your shine before it loses all its luster to get some new shine and never experience the solid soulfulness of hard-earned grime. This also affects people's lack of ability to fix their own anymore as well, as the encouragement to always replace junk with junk eliminated the desire to learn how to patch and repair and make due. And basically the biggest problem we'll all face during the impending financial collapse of the American Empire is our collective inability to make due. Though it's completely different from the "entitlements" that politicians jibber jabber about, we are all feeling a good amount of entitlement in our daily lives, about what we deserve to have, and how it should be better. Like how the fuck does anyone deserve a big ass flat screen? What kind of nonsense is that?
The survivor mentality is being polished away, being banished to jails and trained to be embarrassed of itself so it hides, and I guess only comes out around the 4th of July, drunk on freedom mythologies. And what struck me as most odd during this all juggling around my head around the 4th of July was the fireworks got cancelled because it rained too much, so in honoring the persistence of the patriots, it got pushed back a week until the ground wasn't so wet. So we came home early and I was flipping through channels on the television box, and there was a commercial for a stupid computer generated Smurfs movie. They ran through the characters I knew, like Papa Smurf and Smurfette and Jokey and Brainy and all, but Handy Smurf was gone. You know who was in his place though? A Scottish style smurf named Gutsy. This just kinda kicked around with all the other thinking on this I had been doing, and made perfect sense that pop culture would flip the script and replace a Handy do-it-yourself type with a Gutsy character, that probably fights Azrael-Qaeda and doesn't fix a fucking thing because he refinances the mushroom to upgrade his home electronics every other year. Well fuck you Gutsy Smurf. And fuck you social engineering.
STEAL "Alabama Highway"
NEXT: a dude named after a plurality of town!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #7: The Ballad Of Curtis Loew" by Lynyrd Skynyrd

At one time in my life, I lived in a dilapidated trailer number seven in a magical trailer park run by a chill ass old dude along the edge of his tobacco farm. A trailer park is often looked down upon by the socio-economic types who proliferate the interwebs, as is a single solitary trailer, but there's something really stimulating psychologically when living inside of one, which I have done multiple times in my life. A trailer is a pretty bare-bones, so it's not too far from rustic camping at times, and true to this, our trailer had a busted doorknob, so we kept a butter knife hidden under a cinderblock outside the door to open the door with. It was our key. But the cramped confines of a trailer make your brain go in strange patterns, which is why I think so many people who live too long in trailers tend to have fairly wild personalities, which of course just reinforces the negative perception of trailers. But when you are cramped into a long, slender rowhouse of a home that you can feel shake when the wind blows too strong, that'll create in you the type of attitude that tends to holler loudly at full moons or large crowds and will make you think wearing shirts is not a requirement for public appearances. I understand this, because I am this.
Anyways, in this trailer, we tried to spruce it up, with nice shit like a Steve McQueen tapestry, leopard print fabric over most of our sitting furniture, and I think some sort of weird ass velvet painting. But the main piece of decor ended up being my roommate getting a fish tank. Fish tanks are a funny thing.
The hobbyist ownage of a fish tank is as close to being a stoner that a non-stoner person can be. In fact, you will find fish tank enthusiasts to really mirror the behavioral patterns of actual stoners, but without actually smoking reefer regularly, if at all. I mean, what do you do to enjoy a fish tank? You look at it, and watch the fish. Apparently, this has some sort of scientific therapeutic value, which is why everybody had those stupid fish tank screensavers briefly, or at least I think that was the justification. But there's no doubt sitting around watching little tiny neon fish pop around in some water will put you on chill mode, much like weed smoking, but without the weed. This is probably why a lot of professional athletes have ridiculous fish tanks, because they are drug tested but want to be high, so the do this instead. And there can be no one to deny it is a stoner-style mind that can ramble on and on about the fourteen different types of tetras floating around in his tank, with personality traits for each one, even if that person does not or has never smoked weed. It's still the same type of dude in the brain.
