J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #1: "Lovesong Of The Buzzard" by Iron & Wine

Buzzards are unable to love because they eat too many hearts of other animals, thus know the blackness that inevitably poisons even the most naive of animal kingdom's cupid-pecked fools. Actually, that's bullshit that I wrote because this is the internet and that's the type of place where you write bullshit, and then hopefully a bunch of dumbasses are like, "HA! This guy writes some really great bullshit!" And it all leads to absolutely nothing. I have become far too self-aware in this format, so am pulling back, though it might seem like the same amount as ever, but I'm working on other shit that will show up here as an offer. It is time to rekindle the magic, break the electronic umbilical cords into tiny little shards and make a mosaic of death images to share with my grandchildren, polyurethaned seven times over in the clear hydraulic blood of the machines that oversee my every action. Or something. Mostly I say that to be all cryptic and weird sounding, again for the "HA!" factor, but also because I am the white dork Ghostface Killah of the cybersphere, and am trying to push that into a different level of capitalist hell in the hopes my whore ass can afford some new fake titties.
STEAL "Lovesong Of The Buzzard"
NEXT MONTH: Fool music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #2: "Butt In The Meantime" by Black Sheep

Back in the days of being in college, I used to buy every fucking tape that came out, and lived with a shitty girlfriend in a shitty apartment with transvestite hookers walking back and forth outside (what up 1100 block of Grace Street, RVA!), and I'd obsessively just make mixtapes - actual 90-minute dual cassette dubbed tapes, like a fool. Bought the Gemini turntables/mixer hook-up out the back of a The Source magazine, but had to cancel the check through the bank to cover my rent before they showed up - always steadily juggling. Still though, making tapes mostly for myself, or for whoever else would take one, finding good mixes and songs that went to the other. I'd buy a tape and bump that shit and be putting a song on mixes that ended up being the next single - true DJ ear developed broke ass style. Anyways, what this all leads up to is me telling you one of my favorite song-to-song transitions then, and to this day really, is "Butt In The Meantime" coming in off the back end of "The Bridge Is Over" by Boogie Down Productions. That broken keyboard sound is in both, meandering nowhere, and shit goes good.
One of Black Sheep I think is still around, and the other one went to jail for genocide in Rwanda. Also Chi Ali the kid rapper who was so cute and kidsy on the Black Sheep tape - like the official young 'un of Native Tongues, he went to jail for killing some dude, or shooting him or something. Briefly, the whole rap dork world was like, "Oh no, it couldn't be," like we all were EPMD on a date with Jane.
STEAL "Butt In The Meantime"
NEXT: The buzzards circle overhead and hide in the ditches waiting for you to wrap yourself around the guard rail at 3 in the morning!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #3: "Living On The Run" by David Allan Coe

Running from my self most of the time, as I am my own worst enemy. Needing to feel the outside, needing to feel the mothball smell of North Carolina flea markets, needing to hear shitty Mexicans talk shitty Spanish in paint-speckled blue jeans. Need to smell the grass cut for the first time, with the violets and wild onions up in the mix. Need to fix the riding mower. Need to fix the truck. Need to drive the truck to Indiana. Need to run, not so much away from anything but just because running causes circulation. There is stagnant energy and when you run, even if all you do is run away for four hours, then run back for five, taking longer on the way back because you are confident enough in the path to stop and get a bite to eat at some fucked up looking restaurant, just to see what it looks like inside, that running causes circulation - of energy of blood of spinal fluid of brain waves of everything. I have not done any running for a couple months, not of the physical variety or real variety or any. As I walked back into work after the meditative health-related break, I realized what a false world it was I was in the middle of. Brick facades and false auras propped up on paper, not backed by physical power nor spiritual energy. Vast swaths or our lives now are frantic strolls through engineered environments, where you never once step on a blade of grass, and many times even if you do it is a pesticided out Aryan lawn, complete with the militaristic crewcut. Sadly, we can run through that world all day every day, and never get anywhere, not in a spiritual sense, financial sense, or even stir up any of the stagnant energy. Sedimentary lifestyle, even at full-speed twelve-hours a day, about to get a ticket to help drum up revenue for local governments.
As soon as I'm better, I'm going to that abandoned roadside pull-off right near Shannon Hill off I-64, where the underground access to the tunnels that stretch underneath the Blue Ridge up into West Virginia and back over to the District of Columbia. I know about it. I heard a trucker tell of entering there, going for five hours, dropping off, and then being escorted back out for another few hours, and coming out somewhere near Staunton. It's under there. Seed banks and subterranean worlds. You think they give a fuck about poisoning the Pacific with radiation or dropping depleted uranium munitions all throughout the Holy Lands of the major good/evil dichotomy three religions of our current days? Hell no. Those who can already have the access birthrighted to them to go underground till it all blows over, grows over, and starts over. Regenesis. Old ass people been talking about Armageddon and Rapture and thinking of flying off into the sky, looking up at the sunshine, and when it really happens, the real rapture is going to be disappearing into the ground while we all standing up here burning to death.
STEAL "Living On The Run"
NEXT: Music that makes me think of having sex, even though I never had sex to it!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #4: "Eye Examination" by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien

When I was in the college, I did a 12-page paper on this very song, for a linguistics class, breaking the shit down to a nerdgasmic compound. At the time that was crazy clever, but what with the internet, that's been lost. I'm not sure how you'd be clever nowadays with everything meta times twelve all over the place. But I've always dug this song immensely - actually have the 12-inch single for I think "Dr. Bombay" but to be honest, I don't even know, because all I ever played off the single was "Eye Examination" proving that B-side not only won again but made A-side obsolete in my brain.
I went to college at VCU, which is in the news for basketball glory. Kids filled the streets at campus when they won their Final Four game last weekend, except a lot of campus is like a couple blocks over from where I remember, because they've expanded like fuck, trying to chase off the negro crimelords of Jackson Ward, and expand the big industry of higher education to revitalize the Broad Street corridor around the campus there. Used to be a place called Ivory's where people got shot every weekend. Like seriously, every weekend. Dude opened up with a machine gun one night, and abandoned his hot pink Beamer right on Broad Street. I always wondered if he just ran off or got in someone else's car or what. Seems a big waste of a pimped out Beamer. Ivory's is gone though, as is the Hardee's and the old strip club that was the most decrepit concrete building ever, that got tore down while I was still in school there. Industry is the key to revitilization.
They showed a park there where the students were encouraged to celebrate, but none of them really filled the park, which was odd to me and my wife because when we went everybody hung out there, including the homeless. But the school took over the park - Monroe Park - and put benches with center armrests to keep people from sittin' sideways on them, and put a campus cop shop in the center gazebo-like building. I guess no one goes there anymore, like it's a red zone of unlounging and the kids preferred to fill the asphalt going around it. That park is where I first met my wife. I was high on acid. That's college.
My linguistics paper on Del's B-side song that won again, I really was proud of it, more so than most things I did in college. I still have the word processor I wrote it on, but the thing is broke, and you can't use those disks from one to the other without them being reformatted, but I still have a box of those disks from that word processor. I have in that box about 80 pages on a novel I wrote about some coked out ambulance EMT guy who was stealing tattooed skins off of dead people, and there was this background uprising going on where naked people with torches - like hundreds of them - would just storm through at times like a tsunami wave of feral humanity. The novel really sucked, and I got sick of the main character, and didn't want to hang out with him anymore. I wish I could see what he's been up to, locked up in those obsolete word processor disks all these years. I wonder if he ever finished making his wall-hanging?
STEAL "Eye Examination"
NEXT: You can run but you can never hide, not even when you are concealed!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #5: "Tight Rope" by Leon Russell

Look, I have talked about Leon Russell for like nine months in a row, and judging from the contents of my 4gb gaypod, I will probably talk about him for the next nine months. Let me just tell you he has some hits and he has some misses, and you might get a CD and it suck, be like some old ass white dude doing R&B music. That's okay, that's Leon. But the album this song comes from - Carney - it is an unmistakable classic. If you get that shit (like for real buying it or just pilfering it from inside the interweb's bountiful electronic vagina). So just get that. And since it's a carney theme on that album, including the metaphor behind this song - which is a great goddamned song, perfect use of piano in a classic rock poppy format, I shall wander through the memory bank about the time I drank forties with a carney worker who had just come home on the Greyhound.
The ride started out I think in Columbus, where I had spent most of the day for some reason, with a long ass layover from right at dawn until late afternoon. First thing that morning, I was cleaning up in the bathroom, and some old dude who I think was Mexican but looked indio as fuck was brushing his teeth with an open 40 of malt liquor right beside him, and some little black kid was kind of standing beside him, and then the old indio dude just started cussing the kid out in Indian Mexican jibber jabber, and I was like, "Ahhh... my beautiful America." I slept for a while on the TV chairs, head down, face tucked into my one arm, that arm's hand holding a knife that was tucked into my second armpit. I learned while riding the Greyhounds this was usually the best way to sleep in the bus station. After a nap, I wandered around a little, got a little high, and ended up my bus headed to Charleston, West Virginia, around the dinner hour. The bus was a strange mix of black kids who were heading from up north (like Detroit and Chicago) to college down south, a couple dudes (black and white) who were fresh out of jail, me, and a quiet dude across the aisle with a couple visibly sketchy tattoos on his arm. Nothing major, but you could tell they were homemade as fuck, like not even trying to look not homemade. I respect that.
Well, once the sun went down, the conversation towards the back half of the Greyhound usually gets pretty wild. The bus already is a place that draws those with more time than money, and I have always appreciated being from that sociological tax bracket. The stories are amazing. And the white underclass and black college kids and myself who was like a college kid from the underclass or whatever the fuck I was, we all sort of agreed on a few major points: namely, fuck the government, the whole thing in general but definitely the police at an individual level; and we all loved to have sex and get fucked up. I mean, who on a bus doesn't like to fuck and get tore down? The one white dude fresh out of jail was talking and talking about how he had two chicks waiting to pick him up in Portsmouth and how they were gonna do a bunch of coke and get drunk and fuck all night. We were all like, "Okay dude, whatever," because hey, it's the bus you know. But when we got to Portsmouth, Ohio, there was this tiny S10 pick-up truck with two hefty, hefty women, who he jumped in the middle of, squeezed into the cab, and was looking through the windshield giving a double thumb's up back at us on the bus as they drove off.
After that dude got off, the bus got quieter, as you could imagine. I bet most of us were thinking about how much greater it would've been to be squeezed between those two not really attractive fat chicks, going to some run-down apartment to sleep on a pull-out couch, than pull another few hours on the bus. Shit man, one of the college dudes was going all the way to Atlanta. But me and the dude across the aisle had quiet conversation, and he was getting off in Charleston, where I was gonna have to spend the night in the bus station until the 7:30 am bus headed east to Richmond.
His story in a nut shell: got a girl pregnant, split small town West Virginia to run off with the carnival (no shit, for real), had been gone for six years, nobody knew he was coming back, so he didn't know what to expect. All he had was a backpack with some clothes in it, and this giant cardboard box holding one of those all-in-one stereo systems that he bought with his carnival money to bring home to the girl he left behind (again, no shit, for real). When we got to the bus station, he made a couple calls on the pay phones trying to find someone to come pick him up. One person had to wake up another person (it was about 11:30 at night), and then he was all, "Can't you borrow $5 to come and get me? I ain't been home in five fuckin' years." After a while, he had somebody coming, but they were gonna be a couple hours before they got there. So we went out front of the Charleston, West Virginia bus station, near midnight, and sat on our backpacks. A couple crackheads rolled up, friendly crackheads, and we shot the shit. They had two fresh 40s, which they shared with me, the other dude didn't drink, potentially a racist I guess, but the four of us talked about how weird it was the Charleston, West Virginia, capitol building was gold-plated, and the crackhead girl was like, "Shit man, make me wanna go up there and scrape some of that shit off. Know what I'm sayin'? Don't make no sense." We all agreed it didn't make no sense, and sat there in front of the bus station, and I have always remembered this scene under a dim streetlight, and it would've made a great painting. Glorious times. The Greyhound is where the underbelly of America slithers back and forth across this god damned country.
STEAL "Tight Rope"
NEXT: A rap song that I did a 12-page paper on in college!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #6: "Methamphetamine" by Old Crow Medicine Show

