J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #1: “Methamphetamine” by Son Volt

I have wanted to be tagging shit with my bobo graffiti for a while, so I started spray paint tagging the backside of guardrails along actual gravel roads in Albemarle County, Virginia, but I didn’t like how it looked. First off, Wal-Mart cheap ass paint is pretty drippy and doesn’t have good coverage, but shit man, good spray paint is expensive. I see why graf writers steal that shit. Also, the dull grey guard rail didn’t give a good background canvas to start with. So I started a couple of different rigs of various failures, until I combined the homemade tattoo gun into a paint tagging mechanism, where I have a two foot long piece of bamboo with a toilet bowl scrubber – the multi-thing foam type – duct-taped to the end of the bamboo. Then I can dip that in paint, and pour some paint down the bamboo tube, and the paint seeps out but it’s kinda like a writing utensil. My graf lettering is pretty weak – I have lots of kick outs of letters and sharp tops, but wish I had flat tops and bouncy bottoms like cholo writing. I could just never get it. I think shit like that is born into you partially, just like for years and years I could never freestyle all fast syllabic pop style like southern rappers or Bone Thugs, then I lived with a guy and that’s just naturally how he did it. I learned, but it was hard.
Anyways, I was riding back roads one full moon evening the other month, looking to tag guardrails, with a home-mixed five-gallon bucket of earthy brown paint (only about 2 gallons of actual paint in the bucket), and saw two old rusty trucks dilapidating in the woods. One of those perfect moments that moment was, so I swung my truck over, dipped my bamboo toilet bowl brush into the paint bucket strapped tight in the back of my truck, went over and wrote in big crooked Raven font letters – RUSTED on both sides of both vehicles, right on the door. It wasn’t huge, not to be completely noticeable and take away from the perfect junkyard feng shui of having rusty ass old vehicles stored amongst the pines to go back to the earth, flake by flake, but it was nice. In fact, in the moonlight – a bright ass cold night, so the paint was drying in little crystal patterns since the metal was so chilled down – the brown RUSTED on the rusted body, truck still having signs of sky blue in there, and I guess the other car was red or orange but it was long gone for sure, shit was beautiful. I had found my tag.
The letters still don’t look cholo at all, but I like how it looks, and I came to it naturally instead of trying to mimic something else. This is why I hate most alt.country because it does not sound natural and is mimicking something else. A guy gave me a slew of songs to DL a few years back, and I didn’t like most of them, for whatever reason, most likely because I’m a hateful asshole. But over the years, each and every one of these songs became ones I loved. Especially Hayes Carll. That dude is great. This one Son Volt song I never liked because I think I thought Son Volt was asshole music or something, the kind of shit cul-de-sac dorks in college wearing straw cowboy hats and drinking PBRs would like. And it probably is. But at some point I stopped hearing this song with my prejudices against that type of person, and heard the actual song itself. And it’s a goddamned beautiful song. Not beautiful in a “put it on a mixtape for a girl” type of way, but beautiful in a “spent all weekend bingeing in a shitty hotel room that had bootholes in the wall and it’s Sunday morning and I’m on a five hour drive home to face some things I wish I didn’t have to face but man, this song really gets it all in there right now doesn’t it?” type way.
STEAL “Methamphetamine”
NEXT MONTH: More fucking music. It’s not like this thing really separates into months so much as it separates into clusters of me having time. So get off my back.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #2: “Andre’s Thang” by Andre Williams

I have to dress biz caz for my working routines, and hate that, but try to mix it up with some ugly combos of polo shirts or the type of thrift store dress shirts that were obviously worn by older black men at some point. It’s really the only way I can inject nonsense into my wardrobe at this point. Apparently I bought a magic shirt of some sort – lavender but kind of shiny yet still cotton, very very urban storefront churchy. Anyways, something has happened since I’ve started wearing this shirt in the past two months to where I can’t distinguish the difference between a lot of white people we’ve been meeting lately. They all seem to look the same to me, with the same Mike and Laurie and Todd and Anne names. Seriously, my wife will be like, “I’m going over to Mike and Anne’s,” and I’m like, “Who?” and she describes them in detail and how we met them, and I vaguely remember pot lucks with a giant slew of people who have all blurred together into the same man and woman. This has also helped me understand why black families were more creative with their naming of children, perhaps adding a consonant and apostrophe in front of a name, or combining the parents names, or just making up some bullshit. It is an easy way to distinguish the faces. I am thankful that the rest of society seems to be catching up to this trend, though white people who do this are still using up wacky words that aren’t usually names like Indian tribes or trees, and have yet to get to the whole completely making up new things phase of naming their children. This type of labeling of humans makes it much easier to distinguish them from each other, instead of them all being named Laurie and Paul.
Also, Andre Williams is fucking awesome. I like to imagine my magic shirt was originally his.
