SONG OF THE DAY: I Get Lifted (kudzu'd)

I wanted to write about how much I love Latimore in general, and this song specifically, but then I let the video I made a month back play, from some old ass cartoon, and boy, this one is a banger. I hope somewhere on this expansive Earth, somebody just gets baked as shit and lets the dirtgod’s 45s on 33 channel shuffle on their screen, big and loud as possible. Because I try to be a big and loud as possible, but also small and unassuming. Within my sweetness is a touch of masculinity, and within my masculinity is a touch of sweetness. Like a yin yang, but with untended beard instead.

SONG OF THE DAY: Gates of Hell

Masked Assassins always lurk around every corner, looking to chop off a true beard. True beard and fake beard discourse has always been stifled in our culture, because we live in a Great Time of Fake Beards. You see them, in fact, donning masks, and being the Secret Police lately, looking to kidnap people at work, on a “per head” bounty quota where the more they disappear people, the fatter their paycheck gets. These are fake beards, and you need not shave their face, because when they pull the balaclava down, the weakness of their bed is obvious. It is moisturized by the Yakubian propaganda they climb into through their handheld portals. A true beard is more akin to a blackberry bush, an as wild and wonderful as the worst towns in West Virginia. True beards cannot be trimmed, except by fire. This is also how a true beard’s soul is, because it is powered by heart (fire organ) and not brain (easily poisoned well of consciousness).
Thus, Masked Assassins lurk, working for the devil state, hoping to steal a true beard’s wizardly wisps of contrarian knowledge. But even if they chop it off, it’s a false victory, because the wisps have grown inward as long as they’ve grown outwards, and the visual hairs return more rapidly than a fake beard could ever hope to grow it (with all his fancy pseudo-scientific beard oil in the world). And the Masked Assassins can never chop the internal beard of a true beard. So they concentrate on poisoning more minds and growing the ranks of the false beards. But they are all weak-souled men, and they will once again scrape the false beards from their faces to appear as smooth as a baby’s ass, because they have no elderly wisdom accumulated over the generations, and desire that childlike smoothness, in both themselves and their partners. Though they appear strong right now, they are inherently weak, and a true beard will always outlive these incursions of unlounge.

SONG OF THE DAY: Good Things

About once every 3 years, I want to shave my beard off, completely. It’s usually a sign that the vibes are off and there’s an itch to my soul I need to fix. There’s too many good things in life for the vibes to off.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Don't Want Your Love

I mostly listen to soul oldies now, and also wear tracksuits more than I used to. I had to promise my man DJ Brilliant though that I wasn’t gonna start using beard oil (outside of natural ones resulting from giving oral sex).

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Flow

 

the newness of nostalgia

a decade beyond my own cultural relevance

reminiscing over you (old shit)

cursing the unrecognizable ways of now

praise being that old shit

one more time

old as fuck

my nicest sunday afternoon fit

for the back yard is straight

off the goodwill racks

my metaphysical pockets

are flat

not fat

fuck it

there’s still majesty

in a grey beard

because it

signifies

survival

SONG OF THE DAY: ICON.TMP

Waves of purple vapour obliterate the statues to long dead falsebeards, still worshipped by country folk who have been trained to believe a Wal-Mart parking lot is a hay field. Sitting in line at the miracle mile Chik-fil-a for twenty efficient minutes is their scenic country ride, ever so briefly letting the real world air in with power windows to grabble their post-modern supper. The obedient wage slave curtsies, saying “it’s my pleasure to serve you” dutifully. And these post-modern country folk who don’t recognize their country has had the flags of an international cartel of lawless brands planted everywhere, drive off into oblivion, taking exit Fuck Everybody Else to hustle back to their 2-acre two-storey McPlantation home where old glory still has a spotlight on it out front, flying just above their chosen battle flag of lost causes which they still claim mental allegiance to despite being as domesticated and docile as feedlot cows in their physical existence. Continuing their practice of suckin’ on the state’s chili dog outside the tastee-freez of reality, secure in their inherited and carefully maintained “simple” comfort. Let the waves of purple (and orange) vapour continue to teargas their oblivion into discomfort.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'll Fly Away

Back when music was new as a form of commodity in America, it hadn’t yet been divvied up like it is now, and they just had a “jukebox singles” list, or the shit that got played the most in jukeboxes. It was a folksy mix of honkytonk white folks and bluesy African-American shit. I’d researched all this because I had been contemplating launching a podcast about the history of number one country singles, and the earliest history of what is now country, fell under that non-racially divided jukebox listing. It wasn’t until later, when the industry made a concerted effort to segregate music into racialized categories that this division became the standard. Organically, when it was just people putting a coin into a jukebox – a true democracy – it was far more mixed.

I bring all this up because bluegrass music is raw as fuck, and one of the weirdest folk contributions to American culture that came from an ethnic European subset, up in the nether regions of Scotland and Ireland, and all the settler-colonials who weren’t English enough to be fine and welcomed mightily into the Eastern strongholds of newfound American culture, so they got sent out into the native wilderness to help settle it. “We kinda hate you, but you’re better than non-Europeans, so go out there and make that shit safe for us all, and if you succeed, well glory be to god we have expanded our idea of what civilization is. And if you fail, well fuck it, it’s not like you’re fine English people anyways.” Bluegrass hyperspeed twang is a wonderful example of fermentation of old world shit plopped into strange environments of a different continent, and something amazing sprouting from that shitpile.

Ralph Stanley obvious is the God of bluegrass music. The music form sort of revived itself in recent years with fringe crossover from jam band circuits, and I’ll be honest, I don’t like a lot of that stuff. And it’s weird, because you can’t really define what’s not good about it, but it’s very much like when you hear some white dudes doing blues music or jazz music or hip hop, and sure it’s technically fine, but something integral is missing. Often times we just call this “soul” when we can’t put a scientific thumb on what it really is.