This is a different "Methamphetamine" song than the Son Volt one I wrote about a month or two back, and I did not give it a proper listen for a while because O.C.M.S. tend to do a lot of covers, which is not a bad thing at all, but I was in my head all like, "Why would you do a cover of a song that's not that old? That seems kinda triflin'." Turns out it's not a cover but an original, a completely separate alt.country warbler about the wonders and consequences of speed. Where I'm from, it was always called crank, and much like religion and opinions on the effects of Mexican people in our town, the drug jargon I learned from my parents is what I still speak. In fact, there's a few things I say from growing up in Farmville, Virginia, that my wife and now daughters make fun of. For example, I call a purse a "pocketbook". They find this endlessly amusing because I guess wherever my wife was raised, pocketbooks did not exist at all. We were watching some show, all of us together at some point, and one of the characters said she was going to buy a new pocketbook, and my wife and the two oldest kids all just turned and stared at me incredulously, like they couldn't believe somebody not in the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Farmville would ever say that word. I just smiled a "told-you-so" smile, stuck my paws in my dungarees, and walked into the kitchen to finish cooking supper.
Old Crow Medicine Show is a weird band. They can be really enjoyable and you dig it a lot, but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you'll realize it's 2011 and you'll think, "What is wrong with these guys?" But I will dig on them, if for no other reason than I'm still convinced that you could book these guys to play a bonfire party. I guess they are in that whole jam band festival concert loop now, but I just refuse to believe if I told them they could sleep in the camper and we'd be cooking a hog that we raised ourselves and we had a tent set up with a P.A. and everything, that we could get them to play in our back yard for a cheap enough price that I could convince like two people I know who might have money to throw in on to make it happen. It wouldn't be like singing for Qaddhafi or anything, but hey, it'd be a fun gig.
Speaking of those famous types who played for Qaddhafi and now caught flack for it, I feel the worst for Nelly Furtado. When my oldest kid was like five, I took her to the record store (back when those places still existed - Rest In Peace record stores) to pick out a CD of her choice, to encourage music appreciation. She loved that "I'm Like A Bird" song by Nelly Furtado, so that's what she got, so through that CD purchase for my firstborn, I've haphazardly followed Furtado from afar. When she made that "Promiscuous" song, I felt personally betrayed to be honest, because I didn't want my sweet daughter who knew all the words to "I'm Like A Bird" to be listening to shit like "Promiscuous" at a still tender age. Anyways, Furtado was one of the first musicians to be outed for performing for Qaddhafi, pulling in a cool million bucks for the gig. Furtado said she would donate the money to charity once the story was broke, but I couldn't help but wonder if somebody like a Nelly Furtado actually has a million dollars still around to just get rid of to charity, cushy gigs for Libyan leaders aside. I mean, I think we tend to exaggerate how wealthy the entertainment elite end up being. Every one- or two-hit wonder from the past twenty years is not a multi-millionaire, and usually they only become financially successful by moving into the management/industry side of things, learning from their own exploitation how to exploit others. I have a hard time believing Nelly Furtado is sitting on an eight-digit bank account where scribbling out a million-dollar check to Africa Got AIDS Let's All Wear Red Shit To Help or some other charity is really that easy for her. Although sending out a press release saying she would do so is probably not that hard. And with the internet, journalism now is basically just retyping the bullshit people email to you anyways, and pretending you researched it afterwards.
STEAL "Methamphetamine"
NEXT: A carnival anthem, applied metaphorically to a shitty relationship with a crazy bitch!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #7: "Blast It" by Shabazz Palaces