STEAL “Andre’s Thang”
NEXT UP: A modern drug lament sad country-ish song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #3: “Desperados Waiting for a Train” by David Allan Coe

I am very thankful to have discovered this DAC version of this song, because before this I had mostly just heard the Jerry Jeff Walker version, which is a slow and plodding painful execution of what seems like it might be a good song. I don’t know, Jerry Jeff Walker is one of those things that I’m not sure is actually any good, but enough people will tell each other it’s good that everyone tricks themself into believing it. “But up against the wall, redneck fucker! That shit’s awesome!” Except it’s not. I mean, I’m not from Texas or nothing, and to me barbecue is made with pig not cow and it should have some vinegar taste to it, so maybe I’m just not culturally sensitive to Jerry Jeff Walker’s greatness. But from where I sit, it’s painful to listen to.
David Allan Coe takes the same slow and plodding style, but gives it some rasp and peaks and makes it seem like something you’d be stoked to drink Jim Beam to at your crazy uncle’s funeral, it blaring out loud across the back yard where everyone is partying in his memory after he died in a motorcycle accident. If there’s a Heaven, I hope that crazy uncle went there, and instead of pearly gates they’ve got cinderblock walls, and David Mann did murals down the whole fucking thing, and all the women wear tank tops and no bra.
Oddly enough, in my mind, this version of this song matches up really well conceptually with that “Straight Gangstaism” song off that one Geto Boys album when Big Mike joined the group, which was basically a song from The Convicts (Big Mike & 3-2) that was put on the Geto Boys album, probably because it was so goddamned awesome. Not to mention that might’ve been the best John Bido Rap-a-Lot house production beat ever made this side of “Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me”. But both “Straight Gangstaism” and this David Allan Coe “Desperadoes…” song have the “I’m a wild little fucker because of tagging along with my wild ass grandpa” to them, and even though you could easily get all gentrified neighborhood about it and shake your head and feel sad for the endless cycles of poverty and violence and unfulfilled dreams, you could also just be stoked for the simple scene of a wild ass little kid with wide eyes watching the grown men gamble and drink and talk their crazy ass grown man bullshit at each other for a few hours in some beautifully sad little corner of this non-shining world. It ain’t all gonna be neon and pastels, no matter how hard the developing the world types engineer and design things. Wherever they put their focus to fix up perfectly, that takes their focus away from whatever it was they already tried. And that’s when we move in, tear down the value of it all, muck it up with our wonderful grimy souls, and live beautiful fucked up lives, until we die and go get to look at all the David Mann murals in Heaven.
STEAL “Desperados Waiting for a Train”
NEXT UP: We gonna let an old crazy ass dude do his thang!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #4: “Redlights” by Salem

I think Salem is some sort of hipster hit, which would make sense since I came across them first on the Fader blog, which is a great source for things that I will maybe like and then quickly mood out and hate all of a sudden for no reason. I am not a big fan of most house, club, techno, electronic whatever you’d call the overall parent genre this music would fall under. Shit man, I ain’t gonna lie… I have no fucking clue what either dubstep or footwork is. None. I imagine that both are popular with the gays though, or the Germans, or maybe both. And I am not against gays or Germans, but I have this belief that culturally… not small slice of cultural but in the overall grand scheme of the culture of mankind, it has to be a very urban and grimy yet spit-shined cluster of rebar-reinforced concrete crystals for gays or Germans to thrive. It’s very old ordered world. I mean the real old world is living in a hole in a mountain with three women and nine kids and a couple wild dogs that help you kill deer in the fall. You burn pallets for warmth at night that you take from behind the Mohawk carpet factory, using an old engine-less Escort that you’ve turned into a wagon, and during the day you carve more of your Master Work into the walls of your “home”, the deeper you dig into the story, the further into the depths of the caverns you have to crawl to continue with the human etchings that will cause words to form into sensible patterns by future eyeballs.
And that is what I love about this particular Salem song… it fits well with the cultural metropolises that gays and Germans thrive in, and I’m sure it gets bumped in clubs where you can buy $40 drinks. But it’s a sound of the beaten and wretched that is inside this song. It sounds to me like doing crack, which I’ve only done for one stretch of about five months, so I’m probably not the best expert on it. I never got to where I was in abandoned factories shitting in 5-gallon buckets in the corner. But this sounds like good music for that. And when I say for that, I don’t mean like playing on a boombox sitting in the middle of the cold ass room with one broken window that has shredded plastic over it that flaps in the cold and you can peek outside. I mean permeates the darkness of the building, you can’t see nobody’s face unless the lighter in front of their face flickers up for five seconds. The sounds just emanating from the framework, behind the pockmarked drywall, deep from within the abandoned structures of that old world civilization. In fact that’s what’s awesome about this song. It doesn’t sound as if it was made for people so much as abandoned buildings to groove out to, while people smoke crack inside of them.