So in our decrepit little trailer's fish tank, we had a pair of really bright ass tetra that were named Curtis Loew and Kurtis Blow, because honestly you couldn't tell them apart, no matter how stoned you got, and that's a funny pair of names. If I ever had twin sons, that's what I would named them - Curtis Loew Stone Mack and Kurtis Blow Nation Mack. But I never had twin sons, though I tried many many times. Zygotes are hard to train with internal thought processes.
So Curtis Loew and Kurtis Blow were pretty chill, and we had those slave scrub fish that never get names because they are basically just weird little wretched of the fish world fish that just suck the scum off the edges and you ignore because they look like shit eels or something. And we added a couple other small bright fish I think. But then we got a channel cat, for whatever reason, probably because they looked gangsta as fuck, and if you are going to have a fish tank and look at it instead of getting stoned, you will eventually want something gangsta as fuck in there. This is also why professional athletes end up having shark tanks. It's all a very logical progression.
The channel cat we got was a dick though, and started eating everything, but not like whole. He'd just kill them and leave them floating as a warning to the others, which I guess was gangsta as fuck. Eventually I came home from work one day and there was either Curtis Loew or Kurtis Blow laying there sideways at the top of the tank, both his eyeballs gone, and the other one hiding in the little castle that had a Lexus Hot Wheels parked out front (which I still have, and my kids play with, oddly enough), and the channel cat just lurking along the bottom of the tank. Next thing you know, Kurtis Blow or Curtis Loew or whichever one was the other one was dead a few days later, and nothing was left - no scrubs no tetras no nothing, but the goddamned channel cat.
So we figured it was survivalism, and put a second channel cat in there to keep each other company. Except the first channel cat was more gangsta than the second and killed him too. I did not get to see this happen, or else perhaps we would have encouraged fish fights as a gambling activity while we drank Private Stocks on our leopard print covered furniture, but it sort of was the final straw with that channel cat. He was too gangsta for this earth, at least the little part of the earth that was a 10-gallon fish tank in trailer number seven of Lindy Hamlet's trailer park. So I took an empty coffee can and scooped out the channel cat, and then flushed him down the toilet, to give him a fighting chance.
I often imagine that channel cat grew to be 100 pounds, and is still alive (because catfish can live for upwards of 40-some years) and he's lurking in a river bed somewhere in southside Virginia to this day, fucking up everything in sight. And he probably acts this way because he spent so much of his formative fish years living in a trailer. That's just how things work in life.
STEAL "The Ballad Of Curtis Loew"
NEXT: another awesome song no one's ever heard from Heartworn Highways!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #8: "Barry Horowitz" by Action Bronson

Look, when I was pumping Action Bronson like crazy, that was three months ago, for it to make the June Krupert list, so I don't necessarily feel the same way now in retrospect that I did when I was like, "OH SHIT, CHECK OUT THIS FAT FUCK WHITE DUDE TALK ABOUT GRILLIN TUNA STEAKS ON YOUTUBE!" His music is awesome, but it's not awesome in a gonna-make-the-best-rap-album-in-twenty-years awesome. He's no groundbreaker; but he's great at what he does - nostalgia rap for those unwavering boom baptists amongst us who refuse to accept this new form of blip bloop hip hop worship as an authentic form of soulful expression. And let's face it, regardless of how caught up in this rapidly changing world we get, there are times when riding down the road in a cleaned up Mercury Grand Marquis, with the windows down but AC on high, smoking blunts at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon because the sunshine made us do it makes perfect sense. And Action Bronson is the perfect fucking soundtrack for such moments.
I have no problem with throwback raps, and often the white boy into hip hop in me causes me to wear actual throwback jerseys. I get them off the ebays usually, or straight from China, always bootleg, but don't give me that "authentic" vs. "bootleg" shit, because even the real ones you get from actual licensed stores online come from China, and probably get made next door to the same ones you buy for $19 each plus shipping illegally. It's not like those big businesses are using that extra cost to treat American workers with respect and dignity, and toss them great medical benefits. No, them motherfuckers are using the same Chinese laborers, same materials, and pocketing the difference, minus advertising costs to trick you into believing that shit is necessary in the first place. So if you don't buy your stitched jerseys bootlegged from China, then you are a fucking mark.