They are dropping bombs over Tripoli in the name of collective governments that for one reason or another deem one long-time tyrannical overlord no longer an acceptable member of their fraternity, when two states over a similar long-time tyrannical overlord had thousands upon thousands sitting in the center of the largest city - an ancient one that dates back to pyramids on the moon - and no one gave half a shit. The stories in our lightboxes tell us of the Gaddhafi murdering his own people, dropping cluster bombs of death onto innocents to get at the rebellious few. But they ignored the stories of Mubarak's oppression, because he is friend, who helps prop up the Israeli government's grip on a homeland built along deep sociological and historical fault lines.
But hey, sorry Gaddhafi, it was fun that you calmed your ways and stopped supporting state terrorism, whatever that actually is. The Al Qaeda-offshoot organization trying to overthrow your country, angry at you for not being the old you, shall now be the freedom fighters. The shi'a/sunni conflicts have escalated in the Middle East, and to most Americans that subtle difference is like calling an Ay-rab a "towelhead" or a "raghead". But there is a difference, one that becomes as deadly as the Catholic/Protestant conflicts of Northern Ireland.
We are being misled more than ever, and they don't even try to give us the mass media foreplay anymore. Distractions from nuclear disasters, Charlie Sheen pointing his fingers at the moon and everybody studying the fingertip like retarded dogs, trending topics becoming psychic shackles that we waste tiny ten minute parcels of our lives, only to find out the hype is over nothing essentially, that Rebecca Black is stupid or the fat kid powerbombing the bullies is nothing that none of us didn't see on the middle school playground at least once in our younger days. I realize all these things, and realize the buzz and hum of my homeplace is harder, better, stronger, and faster, and it makes me feel uneasy with my own presence in this world.
It is at times like this that I go out to sit on my plastic chair by the tree stump table next to my pig pen, snort at then, and listen to Shabazz Palaces. I do not listen to them in an actual digital form with sound going through speakers into my brain directly, but instead play the songs in my memory bank, exercising my mind to make sure there is still something there that is not tied to nonsense and trivialities. I memorize the lyrics and sounds when the cybermachines are around and making their noises. And I sit with the pigs - real pigs not metaphorical ones - and I let the songs play and play and play, and I think about this fucking world and how all the plate tectonics and irradiation and super moons possible don't change the fact that to this world, we are nothing. There are those who will hype you up about how the earth is crying or vengeful or wants us to change, but that is stupid. The earth and moon and sun and stars are not tied to us people at all, and will be here long after we have pulled our own fingers while saying "Watch this!" one too many times. So as I get caught up in the hum and buzz of our civilized madness, I let the words of Shabazz Palaces bounce around my brain, and overstand in my soul that to be aware is all I can do, that you can't change our collective destiny, and all I can do is try to breath as easy as possible during my short pitter patter across the surface of this spinning rock.
STEAL "Blast It"
NEXT: Poor people snorting drugs music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #8: "Tangled Up In Blue" by Bob Dylan