Me personally, it sounds good reverberating off the walls deep in a hole in the mountain, carving letters one by one into the rock with a flathead screwdriver whose head has been chipped and rounded off on the edges and serrated in the middle through sheer abuse. I hear this song and carve, and know up towards the open womb looking out on the rest of this world, my women will be there throwing pallets on the fire, keeping an eye on our collective litter of children cuddled together along the safest edge of our home sweet home, and they will be there all together when I come back out their way. We won’t leave and rejoin this so-called civilized world, a world where gays and Germans establish cultural trends. Not because we disagree with them, but the whole process, it’s just not our world anymore. We will die in here, maybe of old age, maybe of carbon monoxide asphyxiation, maybe I’ll just slit everybody open with the flathead one night. But none of that will happen until I’m finished putting these words into the sides of the gap in the mountainside.
I guess the “Redlights” are probably something to do with a city, but I pretend it’s about that hour when I’m the only one acknowledging they are awake, the women sleeping around the children now, me poking at what’s left of the last couple pallets, waiting for the flames to safely quiet down to embers only, bright glowing red pieces of white pine that once sturdily shipped riding mowers or rolls of fabric or shrink-wrapped boxes of crackers or something. Redlights glowing in our fire pit, dying like the darkness will when the sun comes back up and I get some sleep finally, before pulling the Escort wagon back down the hill through a couple of strategic alleys, and then back up to our hole, looking forward to that quiet hour with those fading redlights and everyone else quiet and the world dark and me at perfect peace.
STEAL “Redlights”
NEXT UP: We gonna rob a freight train music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #5: “2000 & Beyond (screwed & chopped” by Big K.R.I.T.

I think probably every song from the Big K.R.I.T. Wuz Here mixtape will eventually be on the J.J. Krupert lists, because I played the fuck out of that thing, and still do. Oddly enough, I still have never listened to the regular speed one. Even sober, my life is screwed and chopped. I was gonna at some point be all like, “This is my hip hop album of the year, blah blah blah,” but then that’s kinda what I strive not to do with music on my blog is be all current and know-it-all and shit. Why do people feel the need to be experts on the new shit, like they are the filter through which others purchase their new music? And the funny thing is it’s a whole culture of pirating music, yet you want to be recognized as an authority of what’s good, a tastemaker. Why do we feel we need to be so fresh and so new new with music? Has capitalism fucked us that much that we feel inferior if we are talking about something old?
That’s the fucking thing about the Big K.R.I.T. debut offering… I will be talking about it in two years, and four years and eight years. Hopefully the record deal he got off the back of this mixtape will lead to something else worthwhile and not just an endless barrage of hype that peters out into a dribble of a release, leaving a crushed and half broken MC who has had his soul and spirit squeezed from his body by the vicious clutch of the record industry. (See The Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, and eventually Yelawolf and Jay Electronica. Shit, everybody really.)
The one thing I wish I had gotten to do last year but did not was going to the K.R.I.T. show at a local club. He was playing with either Wiz Khalifa or Currensy… I think Khalifa, but both of those dudes, albeit okay, I would not go out of my way for. Flavors of the month, but the year. K.R.I.T. was something that spoke to me, that I could listen to and be like, “Yeah, I think we’ve driven some of the same roads before.”
I will say that 2010 was pretty awesome for music, even though I didn’t keep up with shit. But the following things all were released for public purchase in 2010: K.R.I.T. Wuz Here (of course that was a free mixtape), that fucking awesome Black Mountain CD, “Thank Yuh Jah” by Vybz Kartel (which of course goes hand-in-hand with “Hold Yuh” by Gyptian), and “Box Chevy – Pt. 3” by Yelawolf & Rittz. But don’t take my word too heavily because I didn’t listen to 19,000 things to try and prove to myself how awesome these things were. I just know they were awesome.
STEAL “2000 & Beyond”
NEXT UP: Music to do crack in an abandoned warehouse to!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #6: “Home Sweet Home” by Motley Crue

Somehow Motley Crue went from red and black leather and pentagrams and evil face paint to lavender and pink lycra outfits and lace doilies on their arms, and crazy Norwegians did not murder them. Very different times then. This song is both completely stupid in retrospect, and yet still the best fucking thing ever. I am a huge fan of any songs ever made since guitars became electrified that runaway teenagers may have had bouncing around in their head as they rode a Greyhound through alien states, not headed nowhere so much as getting away from whatever. I am not entirely sure our current world even has the conditions for a song like this to be made anymore, at least not in America. We fly now, or smartphone our way around our days, and there’s really no room for something like this. I guess maybe in Mexico or certain South American countries it could happen again, but not here.