That being said, I actually like the bootlegs even better, because they have oddities about them that you wouldn't find with the quality control of the bonafide (being they have to justify the added expense to the consumer). In fact, I often think the bootlegs are probably just from the same factory, but the lots that didn't pass QC in the first place. I've got a Julius Erving high school jersey that's an ugly ass yellow, and when I washed it one time the stitching got all loose and some of the numbering borders came apart so it hangs funny, but actually looks even better. It has a tag on it that says 58 OF 75, like there's only 75 of them on earth. I bet if I ever ran into another dude who had one on, his would be 58 of 75 too. But that's okay. I just like rocking the Chinese bootleg throwbacks because they make my dick feel half an inch bigger, and also I want to do whatever I can to expedite the downfall of our western capitalist system.
STEAL "Barry Horowitz"
NEXT: once had a catfish in a trailer named after this song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #9: "Desperadoes Waiting For A Train" by Guy Clark

I have inherited an inflatable river boat from a dude I used to work for who is now swashbuckling in Middle Arabia somewhere, so it has been a summertime goal to float the fam down the James now and then, to just get outside on the water and soak up the goddamned barely left freedom of our modern American lives. This entails dropping the truck off at the second spot, and then shooting up to the first launching spot with the uninflated boat in the back of our Subaru (R.I.P.) and pumping it up, loading kids, loading ourselves, and then meandering the fuck back to the truck. We did this last time, and did a different pair of points, which caused boredom and complaining to kick in for the last half hour of the trip, so rolled back to the Subaru to load up and roll home for cooking out.
The center child stayed in the truck with me, enjoying quality one-on-one time, plus they dig my wild mood after being on the river, playing music really loud, laughing because I have relapsed into 1970s mode being my wife has to sit in the back of the truck being we can't fit everybody in the cab with all three kids, so we sing lyrics loud as fuck out the back sliding window at her, and usually I hang my soaking wet shirt over the side of the truck like a flag, hooked onto my tie-down that never leaves my truck bed, because I am the type of guy that kinda needs to have a tie-down strap at any given point suddenly. As we rolled back into town, past the farm supply place with the quality lounger that works there, I saw three dudes just sitting in front of a trailer, doing nothing but sitting there. I said, "Whoa, check out those loungers." So the center child goes, "Daddy, why do you always say 'lounging'?"
So I went into an explanation of what loungin' means to me, being laid back against all odds, and just generally trying to be a good person, more caught up in helping out someone else or having a good easy time than chasing dollars or scams or schemes or memes or tired routines that get you nowhere. If you're going to get nowhere, you might as well just flip over a goddamn 5-gallon bucket there at nowhere, and go ahead and enjoy the scenery instead of running all over local creation for 60 hours a week only to end up right back at nowhere and nothing.
This lead me to also explain what unloungin' meant, and how it's easy to become an unlounger, and why it's important to not lie, to be a good-hearted person, and to think of the other angle when interacting with folks. At that point, "Every Rose Has A Thorn" came on my J.J. Krupert, so I started singing the lyrics really loud, but making them different to fit Phoenix, my center child. This caused her to smile that perfect Phoenix smile that she rarely kicks because she can be a broody sort at times, but you know when she's got it, she's letting her guard down and being happy. And she'll stare at me in those moments, like "Who is this crazy awesome man?" I try not to think about how that man probably ain't there big parts of the week when overstressed by Other People's Drama and getting caught in the ringer of work-a-day bull tripe.
(I should point out that I thought Poison was gay in high school, and never listened to them. There was a fine line between acceptable glammy stuff like GNR or Faster Pussycat and stupid glammy stuff like Poison, Cinderella, or Warrant. The former was for solid dudes who wanted to get fucked up, and the latter was for girls not dudes. But I have come to enjoy a few of these more stupider selections for their overall pop cultural value, and ain't afraid to listen to them, even if I rode by another me, the other me might be like, "Whoa, what the fuck is up with That Guy?")