I cannot speak too highly of Bob Dylan, though I do not actively dislike the dude. He is one of many things that are from the '60s, which is ahead of my time and has been hyped incessantly at me that doesn't necessarily equal the same awesomeness in delivery to match the hype. I mean, I dig Nashville Skyline, but I don't regard it as a groundbreaking shattering of barriers between genres or anything or some sort of validation of country music for not-stupid people so that the horrible beast that is alt.country could be created in the early days of the internet much much later. And off of both Greatest Hits albums, there's some stuff I love and there's some stuff I don't love. His brilliantly poetic lyricism sometimes seems fucking stupid (most notably off the top of my head, that "smoked my eye and punched my cigarette" line or whatever it was has always annoyed the fuck out of me for some reason). But honestly, the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is one of my all-time favorite theme albums, and I have used it as my background music at times while walking railroad tracks near Arvonia with an old guy called Patchwork who has a bunch of goats and eats them and thus I have had some really tasty goat meat tacos with homegrown cilantro but on some bobo ass Richfood brand taco shells while sitting in scratchy crabgrass pockmarked with wild onions in Buckingham County, Virginia State, America Country, Earth Planet, on and on until the break of universal dawn. In fact, I walked with a bucket of slop to my pigs today and was noticing how tall the wild onions were and it made me think of Patchwork and how I hadn't seen him since probably last August or so, before football season started. Then I tried to pull up a couple wild onions to chop up and put in the coconut chicken and slow cooked veggies I was making, because I love the hyper energy that a wild onion will add to a meal. They're strong so you don't want to use more than one or two, but it gives food such a wild taste, and makes your gut buzz and also makes my penis hard. I think wildcrafting foods is a good way to make yourself have babies if you are having problems with that. I am not going to go into any nature/earth/virility/fertility tangents, but you can see they are there for the running with if you'd like to do so on your own.
Anyways, after thinking too long one day at work about the "Wagon Wheel" song by Old Crow Medicine Show which is just an extension of a studio outtake from a Dylan session, it caused me to download a bunch of shit like the tapes of The Band and Dylan fucking around, and a whole history boxset of The Band, and a whole bunch of Dylan, including both of the first two volumes of his Greatest Hits. So I played a lot of it for a while, and for some reason this rose to the top of the play count. I think that maybe my daughter was bumping it as well on her Ipod and it helped spike the ratings, because she likes to do that knowing my weird methods to calculating the J.J. Krupert list. In fact, on our shared Itunes, no one rates anything except for me, because if something is listed on the J.J. Krupert list, it gets a first star. And then for as long as it remains on my little 4gb Ipod, and has more total plays minus skips over the lowest total plays minus skips of the 13th place new song each month, it will get an additional star, obviously maxing out at 5 stars. These are the strange mathematical parameters that rule my life at every corner. I do not know why I am this way, but it is the way I am wired. But my oldest daughter knows this and knows with a shared Itunes, she can bump shit on her Ipod touch, and run the score up if something is actually on my J.J. Krupert as well. In fact, I had her make a playlist of her favorite songs that I haven't rated (thus haven't Kruperted with yet within cyberworld) and I will probably do a month where I just bump the stuff she wants me to bump, just for the fuck of it. She is 12, and has close friends from her age to like 14, and at some point the terrible wall between knowing I have a website and actually reading my website is going to get blown open. I am not sure how I feel about that. I'm going to have lots of 'splainin' to do I fear. But then again, I don't really shelter her from too much. She doesn't know the more far out nefarious conspiracies, and I don't cuss around them for the most part, and obviously no sex talk. Good lord, none of that. I don't even want to think about that at all, ever, though I will.
Well, "Tangled Up In Blue" got up on here somehow, and just last week I pretty much scrapped everything that was on the J.J. Krupert Ipod and replaced it with all different stuff, a full 4gb shake-up because I thought I should, so I'm not sure if there's even any Bob Dylan left on there right now. And thinking about that, I don't even have the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in cyber format, just two copies on vinyl, somewhere in the stacks of vinyl. If I could be sure the toddler wouldn't decimate it just yet, I'd have the USB turntable hooked up to the home computer and be pumping the albums again, as my other four turntables are all out in the camper, hooked up in strange piles of electronic madness, in early preparations for the return of ancient hobo recording techniques. Which brings me back to Patchwork, because that dude can babble an interesting story, and I'd like to just record him talking his gibberish and throw it over top these loops I've been making from soundboard recordings of old Little Feat shows from the '70s.
STEAL "Tangled Up In Blue"
NEXT: More straight up apocalyptic return to the earth after the irradiation of the surface musical scripture!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #9: "Soul Glo (The Knocks Remix)" by Paper Route Gangstaz

My wife is an herbalist, so she makes tinctures from plants that can help your brain not be so screwy, not to mention help actual physical ailments. She has often offered to make me brain tonics, but I'm just not good about remembering to do things like that. I was good about rubbing goldenrod oil on my back when it started spasming out while working on a ladder, but brain medications... I have always felt like mind over matter is the only way to go for a true alpha-to-omega mind like my own.
Of course, the modern world is buzzing and humming with electronic tomfoolery perhaps not completely meant to but definitely does cloud up the natural rhythms of the natural alpha-to-omega mind. I am not going to get conspiratorial and say this has been done on purpose, and we are all being weakened, maybe not to simply buy things in some sort of capitalist agenda, or to thin us out as the earth is becoming more overtaxed of its resources. Actually yeah, I am saying that. Look at fucking Japan right now, unleashing radiation into the atmosphere, perhaps building to a full-blown China Syndrome (which would actually be New York Syndrome if it happened in Japan, because burning through the core of the earth with toxic radioactive materials to the other side would go there instead... which is interesting that New York and Tokyo are on opposite sides of the earth, of course I have not looked this up on a map at all, so no need to correct me... I am just saying), and having had conversational interactions secondhand with someone who has suggested to me they security clearance access to things and that they know for a fact there have been immunizations tainted with cancer causing agents given to poor people, and that the Gates Foundation is a massive cultural engineering front for performing just such things in the third world...
Wait, this is the wrong direction. My wife made me a herbal tincture to help me focus on not getting caught up in the three thousand things that swirl through my head that I MUST ATTEND TO NOW ALL AT ONCE and to calm myself and handle my business in the thoroughly efficient and gangsta ass ways that I do when my alpha-to-omega mind is not jumbled by the buzzes and hums. And getting caught up in disaster porn or irradiation of the earth fears, that is buzz and hum. Thinking globally and acting locally may make a wonderful bumper sticker for Subaru stationwagons, but it is not a way to live your actual life. The World is huge, and it is impossible, even with the interwebs, to build community with the whole goddamned thing. You have to focus at what is at hand, take care of what needs to be taken care of, and move forward with that. So my wife made me an herbal mix for just such things, to take a few times a day, keep myself from getting fetal positioned out inside my cerebrum, and she called it Soul Shine Tonic because she gives them all names. This of course made me think of this "Soul Glo" song from the Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape from a couple years back that helped launch the Huntsville, Alabama, rap scene onto the world. Of course, that rap scene is a perfect example of thinking locally and acting globally, because for years and years, a solid and thickly intertwined underground scene was built, to the point there's nothing else like it going on right now for the most part, at least not to the extent Huntsville was doing it. Then they blasted out from that, through the interwebs, and now G-Side can get paid to go hang out in Norway, and Jackie Chain can get comp drinks in clubs from Charlotte to San Antone.
So let your soul shine fellow e-folks. Get your hands dirty in your own back yard, and leave the grime on your fingertips when you log into your cyberbot, and let that real soul grime slink into the belly of the beast. Live locally and pollute (the good kind of pollution) globally. But without the local foundation, you can't support the global aspiration. This is why I dremel Rojonekku poems into guard rails throughout southside and central Virginia. This weekend will be my first trip since being injured in January, since it's warm. I try to do a hundred guard rails a weekend, fifty per day, but if you get a good day going, you can knock most all of it out on a wide circle drive Saturday afternoon, and then top it off locally on Sunday morning with the last ten or so, then hit the dumpsters at the Food Lions, come home slop the pigs their Sunday feast, and sit in the back yard trying to figure out if the horizon is as askew as it feels, and how you can use the transmission from the old Datsun and a half-used spool of dry-rotted electrical wire to build a homemade Tesla coil to jam the buzzes and hums on at least part of your five acres.
STEAL "Soul Glo"
NEXT: I will be writing about Bob Dylan, which seems pretty shameful to me!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #10: "El Bandido Generoso" by Chalino Sanchez