I feel like I need a few weekend excursions in the coming months to shake up my life’s monotony. I’d like to ride a Greyhound to Alabama, down near the Florida border, for no real reason or to no particular place, and just vibe. That’s my biggest complaint with my current world – the vibes are all electronic and warped, although I guess to a kid running away from whatever today, it’s like electrified guitars were fifty years ago. You can’t fight progress, or regress, or the both of them just shaking shit all the fuck up all the goddamned time. And then you get old and none of it makes sense, and you write inside a goddamned robot breeding colony motherboard about a stupid fucking Motley Crue song. Fucking poseur.
Motley Crue, up to this third album of their’s, conjures up cellular memories inside my physical realm of those first strong desires to have sex. My male dog is not fixed, and he often runs away for like three hours at night. Instead of being mad at him all the time about it, I should probably figure out how to strap our extra Ipod shuffle to his big head, and when he runs off into the night, he can just listen to “Home Sweet Home” on constant repeat, maybe throw in “Patience” as well, and let him slip off into the night to do his unfixed thing.
I guess I should probably care that my dog is not fixed and he might be knocking up other dogs out there in this stupid fucking civilized world, but I don’t. I just want him to be within earshot of my whistling for him when I go out on the porch in the cold, goofily and clumsily dashing through the woods and blackberry thickets and tall grasses in the field, thinking in his deep stupid hound dog voice, “I’m on my way, I’m on my way, I’m on my way, home sweet home, home sweet home,” and then he gets there and I’m like “good boy” and he’s all stoked and shit. Man, that would be the best commercial ever for Greyhound.
STEAL “Home Sweet Home”
NEXT UP: Wow, I really loved that Big K.R.I.T. CD, didn’t I!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #7: “Old Folks Boogie” by Little Feat

“Boogie” is one of my favorite words ever, at least right now. I mean, this always changes because words are so subjective and get frozen into one thing that will all of a sudden blow open into something else but then that will get frozen. And it’s not like I have a running list of my 500 favorite words that I’ve been compiling, updating obsessively, thinking about, changing and rearranging, a constant work in progress since 7th grade. Back then, it’s not like I did it on spiral notebooks meant for math problems that I filled the lines with lists that would change every week; and when I had a stack of the lists, I’d weight the rankings to create a cumulative overall list, that would in turn be redone every month. It’s not like I did this through high school, on wide margin loose leaf paper, and that’s where I developed my rhyme writing style of squeezing two lines of lyrics between two gridded lines on the paper, to keep it organized musically in my mind as I read it. It’s not like I have floppy disks that ideally would work on my busted up Brother word processor somewhere in the camper trailer with files called “500wordsA” and “500wordsB” and “500words-real” and so on in about 300 different variations. It’s not like I’ve brought that to the computer age, even in the past year starting a photo blog that is just a countdown of my 500 favorite words ever, at least from a cumulative list made from random 500 lists from the past ten years added together, starting by typing word #500 into google image search, to throw up 3 pictures per word, and I’m barely just begun, not even to 400 yet. It’s not like I’ve done all that throughout my life, about words, and “boogie” has been a pretty constant presence, even being a cumulative top 100 word all the way back to 7th grade. And it’s not like sometimes I get excited about the day when I get to type the word “boogie” into the google image search box and see what it spits out, safesearch settings be damned.
STEAL “Old Folks Boogie”
NEXT UP: Black and red leather goes lavender and pink lycra!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #8: “That Ain’t My Wife” by Swamp Dogg

It is strange how you get lost in the darkness and then find some light that expands and all of a sudden a full landscape of random personal magic comes into focus, and you are like, “What the fuck? How did I not know all of this already?”
I am Aquarius, and thus a moody, broody creative type who is sensitive to the scars of the world. Not like in an artphaggotry way writing poetry in a coffee shop, but just when random downtrodden dudes pass me, they talk because our eyes are like, “Yeah, I know,” at each other, and I listen and talk back and we relate. It is my position to play. But being sensitive to all that shit can get you stuck in the darkness at times, deep to where you don’t really see yourself coming back out of it.
Enter my ol’ lady, who is a Gemini, and thus two people, complementary to each other, not crazy dueling personalities like modern psychiatric medicine would have you believe. (Mental illness doesn’t exist. I mean it does, but a lot of mental issues are more control issues by society at large or those around you rather than actual “illnesses”. Civilization’s greatest visions and visionaries come from what would be considered mental illness, so to numb that down with drugs is to stifle our future. Which I guess makes sense.) I could not imagine anyone else toleration me or my madnesses other than my ol’ lady, and I am thankful for her far more often than not.
Lately it seems the world is swirled up with relationship chaos, those around us in strange personal patterns, and us as well, to the point we were annoyed with each other and thinking things that didn’t make sense to either of us but were in our heads nonetheless. (I am not entirely convinced there is not some sort of EMF thing going on to drum this up before Christmas while the economy is still so meager, to cause people to look for satisfaction for that innate dissatisfied feeling in the material world. But I guess that’s “crazy talk”.)