The next morning was Sunday morning, which usually means dumpster diving through a giant loop to hit the four stores I hit on Sundays, because ain't no trash service on weekends and they can be loaded. Phoenix absolutely loves to go with me on these, and we caught a bounty at one store, like a ton of cakes and bread and donuts, at least 40 pounds of it, plus plenty vegetables at my favorite Sunday spot. Sundays are my favorite day, when I can sort through trash and give it to my animals and walk my property calmly, and hang with the kids. Even in our western world, with our spiritless Gods of Capitalism, Sunday mornings every thing slows down a little and is less frenetic. Stores open later, and smaller businesses ain't even fucking with a Sunday. I dream of our society collapsing to the point all day every day is like a Sunday morning - free and easy and chill as fuck.
It's bothersome to me how much work gets in the way of actual life, and actual loungin', and it's a shame we've been taught to think by chasing the endless circles to nowhere, we'll somehow be rewarded with some sort of bounty of free time and loungin' days that never come. We have been duped, and continue to be duped, but not many of us are confident enough in ourselves to really make a break off that grid of normal life.
All of this has nothing to do with the song here (as if that should surprise me if you've been a regular reader of this blog), but I imagine at least one of my kids is going to have children, and probably a son, and being I have all daughters, there's not as much room for me to ramble about shit like Guy Clark, because it doesn't strike a chord at this point. So maybe by the time I'm an old dude with a tagalong grandson, and he's hanging out while I'm playing dominoes with three dudes at a picnic table we dragged to the end of a logging road by the river somewhere near Shores, and we have an old boombox we tuck under an empty bucket down there to not forget to bring but also not get ruined by the rain, and we play cassettes, not because they are cool or hip but because shit, it's a tape player. And each time, the batteries die on tape mode, so we switch to radio, which doesn't take as much battery power, and squeeze a few more songs out of it before the sun goes down, and the CSX coal line will shoot east from the mountains, full of mountain raped energy bounty, and the train will sound as great as ever clack-a-clack-a-clacking over those old tracks, and "Desperadoes Waiting For a Train" will come on whatever new-fangled audio device they've installed into our vehicles at that point while me and the grandson ride home to grandma's house where a fresh apple crisp is waiting, and my grandboy will be like, "Whoa, this song is my shit kinda" in his head, and he'll ask, "Grandpa, what is this?" and I'll tell him about loungin' and unloungin' and then start yelling nonsense lyrics out the window like I always do when I feel good as fuck from the river aura cleansing my goddamned money sins away.
STEAL "Desperadoes Waiting For A Train"
NEXT: throwback rap!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #10: "Brown Sugar" by ZZ Top

Me and the big homey D went to a baseball game a few weeks back, but it rained like a motherfucker so we didn't do anything at the game except stand around thinking about what it would be like to watch a baseball game. We decided to roll to a bar where a friend of mines worked at, and play some dominoes. I don't drink anymore, but am comfortable as fuck with being a non-drinking, non-punk ass dude, not needing fake gods or 12-step self-help programs to limit my true potential, so though it might seem a strange environment, and I think tweaked the big homey D out a little bit at first, it made good sense, and for good times.
Anyways, after a few hours of this, we came home, and I dropped D off at his shop (one of the benefits of a non-drinking friends is having a dude who can actually drive without aiming for the middle just barely better than you would), and headed back to the compound, smelling like cigarette smoke and probably beer, even though I hadn't drunk a drop.