It has become painfully obvious to me in recent months of doing these lists that I listen to far too much obscure Latin music. I am not sure why this is. Hell, since I stopped working construction, my Spanish has broken down to next to nothing. I can teach the kids basic things, but I can't rotototototo my way through broken conversations like I used to. Plus all I work with now is Chinapeople, and I haven't even begun to crack that code. I always thought I'd want to learn Chinese, more to translate old T'ang poets, to have my own firsthand versions of the guys I loved like Han Shan and Tu Fu. Instead I'm trying to understand insane scientific China people who I am supposed to be collaborating with, but I always fear they are secretly talking about me. I have always assumed that, partially because when I did learn Spanish and would work on jobsites, you'd sometimes be around dudes who did not think the average gringo could speak, so you'd hear them talking shit about you or about other people, and you'd let it slide until you found a highly comedic or punctuated moment to reveal you were with them along. I can't do that with China people. Do they have crazy Chinese gangster folk musicians who get shot in opium dens? Seems like China's done a good job of speed gentrifying whatever they deem unsightly.
Anyways, here is another Chalino Sanchez song. This one is about a generous bandit. Mexicans love stories like that, because they tend to read newspapers where people have had their heads chopped off and the bodies are dumped on school playgrounds for children to find. I guess it helps them feel safe to like music like this. Chalino is most famous because he was the second of three men to get Jenifer Lopez pregnant, only for her to have an abortion because it was not the right career move (Puff Diddy Dog was another), which put her in the strong Latina desire to settle down with an abusive and mongrel-looking man with solid virility. God bless family, you know.
STEAL "El Bandido Generoso"
NEXT: I continue to speak about Alabama rap as it sets up a dangerous motorcycle jump over top a water tank with a real live great white shark inside!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #11: "South Bronx" by Boogie Down Productions