We made it through that though, as always. And my biggest gift for her for the purchasing frenzy holiday was a set of prints from an artist named Rima Staines, who does art that’s an odd combination of old world style but with a sort of street art modern flair, except it’s very rural and ancient. It’s awesome shit. It barely got here on time due to various governmental shipping agencies, and I bought some dollar store frames and a scrapbook paper book on the discontinued bin, and cut out some homemade mats for the prints, put it together, and gave it to the ol’ lady, who was stoked. One is across from my eyes right now, of an old man smoking a pipe and an old woman ladling soup out, and they are together, and even though it’s just a print of an illustration some British lady did, it is me and my wife. Or it was us. Or will be. All of it really.
Anyways, all this happens, and we settle down after the holidays, and I am not stuck in the deep darkness so impossibly right now, and am poking around that Rima Staines’ art chick’s photo blog, and her last update from a month ago is of Odin with his two ravens, Huginn (“thought) and Muninn (“mind” or “memory”), on his shoulders. They fly out and see the entire world and bring back info for Odinn, and he’s always worried they died while they are gone, but they come back.
And holy fuck, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell, getting so lost but always coming back, deeply lost in my own thoughts and memories, to where introverted seems overly social. And why was that on her mind? We chatted by email a good bit, so perhaps I put ravens in her brain. But why was I so inclined to make a herbal gruit beer like the crazy fucking Scandinavians last spring? That blood is inside of me, but a bunch of other bloods are too.
It is strange though how parts of our genetics will start to scream itself out, or make itself known in odd manners. I am not one to believe in fake gods who tinker and hammer with our lives; but there’s a lot of things that go on that point you in directions, probably with no ultimate ending in mind, but just because you are supposed to go do it in a different direction or way on your life’s meander. What is that force though?
Shit man, don’t nobody know. If they tell you do, they got stuck on a definition somewhere along the way, and are full of shit. I don’t know nothing, but at least I know it.
STEAL “That Ain’t My Wife”
NEXT UP: What you know ‘bout scratchin’ my back!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #9: “Uncle Lijah” by Black Oak Arkansas

I had a perfect American moment the other day, taking a walk along the railroad tracks between mile markers 71 and 70 along one of my concentrated personal power idol locations. I was sticking to the left edge of the tracks, pacing myself to have my right foot miss a tie since the gravel was packed better on that side, being pretty quiet along those steps. My oldest has taken wilderness skills training a number of times, and she always talks about her fox walk, which I’ve tried to show her is necessary even in civilized locations, which we actually ran through when doing a dumpster drive-by the other week. Fox walking, I explained, is no different than invisibility, which can move from wilderness to civilization to anywhere, because it’s not so much that you are invisible or silent as it is you are not seen or heard. This helps when you are trying to blend into the wild or snag things from commercial dumpsters or just not be present for so many people to disrupt your personal flow.
Anyways, I was walking this way, and shifted over to the edge of the tracks and a couple of white-tailed deer took off down by the old abandoned canal, which was covered in a sheet of ice. About an eighth of a mile further, I was startled by another rustling, on my river side this time, and looked over and saw a full-blown eagle leaving a nesting island, eye level with me but about 50 yards away, big ol’ whitehead kicking it. And here I was trespassing along railroad tracks to get a little blood flow going on a Saturday morning. I thought to myself, “America.”
Except I was actually trespassing, and you never know if a railroad worker is gonna be a dick or not if they see you. So when a freight started coming up on me, I had to stumble down the embankment to where the canal was, this spot dry and grown over with nice lush grass, hence all the deer droppings. I took a seat on a fallen tree and watched a recession-short freight fly by, me just another unseen petty criminal not respecting property rights like I ought to be. Or a man on a search for whatever, walking with the railroad like a thousand lost souls in front of me. Either way.
Then I started walking back to where my truck was parked by some dumped deer guts (man, I’m always glad when hunting season is over, because I know I stand less a chance of getting shot accidentally while wandering through the woods). I didn’t hear another animal sneaking up behind me until he got right up beside me – a ragged skin and bones hunting dog with like three electronic collars poking this way and that off his neck, looking for radio waves that weren’t there no more I’d guess. The dog was starved for human companionship, and tagged along with me the entire walk back. I felt bad for the little fucker, and also wandered further on my “America” thought, about how as much as the fairy tale is the flying eagle soaring above a majestic rolling river, I was more like that goddamned skin and bones hunting dog, electronically trapped or at least steered, starving for sustenance, and happy as fuck when someone who looks like they might care halfway comes along. “America” indeed. I went home and wrapped a strand of barbed wire around the top of my chicken run to keep my own dogs from going in at night when they are allowed to run free for a few hours.