Passed a cop though, and my alignment ain't the greatest, so it pulls left, and the cop must've seen my beard and tattoos in the busted up truck under the street lights and figured I was a good catfish to reel in. Blue lights behind me, I pulled over about a half mile from Thomas Jefferson's crib up on the mountain, and realized I probably would be drunk driving this time of night normally most points in my life; but I was straight as an Eskimo spear. You'd think this would mean I'd answer the questions and be done in a timely manner, but I knew pre-emptively that all cops are dicks, so I figured I'd dick it up too, and reacted slowly to his questions, even hand rolling down my window (yeah, it's manual) all oddly just to give the illusion of drunkardliness. Sure enough, he asked me where I was coming from, so I sort of slowed my talking pace, though didn't slur, and said, "I just dropped a friend of mine off at his place. We had been at a place in Richmond hanging out for a few hours and all." So he of course asks me if I had been drinking, so I just look down the side of the door and say, "Well, my friend drank a bunch of beers, but I wasn't drinking," trying not to make eye contact because if he was a good judge of eyeballs, he'd know I was lying; but of course, he's also a cop so he probably figures I'm lying anyways, regardless of what I say. "Mr. Mack, can you step out the truck," and I look at him and am awkwardly unhappy, like I'm tired and want to go to bed, saying, "Why, officer?" And he repeats his demand, which makes me laugh inside because I know I ain't drunk. He has me do the one leg in front of the other thing, which I do really slow on purpose, and answer all his questions on purpose. He says, "Mr. Mack, I want to give you a breathalyzer test." And I say, "I don't really see the need, officer," but he persists, and explains by refusing to take it I am proclaiming my own guilt. At this point, just doing everything slow adds to the belief I'm lying on his end. So he puts the plastic tube on the device and puts it in my mouth, and I blow really slowly, trying not to register the device, because I've played this game on the actually drunk side before. It reads 0.00, and he says, "Mr. Mack, I need you to blow harder into the tube." "But I did, officer, and it said nothing." "Mr. Mack, you need to blow strongly into the tube for three to four seconds, or else it's considered refusing the test." I roll my eyes and make a dramatic scene about it, but then blow as hard as I can, and it comes up 0.00.
At this point, of course a second cop pulls up, so I switch into normal speed at this point. First cop is like, "He blew zeroes but he's showing signs of inebriation." And then all of a sudden I'm in normal talk mode with, "What signs of inebriation have I shown Officer X" - referring to him by name for the first time, which took him aback because I'm sure in his mind I couldn't even focus on a name tag. I look at the second officer and say, "Officer, I've cooperated fully with Officer X since he pulled me over ten minutes ago. I've completed his field tests and blown into his breathalyzer twice now, and I've tried to be a patient and conscientious citizen, because I know how hard the job of a police officer is. But as far as I can tell, I don't think I've given him any reason to further this situation." The first officer says, "If you are under the influence of narcotics, we can demand a blood test to find out."
I look at the second cop and say, "Sir, do you want to search my truck? I'm not exactly excited about letting you do so, but there's no sign of drugs anywhere in my truck, and I don't feel there's any reason to believe I'm on any type of drug." At this point, the second cop is sort of torn between his fraternal bullshit obligation to help his cop friend be a dick to any one they come across; but I can see he's wrestling with the fact that I've shown absolutely no signs of being fucked up whatsoever. The first cop is still holding to his threats, "We can have a K-9 car here in half an hour." So I throw back at him, calmly still though, because they'll use emotional outbursts at their demeaning tactics as an excuse to say you did wrong, "Sir, you can call your K-9 car if you want, and I will sit here on the side of the road with you for another hour, keeping me from getting home to my wife and family for another hour, until your dog can sniff around my truck and find nothing except an old cookie wrapper and empty water bottles. And I still won't be inebriated, and we'll have wasted a good chunk of both our nights."
At this point, I can see the second cop is not backing the first cop, just because there doesn't seem to be any reason, and they walk back to the second car, leaving the first car's incessant cop radio babble on between me and them, and they come back and the second cop says, "The reason he pulled you over was because of some slightly erratic driving coming through the light back there. We're going to let you go, but just be careful, okay?"
I know I've got them at this point, and have cracked their infallible cop tonton macoutes armor where the entire world is a lying ass criminal piece of shit, and now two cops questions one cop and probably one cop will be mad with two cop and I have divided them, at least partially, so I go, "Sir, I will be as careful as always. Good night. And you should watch over how your partner there treats regular people," and turned back to my truck. "Our apologies, Mr. Mack. He was only doing his job." And I resisted the urge to add, "Well he's not doing it very well," because even in a situation like this, I know it could easily get ugly with the type of ignorant bastard that becomes a cop, so I just got in, turned on my J.J. Krupert real fucking loud, and drove off. And this was the song that came on.