In my opinion, were I to be commissioned to do a list of the greatest hip hop albums of all-time, there is no doubt in my mind that to this very day, Criminal Minded by Boogie Down Productions would still be in the top 5. The sound, compared to everything else that was going on at the time, was so raw and fucking perfect, sounding like people banging on pipes vibrating inside concrete. And the fact the whole thing was done on a four-track with nothing but turntables and a drum machine is fucking amazing. That album is like the truth of early hip hop to me, and this particular song is a testimonial to the origins.
When I was in 9th grade, we took a multi-day field trip to NYC from bumfuck Farmville, Virginia, a bunch of naive ass kids going into the belly of the beast's brightest demon jewel. And what a trip man. We stayed at the YMCA. Can you imagine that? I mean, I know it's cheaper and all, but being a grown ass man now and knowing the things I know about the way the world is, how could you in good conscious book a field trip to NYC with a bunch of small town and rural kids and stay in the YMCA on 47th Street? I have never figured if the administrative leaders of this expedition were naive as well, or crazy, or what. Of course, us being in NYC, we were supposed to never go anywhere without a chaperone. But me and the dude I was sharing a room with, who was a year ahead of me but already a weed-smoking buddy back home, we snuck off from shit as much as possible, the first afternoon even, when we actually had a shady dude crouch down in front of us on the sidewalk and hold out his hand offering to sell us crack for cheap. That really happened, like an old afterschool special. Interesting looking back to think about crack being a new thing and go-getter sales people actually pushing it on the streets, trying to get people to try this new thing that they were gonna get addicted to and thus buy more and more. It's very simple capitalism and not much different than selling Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies to diabetics. But for it to happen so laughingly like a Just Say No warning, and compared to how things are now, it's pretty funny looking back.
We stole off a whole day one time on the trip, to go to Times Square, which was dank ass smut whore delinquent's paradise back then. We bought a bunch of thrash metal tapes, punk rock singles, swords, knives, and a couple bongs. I mean, that was the culture we were looking for anyways at the time. But looking back, I'm still so amazed at that trip, thinking about letting my oldest daughter - in two years- go stay in the fucking YMCA in NYC. I bet my paranoid ass rural dad was sweating the whole goddamned time I was gone, thinking I was gonna get murdered or raped or turned gay or something while I was there. I'm sure for a long time afterwards he was worried some sort of staining to my soul had happened that could never be undone. His only time in NYC was on a bus ride home from juvenile detention in Ohio, and he got off the bus and was immediately accosted by a crazy fucker, so he hid in the bus station cafe until his bus came, and he ran on and hunkered down until he was back in southside Virginia. My dad was an alpha male of the first sort, but there are many things he never had the strength I've had to navigate. Urban clusters of humanity is the most obvious of those things. Hell, he would pull out his pistol, take the safety off, and set it on the seat beside him when we went to Richmond. That was city enough for him.
Anyways, being a little rural dumb fucking kid from southside Virginia, I remember the charter bus for the trip rolling into NYC, staring with big eyes at the endless thick growths of brick and concrete far taller than anything on the main intersection of Main and Third in Farmville. Ran down buildings full of people milling around outside, idle, sneakers over telephone wires, decay, graffiti, beautiful urban decay, the immensity of being on the wrong side of civilization's progress, but trapped in the midst of its thickness. That was some crazy shit to see for the first time, and wash into my little naive ass mind. And as corny as it sounds, me being a fucking naive ass whiteboy from rural southside Virginia, population not much, the Boogie Down Productions Criminal Minded sound made even more sense. The shit I was geeking on visually looked like that raw ass early boom bap sounded. Grimy yet calming, kinda violent but kinda exciting, and putting a smile-time good feeling on a concrete compost pile of a born life. And I am no expert on NYC by any means, but the times I've been there, I've felt it. I'm a sensitive person to environmental energy, and Criminal Minded felt like a NYC tape. There have been others that get hyped as pure NYC tapes over the years, classics from hip hop's birthplace. Seems like it's falling on a dry spell, and they're always hyping some new unsigned rapper as NYC's latest savior of that old flavor, but it never comes to fruition. Maybe it's because NYC ain't the same. They're gentrifying the world it seems sometimes, pushing the grime and dirt further into strange corners, out to Jersey or over into Connecticut or up into Yonkers. If they can find something cheap and with history, they'll clean it up and the gay people and the young liberal couples will boutique it up. And then their kids will live on the fringes of that, and further spread the economic (bordering on ethnic) cleansing, and what once were thrift stores for Jesus are now vintage stores for AIDS awareness.
But "South Bronx" to this day is a 101 class handout on the origins of hip hop. I'm not sure what KRS One is up to these days, but I know he fell from relevance there for a while, which is fine because that's the natural order of things in the lion-like alpha world of authentic hip hop. The old has to become unseen for the young to roar and show their fresh dipped manes. But this song, it is a serious song, one that I love to this day, and sounds like NYC looked to me as a goofy assed 13-year-old boy. I feel sad for people who think synth disco rap is a reflection of urban reality nowadays. I mean, I don't want to get stabbed for no reason or addicted to crack because that's more real or anything. But I also don't want the bright lights of Disney, McDonalds, and Target blotting out the beautiful twisted grime of smut theaters, head shops, and bootleg bodegas. I understand wanting to progress as a collective unit, but running property values into some extra digits does not constitute actual progression.
STEAL "South Bronx"
NEXT: Mas Chalino, el norteno loco y el mejor narcocorrido rojonekku pendejo gringo manifesto!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #12: "Think About It" by Otis Redding