We – me and you – are not as useful without our collars, nor as profitable. I cannot even begin to explain to you how fucking awesome Black Oak Arkansas was at their high watermarks. David Lee Roth is basically a pasteurized more profitable (due to control) version of Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, the lead singer of BOA. I mean, it’s fucking ridiculous. And I do not dislike early Van Halen at all, although it all is a little overrated to be perfectly honest with you. It’s like fratboy raw, being rock-n-roll with the knowledge it is rock-n-roll and meant to be consumed. Black Oak Arkansas is raw like a pair of hairy pelvises rubbing and bumping from thirty-nine different angles by sunrise. It could not be kept in control to have radio hit after radio hit, like Van Halen. Black Oak Arkansas is gonna jump over the chicken run fence and eat a leghorn every fucking time.
Sad thing is even David Lee Roth was too raw, and he got run off so that Sammy Hagar could join Van Halen and make light rock-ready pseudo-rock-n-roll that some people actually pretend is good. It’s sad what happens to use when we are starving and stifled by our collars. We start doing some weird shit in order to bond with our masters. And as long as we are useful enough, they’ll rub our belly or throw us a neckbone every now and then.
STEAL “Uncle Lijah”
NEXT UP: Cheating ass woman soul!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #10: “My Time Is Now” by Rittz

Rittz is a longhaired redhead dude from Georgia whose alter-name is Jonny Valiant, which I hope is wrestling-related, and he just raps simple ass hotel room knocking boots party party party until we die music. But he’s awesome at it, and looks like he’d be hanging out at a junkyard in Cumberland County, Virginia. In this song, he very casually rapidfire says “gimme the money and my tail will wag.” That is my favorite rap lyric of 2010, and it is very Georgia whiteboy, yet very rap, and just fucking perfect. I am not going to tangent rant for 2000 words on this one. You should just hit up the DL link, and play it in whatever car has the loudest system you have access to, while you ride around in circles for about 20 minutes.
STEAL “My Time Is Now”
NEXT UP: Ozark kinfolks!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #11: “I Never Made 20” by Royal Flush

This song came to me from somewhere inside the interwebs as Royal Flush being name-dropped by Bun B as the rillest MC he ever heard back in the day. And I had never heard of it, though it was Rap-a-Lot related, so I knew it was going to be lo-fi quality. And it was. This song is just some straight simple gangsta coming of age shit, but it’s a vivid story, and really shines when compared to the crap that is considered good rap music in 2010. (I see young black kids walking around in tight jeans and weird sweater-shirts, and it’s funny… this last wave of hip hop has culturally created a generation gap between boom bappers and kids, to where five years from now when these teenagers grow up, it’s going to be very pronounced. Party like a rock star, bro, to a techno beat.) The thing I love about it though, and that’s often lost with storytelling rap lyricists, is that the shit didn’t really happen. Much like a short story, whoever the fuck is the MC in Royal Flush is imagining this entire kid’s life, probably drawing from some personal experience, but not entirely, and creating a complete tale. It’s really a vulgar song and yet completely beautiful all at once, which for me, is what made hip hop so amazing when it was younger and less compromised by attachment to the fruits of one’s musical actions. It was such a brutal yet beautiful art form. Now I don’t understand what the fuck it is doing, and I know the automatic response would be to say I am old. But it’s old too. So if I have lost touch by being older, it seems to me hip hop has lost touch as well. So fuck you hip hop, you old piece of shit judgmental bastard. You are useless to me.
STEAL “I Never Made 20”
NEXT UP: Whiteboy done got paid!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #12: “That Lonesome Song” by Jamey Johnson

We try to give the kids organic milk since they are all daughters and I don’t want them to grow giant chests before puberty due to steroid bovine injections. But I always suspected it was the same shit the Horizon extra dollar a half-gallon jug as the generic Food Lion/Giant/Kroger Nature’s Nature brand. I worked at a charcoal factory very briefly with black guys called Dance and Toots and strange southside Virginia country things like that, and all the different charcoal brands came off the exact same line. Well, one time the ol’ lady and the kids had to use the bathroom, so I was standing around suspiciously by the dairy cooler for ten minutes. The organic milks were right there so I scoped them out. Sure enough, the Food Lion organic milk and the Horizon organic milk (which was a dollar more) had the exact same factory number and factory lot stamped on them in digital black numbers at the top. Exact same manufactured launch spot, different labels, different brands, different prices.