STEAL "Brown Sugar"
NEXT: if you listen really closely, you can hear Charles Bronson playing a harmonica in the background!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #11: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron

Them (D)s and (R)s just barely did pass whatever it was they did to buy off the credit wolves, but the promise of financial armageddon is still there, thankfully. I was really hoping nothing would get agreed to and shit would blow up, even though it would mean tough times for most folks - including me as sole provider for a family of five. But honestly, fuck it man, it's got to happen sooner or later anyways, and we've lived as Americans under this guise of freedom where we are indebted to a new-fangled country store all our livelong lives, and we just roll it back into company scrip, get a little cut off the top, and we blow it on some new shit to bedazzle us into oblivion for the time being. It can't hold, and it won't hold, no matter what finagling them (D)s and (R)s pretend they put together in their pretend different ways. We, as people, would be better off long-term if the shit just hit the fan, and we're forced to struggle through chaos and insanity for decades until something new takes off. Sure, short-term, a lot of us would struggle in ways we have not previously imagined, and a lot of motherfuckers would get hurt and probably die, over the petty petty politics of accumulating pretend wealth. We can't all get rich if there's a finite amount of wealth, which is what the whole wide world was pretending we was doing, and the capitalism system tried to flaunt it could achieve. But that center can't hold.
At the same time, we can't all get poor either, even though that might be the pretend result of what happens in the coming months/years. But if the "we all getting rich" throwing money in the air like we all are extras in the "Luchini" video is smoke and mirrors, then the "we all are fucked" doom and gloom is smoke and mirrors too, from the other angle. We will get by, if we adapt and survive to thrive. You don't need all this shit, bro, trust me.
So that brings me to the popular misconception that somehow new social media is some sort of anti-authoritarian vanguard of revolution, or awakening people to the truth. Guess what though, bro? The Revolution won't be digitized either. All this electronic foundation you build upon, the lights go out and it's gone, as soon as the battery power of our assorted handheld "revolutionary" devices die out. And I don't see no one accumulating smart phone batteries in 5-gallon buckets like military rations. So very simply, once the power is out, your digital revolution is snuffed. Straight up. Not to mention that your bullshit is tracked with a precision that 1969 FBI salivated over.
I don't know man, revolutions always seem to be more about the feeling good about being different part of things than actually fucking shit up and bringing about actual change. Like Gil Scott-Heron fans - and I warn you, I'm about to blaspheme in ways that will make the type that eats a type of soul food made of barbecue tofu cringe with disagreement - but Gil Scott-Heron had some good thangs going on, but came across as soft to me, like a character on Sesame Street, singing about red, black, and green liberation jumpsuits outside of that corner grocery store to Maria and Oscar the Grouch. I mean, I get it, and really love the spirit behind this song right here, but I think the whole thing about the reality of revolution was lost inside the grand notion of listening to Gil Scott-Heron while eating at cafes that serve couscous while discussing kemetics with your likeminded friends. And there's nothing wrong with that, in a consumer culture sense. And in a consumer culture sense, I'm certainly a thousand more times appreciative of that than some dumbass jocking the latest mindless "reality" TV rap anthem jibber jabber. But it's still not a bonafide revolution.
I don't think those types of people - the Gil Scott-Heron lovers - can get behind a true revolution, and I think this simply because of the pot lucks I've been to over the years. I'm talking pot lucks where, for the most part, people of righteous minds bring righteous dishes in handcrafted bowls with wooden spoons of organicky couscouses and brown rices and foreign vegetable spicings, but in small servings. When there's a Revolution, you've got to feed an army, and an army ain't fed with three tablespoons of rice pilaf with curried chick peas per person. I roll to pot lucks with enough to feed my whole goddamned five-person family in the car, never less, often more, and it might be shitty meat from the shitty grocery store down the road. But it's my shitty grocery store in my shitty little town, and I take those ingredients and I spice it and flip it and cook it up. I can work my way around a kitchen, as can the ol' lady, as well as the kids, as much as we've shown them this far along in their cultivation. But you've got to have that "feed an army with the shit at hand" mentality to throw down in the coming times. It ain't all organic on this earth. Shit's gonna burn, and it gonna vibrate in your pocket on your robot phone when it's actually burning. The 1s and 0s are already gonna be cut off by the (D)s and (R)s.