This is another Otis Redding song, and I was gonna write something about soulful music and how it was a rainy Sunday and we made a giant playlist of soulful chill ass music and it played all day long until the whole 8 hour list was done, and then we started it again. But I couldn't really get into the flow of that stream of thought, so I typed shit, then deleted, then typed, then deleted. Conscious is a hard thing to overcome, and I realize the correct term is "conscience" but I am being wrong on purpose there because when you get conscious of what you are doing, you lose the ability to do it so easily I think. The human condition is to think too fucking much, and we all do it, and try to make ourselves feel better by mocking others who do not do it the way we do it. And oddly enough, as I get lost in the nothing, I talk about how we think too much, and realize, "Oh yeah, this song is called 'Think About It'." And it is.
That's the beauty of a good goddamned song. You can talk and think and get hung up in your world all you want. For me, that means I am trying to go back to work today, not feeling sure about it, still have a fucking oozing 2-inch deep wound on my abdomen, but feel like an unproductive member of society at this point. But why do I care? What makes me have a work ethic for a job that I regard as a transition towards doing what I truly want to do with my life? Shit man, I should be on short-term disability and riding this the fuck out as hard as possible you'd think. But I can't. I think too much, and wonder if someone is being let down by me not doing more than I am, in my work. And then this is my work too, and I wonder if I space out and don't do things for a few days if I am letting down people who come here, looking for their escape. Do people check every day? And at the same time, I'll talk to someone who says, "Yeah, I look at your shit once a week, and goddamn there's always a ton of shit on there." To me, it's constant, but to most it's random. How do you navigate through it? What the fuck is wrong with me?
Well, that's the thing. This is what I do, even if we haven't really nailed down what it is yet. I mean, I know, and there's a process, and we'll be pulling the tarp off of some other things this year, and maybe it will make sense. Or maybe not. It's hard when you overthink it. And really all I do is overthink.
Which is probably why a song by Otis Redding asking the ol' lady who is about to cut out the door to give it a second thought. It is easy to imagine when you are a tortured cerebral basketcase that the other person has not given it the proper brain look from the right angle, like you have. And also the greatness of a song is to capture that moment, to be sad and broken-souled because the person you had invested so emotionally in is bankrupting your ass all of a sudden, completely withdrawn and bound to be gone. Who hasn't been there? Why the fuck don't people make music like that anymore?
I'm getting hung up on things again, because I just thought about it and wondered where I was going. I am going nowhere, at least not with this. It is a song. A great fucking song.
STEAL "Think About It"
NEXT: The fantastic tale of the origins of an urban culture that has been domesticated by devils to plow the minds of the sheeple!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #13: "Ya Se Ha Muerto Mi Abuelo" by Juaneco Y Su Combo

Chicha music is drug music from Peru. This of course means the internet in the far, dusty, nerdboy I LOVE CRAZY WACKY MUSICS corners of things, chicha is a very popular thing. There are a thousand people who ABSOLUTELY LOVE CHICHA MUSIC, me included. We are the chosen uber-dorks of strange musical sub-genres. We anxiously listen to collections of songs from Moroccan cellphones, and we trip the fuck out over some Greek dude from 1930 because of a song on The Wire that one year with all the dockworker bullshit. Every popular American song from the beginning of Billboard charts should be chopped and screwed, and I do mean AND, because just slowing it down is not doing DJ Screw's legacy right. We absolutely shit ourselves over vinyl, yet for some reason spend vast chunks of our lives scouring 19 Layers of Music Blogs for intriguing digital zip/rar collections of something we've never heard of, but sounds like it could exist, and looks cool. We think Third World people are more pure, just because. We tend to embrace made up terms for shit that barely exists, like dubstep or chillwave, until the rest of the interwebz eventually catches up to the slang, usually because of The Fader. We dream of being able to do a Pitchfork Media type site where we give every cassette we can find in flea markets from Nigeria to Bolivia to Turkey and back to the Philippines, swinging through the ethnic suburban ghettos of Europe, and probably liking something else that they only do in a twelve-block radius in either Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore, along the way. It is our purpose.
I share this chicha song, by the kings of chicha - Juaneco and his combo, and their song "Ya Se Ha Muerto Mi Abuelo" because I have dug long and hard, not only to find all these things, but wasted large amounts of my life listening to them, trying to determine what is truly awesome and what is just some bullshit that should've stayed lost in obscurity. The song title translates roughly into "since my grandfather has died," which I would assume means the dude is getting fucked up on chicha root drinks, hallucinating his way through his sadness, looking for spirit vines to grab onto and swing into a more elderly wisdom that he feels has been taken from him due to gramps passing on to the next level of the game. We all feel that loss in our culturally specific ways, and self-medicate as necessary. Personally, I don't think there's nearly enough psychotropic plant use in our daily lives.
STEAL "Ya Se Ha Muerto Mi Abuelo"
NEXT: More of the best damn soul voice to ever be soulful about shit!

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

It is March, and the cold and warm bounces back and forth but there's been rain mixed in there now and then so the ground is starting to perk with the first bright greens of the 2011 calendar box. 2011 has seemingly not been a good year for me thus far, what with physical maladies following each other like waves in the ocean, each one with a little more riptide to it. But it's actually been a good year - I'm on a good personal path, and life feels lighter than it's felt in a long time.
This is the first time with the J.J. Krupert nonsense that I've actually been caught up enough that I can switch back to one a day because the end of the month I'm writing about songs is not like tomorrow night. I've been techno-babbling a lot on here lately, in addition to other projects going on behind the curtains, and it is an immense mess that can be hard to sift through because if you don't look at the site but once every three weeks, there's like 39 new things and you're like "what the fuck?" This is a strange website in that you sort of keep immersed into my tangents and habits, which of course change constantly, because I am a changeling at heart.
I want you to know though, it is springtime. We shall start playing music in the back yard through the camper trailer speakers soon. Horseshoes shall start clanging before you know it. Gardens going in, new chickens to the flock, kids chasing each other around on frankenstein bicycles... life is good. We wanted snow fencing to wrap around a vegetable garden to keep the chickens out and today on the side of the road was a dude selling a roll of brand new snow fencing for $20. Shit works out, not matter how screwed up it seems. That's the essence of spring. Fuck needing a god to be reborn - I can do it every year. Start fresh and get some new dirt on my hands.
FIRST UP: Who don't love them some Peruvian drug music!