Luckily for us we found a grocery store that sells milk bottles from an actual creamery from just over the mountain headed towards Harrisonburg. Being organic is not the wonderful Mother Earth News mom-and-pop procedure anymore. Government regulations and big agribusiness have made it so organic is more of a brand than a health choice. In order for milk (or meat or anything) to be labeled organic, any sick cows are left to stay sick, because they can’t be given any outside drugs. Thus, you might think you are getting something supremely healthy for yourself and family (and it’s probably better than the steroids, no doubt), but it’s still fucked up. I have always wanted there to be a website where it had pictures of food or drink with a picture of the factory it came from right beside it. Because factories are always gross industrial complexes, smelling of bleach and Mexican lunches, and that’s where all our shit we eat comes from, regardless of organic or natural or generic. This is how organic is now available at Wal-Mart, because organic does not mean healthy at all.
Anyways, the creamery milk is so fucking good, has chunks of cream floating in it to where you’re like, “Oh shit, it’s gone bad,” but it hasn’t, it’s just actual cream, and it dissolves in your cup of tea or coffee, and it’s good as fuck. It will never be at a Wal-Mart because I doubt they even produce enough of it. I would bet the reason it’s only at one chain of grocery stores around here is because that’s about all they can produce. I actually can tell the different shipments from the expiration date (which is always way faster than any other milk because it’s not super-pasteurized), but knowing it’s a small creamery, I still buy it if it’s about to go out, mostly because it’ll be half-priced and if we don’t drink it all, I’ll let it sit on the counter overnight and give it to the pigs as a dope ass treat.
“That Lonesome Song” is the song that put Jamey Johnson on the Nashville map as their resident outlaw redemption story. The thing is, for me, it’s sort of like there being organic milk at Wal-Mart – would it be there if it was really deep down healthy for you. How outlaw is someone being pushed to the moon by the Nashville media machine as an outlaw there to dirty up Nashville’s overly polished squeaky clean image? It seems to me the true outlaw is not even going to be there, or allowed into those hallowed record company halls, and would have to scratch and claw for a cult following by playing shit ass clubs and bars for years and years. And there are plenty of dudes in Nashville who regard themselves as that, but they also are hoping that they can write a song that Carrie Underwood or Tim McGraw blow the fuck up, so that they can cash royalty checks for the next ten years.
I really like Jamey Johnson at times, and at other times he’s like every other musical offering that comes out of Nashville – boring as fuck and easily predictable. He has had enough good songs to make me think there’s something inside of there that could be that outlaw, but the simple fact he is part of that Nashville machine makes me distrust the whole process. I can see going sober, as he has done according to his PR biography, and feeling like you have to follow the status quo with your own story and get your songs out there. As I struggle with my own newfound sobriety, I find it compelling to not follow that path, not chop off my beard and try to be more regular. In fact, I find it more important to be fucked up and contrarian. Fuck this government and fuck this financial system and fuck these shady record companies and shady agribusinesses and $60,000 sedans as status symbol and fuck it all. Real organic outlaws don’t consider themselves either “organic” or “outlaw”. They just fucking are. It seems we love labels in this today world because it helps us think we are something when deep down inside for most all of us, we are not. We just are not.
My goal for this next arbitrary Gregorian calendar year is to be Are as fuck, and stop Not Being so damn much.
STEAL “That Lonesome Song”
NEXT UP: Lost rap classic!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #13: “Home Sweet Oklahoma” by Leon Russell

I have been on a huge Leon Russell kick lately, reminded how awesome the dude is. This song is one that I only recently heard ever, which is amazing considering I have had like 9 Leon Russell LPs in my collection since my early 20s. The story on Leon is he split Oklahoma as a teenager, classic runaway story, to hit big and crazy brightly lit Los Angeles and make it big. And god bless that crazy fucker, somehow he did it, which in itself makes me proud to be American, in the strange and fucked ways I usually find pride for the geopolitical boundaries I was randomly born into.
One summer, I was riding Greyhounds around here and there, and went to Oklahoma City for I don’t know why, met a bunch of west coast gangsters on the bus, as well as a reformed gangster who played softball professional somehow, who pointed me towards a cheap hotel somewhere in OKC, where I spent about a week, in a shithole room, taking walks to the front desk to buy two forties for $3 with the choices of Budweiser or Busch. There were strange old crinkle-faced dudes with the textbook definition of “leather skin” and obvious crack money rooms around me, weird overweight ladies who cleaned the rooms and drank in the attached bar without a clear distinction between those two tasks (you should always just keep your Do Not Disturb sign on your door in places like that; in fact, having come up more in places like that than anything else, I just do that regardless of the hotel, never allowing staff into my room at all until I am gone, ever), and it was just a generally perfectly Oklahoma thing in my mind.
At some point, I decided to go ahead and hitchhike out of town to go to Colorado where I had a friend living, and I cleared out at six in the morning, OKC quiet as fuck, scraggly little dogs barking in Spanish at me as I tromped through with my camping backpack full of useless shit that I never dug deep down into. I saw a handwritten sign that said “RAVEN” with an arrow pointing straight ahead. So I followed, leading to another one about four blocks away, then another, pointing to the left. Of course, I followed – this was my destiny, laid the fuck out right before my eyes.