And hey, bring that righteous mind with you though. Once it all goes down, in a bad way, and starts to grow back up, then we can try to heal the land, bring the plants back the way they're meant to nourish and handle our own meat animals and give them the appreciation that'll pop back up in our bellies and muscles and minds. Shit's gonna get ugly, but it's gotta get ugly before it can be truly pretty again, because mostly what we're all doing nowadays is putting make-up on an old whore and pretending she's still tight.
STEAL "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
NEXT: the main ingredient in brown sugar pie!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #12: "Sunny Day" by Screwed-Up Click

I had been taking little notes in a tiny little American Girl-sized notebook of shit to write but that hasn't happened because life has been fatiguing and also because I am more of a natural born free-form type, not meant to be confined even by my own notations for the future. I was going to write about how Screwed music is the greatest summertime music because it's all thick and slow like humidity, and it's been really hot in my real life. I heard some nerd lady talking inside the NPRs about global warming today and how that meant bigger blizzards too and it made me laugh because that's every redneck dude's justification that global warming is bullshit - when it snows two dicks deep in December, they're all like, "Where's that global warming now?" and that's that.
We are an ignorant fucking animal, but hey we've done some interesting things. Screw was ahead of his time because now everything is derivative and the key is to be creative with your derivate bullshit, and that's pretty much what Screw did. This song is like the "Simple Man" of screwed music... Okay, maybe not. That would probably be "25 Lighters" by Fat Pat, but I'm not writing about that, I'm writing about this. I feel bad for Lil Flip because he was so awesome, the king of the world, and got punked by T.I., everybody of the internet age has seen pictures of him in a leprechaun outfit, and really it's hard to take anything seriously now. Plus, he did that wack ass major label release with R&B hooks and shit, although that great "Game Over" beat with Pac Man eating up everything was nice.
I am just sort of rambling because I need to write something for this blog again. Mostly I've been writing crazy man poetry and working on this other thing, plus reading old Confederate Macks to collect into a book, but the early Confederate Macks bummed me out so much I had to pull back. The hatred and frustration I was expressing was sort of shocking to me, and it kinda bothered me people thought that shit was so cool. So then I think, "Fuck people," which is basically the underlying belief behind those early Confederate Macks that so disturbed. This means that even though I'm a completely changed man, and think very differently about the world, I still have the same underlying beliefs. The more things change, the more they are like whatevs.
STEAL "Sunny Day"
NEXT: Soul food cafe staple!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '11 #13: "Don't Do It" by The Band

We don't recognize the flexible beauty of age in this superficially encouraged world we rock out upon. I passed a simple scene where I work the other week - an office with a hefty but attractive woman sitting at her desk and a thick-glassed man talking to her. Neither was textbook beautiful according to glossy magazine pictures - her a little chunky but round in all the best places, and with a sweet southern smile; him a little nerded out looking but with gentle eyes and a non-threatening demeanor, yet sturdy and not submissive in stature. They were talking and sharing googly smiles at each other, and I only caught a flash of it as the door was cracked open in passing, but it was beautiful.
There's a natural beauty in age, more flesh and less tautness of the forms we lusted after in our youth, but that's a natural flexibility that has come with use, that has been earned not condemned upon the body. Vaginas that have gave birth and penises that take a little longer for round two than they used to, softness between two people who want to savor those soft moments, not stab at each other with sharp figures and jolting epileptic frenzies. Makes me think of tomatoes on the vine, because green tomatoes are hard bodies but taste terrible. And them older tomatoes, all soft and red ripe, dripping juice, might have a bad edge you have to slice off for the compost bucket, but it's good and perfect and messy and doesn't look like the ones in the supermarket that they take pictures of for circulars, but damn if it don't taste thirty times better.
Don't hate age. I'm getting on close to wrapping up my fourth decade in a couple years, and I ain't the same as I was, but I'm a goddamned beautiful motherfucker. Not sharp-edged pretty like a 20-year-old girl sucking at the tit of pop culture would gawk at, but hey, I can't help that. I don't want to help that. I feel sad when I see older women running themselves to death to try and keep their sharp-edged magazine mirror "beauty", all gaunt and Ms. Skeletor-looking and needing a sandwich. And I feel sad when I see old dudes brow beaten into hiding their scuffs and scars and ink-stained skin, hair chopped into an business appropriate coif, fighting to hold their imagined spot as the younger, firmer, less savvy dudes roll into the overall picture.
I say all this knowing my hair has gotten shaggy and I work a job where responsibilities hover over everything like storm clouds, and there has been no thunder from up the ladder, but I know I need to cut it shorter again. And whenever I get to that point, and look in the mirror and know my shaggy hair looks stupid when I comb it (because that's not it's nature) but looks perfect when I've driven 49 miles with my window down on the truck because the AC's broken, and it's all over the place on my head, looking like a European basketball player but with an Al-Qaeda beard, and I realize I should probably just run in the opposite direction instead of trying to keep making the storm clouds happy, because the storm clouds come from the same place those hard-edged threatening stabbity images of beauty come from - a sad and worried place never quite comfortable with what it is and always wanting to look a little bit more like something it ain't.
That being said, I'll cut it. Light bill don't pay itself. I know. I've been waiting three months, and it ain't done it yet.
STEAL "Don't Do It"
NEXT: A summer ass jam that I swear was on a J.J. Krupert countdown before but doesn't show up as so in my secret J.J. Krupert master database of dork sciences!

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

June is here and June is almost gone and it is the beginning of summer though summer humidity arrives earlier and earlier each year it seems as I get older, and I am accustomed to putting in the window units earlier without hassle because the Owl and the River cannot function well in extreme heat, though it upsets me because I do not like the catacomb nature of an old farmhouse with window units loaded up like homemade hollow points in a six-shooter, as the house becomes separate from the outside. The AC in my truck died and I am refusing to fix it because I feel that if the faith of science is informing us correctly for once on this global warming trend, then it is my duty as a human being of the animal world to condition myself as much as possible to harsh heat waves, to initiate the process of adaptation so that my offspring - even though I am done with that - are more apt to survive. Most of us fat, smooth-handed Americans live a conditioned air lifestyle, from vehicle pod to workplace cubicle to home environment, all of it with air reconditioned and cooled or heated to dull our sensory spectrum.
So it is June, it is hot, and it is storming. Rivers are flooding and nuclear plants are exploding. Man is dying and man is adapting. I say to you dear friend of Rojonekku, take yourself outside, sit in the sun, listen to some music, sweat, suffer, remove articles of clothing (as much as you feel comfortable with), enjoy yourself - and by that I mean your "self". If you live close enough, go dip yourself in the re-ionizing waters of the various oceans on this earth, though you should probably beware of the Pacific because the full impact of Fukushima is not yet known, and will probably never be revealed until we are all dead, and then the last ten people will have the last remaining bureaucratic overlord admit some mistakes and then shoot three of the people to feed the other seven. Or more likely shoot seven to feed three.
The symbolic frenzy of 4th of July is almost upon us in America, and as you pretend to be free - and that is no political statement or me trying to be all "lolol sheeple" at you - try to be free. Detach from your smart phone shackles, and unplug as much as possible inside the house. Carry an old chunk of bald tire, preferably without exposed steel cables. The rubber is a great blocker of harmful EMF rays. In fact, I encourage you all to make homemade sandals out of an old tire just like an old Vietnamese lady would do, and just walk down whatever road you live on that hopefully doesn't have so much traffic you could get killed by a logging truck. I prefer night time strolls along the median strips of the interstate because it's a calmly wild place with very little, if any, large threatening wild life, and there's a strange meditative nature to getting pricked by blackberry bushes and sharp pine needles when you are hiding from what might be a cop while a constant mechanical bzzzz and rush of machines goes on along both sides of you. This is very much like conditioning yourself by sitting outside in the sun, yet you are conditioning yourself for the world we are already trapped in. The best access points are wherever the interstate overpasses a lower road or train track or river with two separate bridges, because often times you can climb up the embankment between bridges from underneath without jeopardizing yourself to Predator Drone attacks by crossing the actual interstate asphalt, which is speckled with the glass shards of obsolete slave eyeballs.
FIRST UP: A band so simple in nature that it gave itself the simplest of names!