I imagine this is exactly how Leon Russell left Oklahoma, same way. Unfortunately for me, the signs ended up at an abandoned strip mall with a store called RAVEN that looked like it had been looted. I am fairly certain in retrospect my destiny was to break into that place to look around, get arrested, go to jail in Oklahoma, get out of jail in Oklahoma most likely no longer in college and no longer having a place to live in Richmond (although I actually didn’t have a place when I got back anyways), and then I would’ve charted some errant path towards my true destiny. The one I’ve got isn’t bad at all, but I often wonder what that chance thing was the universe was laying out for me that day. I also often think me not breaking into that place is part of my problem in a nutshell, not smash and grabbing what is placed right in front of me by the universe, to claim my rightful little cobwebby corner of popular culture. Luckily, it seems the universe is patient with me. And I was a pretty baby-faced dude until my late 20s (which is why I grew a beard), so going to Oklahoma jail or even running away to Los Angeles most likely would’ve ended up in the handling of strange penises somehow. So there is that to be thankful for, no?
STEAL “Home Sweet Oklahoma”
NEXT UP: The Nashville hit that made an alleged outlaw!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 Intro

I am barely starting last month in this month, meaning there’s still a slim prospect of me actually starting the December list in actual calendar December, although it seems that a lot of my personal blog parameters are being met on a bare minimum schedule, much like how I maintain my American credit. This is on my head because it is Christmas season and we are maxed the fuck out on all ends to give useless crap to those we love not to mention give shit to people we don’t really feel like giving shit to but feel obliged so we do. There is nothing worse than attempting to financially keep up with someone who is not only on a different economic scale than you, but is probably on a different socio-economic ladder completely. Fuck, these people I speak of, they’ve probably transcended ladders and are on some sort of socio-economic elevator, and I’m still standing around the very bottom part of a nice but battered aluminum middle class. These people, they blew us off last year after we did not gift back to them the way they gifted us, so broke off contact for like 9 months. But then the lady got the facebooks and creeped back into our lives, and sent presents for the kids with the prices still all over the shit, so that I can know they can flaunt about blowing like $200 on our kids that they’ve only seen three times.
Odd thing is, last year when our gift insult occurred, we literally had only about $200 to spend on everything of Christmas – our kids, each other, the world at large, and much to my not-down-with-itness, my wife spent like $24 on these people’s kids, who are family of a distant sort, literally and emotionally. And it was probably something they threw away before the kids even got to play with the stuff. So I’m supposed to feel bad.
My ol’ lady took the kids to a homeless shelter yesterday, where they took some fuzzy socks and scarves and a bunch of batches of homemade cookies. I do not say this to make myself feel better or flaunt our charity like the aforementioned assholes flaunt their wealth. Because I will readily admit that we don’t do shit compared to what we should be doing. We are stuck in our little microcosms like everyone else. But we are aware, and try to be thankful each day for something that happened. Sure, I feel completely lost in my new job, but at least I am not completely fucked like my last job. Sure, we have less than $35 in combined available credit/bank account pretend money as I sit here, but at least all our bills have the extreme past dues covered, and plus I get paid again tomorrow. So really, in the grand scheme of things, shit is good.
I talked to a dude the other day, a co-conspirator of sorts, though what we do together creatively is still in the incubation stages, and we both had had those struggles of just wanting to swallow a hollow point and throw in the towel. Those thoughts pop up a lot this time of year for a lot of people. It’s a strange fucking world to navigate that’s been cultivated here in America. Really strange. Somehow we’ve developed a sense of collective entitlement, everyone feels like they have it worse off than everybody else, and yet we all are somehow getting quietly finger fucked out of whatever actual wealth we are able to accumulate by nefarious industries built on economic principles of smoke and mirrors. Still though, if you are alive, the goddamn sun has come up, and it is shining on some things you probably have not noticed. There is more out there than what is inside, and often times you can’t trust what’s inside of you anyways because it’s emotionally agitated by electronic stimuli and an overload of psychologically-based marketing and just a general dissatisfaction with what the fuck you’ve found yourself in. I kinda realize that even though this blog doesn’t have the traffic it once had, or nowhere near an old website or two I’ve done, it is a place for that type of person, which is my type of person. I am good with that. I just want you to know that when you feel those thoughts, don’t fuck yourself up because ultimately it’s not yourself that you hate – it’s the world around you that’s got things going askew.
If you are not feeling those thoughts, and are like, “What the fuck is Raven talking about? Goddamn, say something funny, motherfucker,” my bad. Times be dark as fuck bros and sisses, so sometimes you’ve got to hit these tangents for clarification, for yourself as much as anybody else. Now let’s get onto some music.
FIRST UP: Okie rock!