In our racial divisions of whiteness and non-whiteness, we sort of forget the fact that if you focus in on “whiteness” alone, there’s a lot of shades of difference within that too. A lot of cultures were oppressed and destroyed on the European continent alone, before global expansion of certain European empires. I mean obviously the history of the English in the British Isles is one of the best examples of this, with the Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, and others all having been conquered by the English. All that just got laundered in the offshore investment operation of empire that ended up being called America into a vague whiteness.

But there’s plenty of examples, even within vague whiteness, where some white people just ain’t doing something else correctly that other white people have a long history of doing pretty great. Bluegrass is that. Shaggy-haired, oil bearded dudebros can learn the mandolin, can learn a banjo, but it doesn’t mean they’re doing it in a strong way. Something often times is still missing, which you can’t pinpoint, or teach, but would likely fall under that “soul” term.

There’s a lot of weird Appalachian identity memes online now, I guess people attempting to distance themselves from the dominant white culture that’s done so much damage. A lot of that memetics looks heavy-handed, and not real though. Ain’t all these people out here had somebody they called Meemaw. Some of y’all performatively complaining about people putting soap in your skillet bought that “skillet” at Target about three years ago.

But I ain’t here to complain (though I just did), because when real culture hits – not planned culture like an English garden, but feral culture that sprouts from the shitpiles of human existence, volunteering itself to make life feel better – when that type of shit hits the most dirtgodly high notes, it is transcendent. That’s Ralph Stanley in his finest moments. When I die, I hope y’all remember to cremate me and scatter my ashes around the 69th mile marker of the Rivanna subdivision line, between Scottsville and Bremo Bluff, right near the Seven Islands where I used to play dominoes with elven people. But I also hope y’all have a big ass party in a field somewhere, and remember me in good ways, and hopefully somebody has the sense to play “I’ll Fly Away” loud as fuck. Just do it from a car with the doors opened so everybody can hear the radio though if all you can find is unqualified dudebros to try and do a cover. If y’all have some raggedy ass shinefaces hiding behind false beards playing bluegrass at my “Raven is dead, let’s remember that fool” celebration, I’m gonna haunt the fuck out of you all.

SONG OF THE DAY: Serpent's Whisper

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Stalley secretly became one of my favorite rappers this past year. The Tell the Truth Shame the Devil series of EPs, from which this song comes from, is fuckin’ great. I am mostly prejudiced against Ohio, in all forms, because it’s one of the most godforsaken places ever. Not really midwest, not really east, not really Appalachia (fuck you J.D. Vance), not really anything... just a big ol’ mass of kind of a bunch of different things. And yet some wonderful things have come out of Ohio, with stealth. Stalley is that classic industrial shithole rapper though, who got signed to big thangs (Mayback Music Group) but ain’t do shit really with that, and somehow ended up being way better once he was off the corporate chain. People who grew up steeped in struggle, which all rappers claim but there’s different layers to struggle – the struggle spectrum is not a binary (which is why people always play oppression olympics with each other, to prove how oppressed they are, when usually the types who play that are from the lighter end of the spectrum), but once you know that struggle deeply, to your DNA, through generations, lolol shit like “maybach music” is actually corny as fuck to your molecular make-up. So you end up getting dropped, or fucking it up by making poor choices (always poor choices), and you end up releasing a sick ass series of EPs about shaming the devil on your own Blue Collar Gang label.

This song really speaks to me, as does much of Stalley's 2018 body of work. Motherfucker is on some shit.

TVRN 4LL TH3 0LD M1LLS 1NT0...

turn all the old mills into

expensive apartments for

wannabe artists with beards

T34 P4RTY L1C3NS3 PL4T3S 0N...

tea party license plates on

an extended cab Nissan
pick-up truck full of trimbeards

RVR4L 3V'RYM4N F4C4D3...

rural ev'ryman facade

manufactured and offered

exclusively at Wal-Mart

freestyle sonnet #066: HANDICAP MACHETE MATCH AGAINST RICHARD SPENCER-GAVIN MCINNES TYPES

Alpha male mentality but with open heart,
surrounded by ignorant country fucks dumbed down
by steady diet of shock and awe lacking art,
jacked-up truck fuckfaces, unblemished, shines like town -

inauthentic country, surviving card to card,
misinforming themselves as hard. On other side,
proudboy shitheads more peacock than gamecock - new guard
of old boy networks and traditions, taking pride

in being snide condescending asshole bosses,
considering themselves clever through harassing
nature. Falsebeard proliferation criss-crosses
my path often, "right" peacocks amassing

like seed ticks, but shinebeards risk shaving against will
if y'all self-important bitches don't learn to chill.

old head beardfaces counting

by fives at picnic table

in public park “art space” spot

freestyle sonnet #047: WRITTEN AFTER *ALLEGED* ELVEN WIZARD OF SEVEN ISLANDS ANGRILY REPRIMANDED ME FOR ACKNOWLEDGING THE ELVEN PEOPLE'S EXISTENCE PUBLICLY

The elven wizard of Seven Islands (lost james)
summoned me to come as the third whistle coal train
passed this past new moon, to conference upon names
written in digital void by my fingers' brain.

It seems I assumed falsely elven people lacked
access to our interred nets of progressive doom;
but apparently elven tribes are techno-backed
by Scandinavian non-prophets, thus deep boom

of elven wizard leader's voice chastised my acts:
"How dare you of most humane origins reveal
our existence? Folk pseudo-scientific facts
enable us to survive through denial. Real

life - as you humans know it - lacks our kind at all!"
Thus, I *know* *no* people standing just two feet tall.

Sheriff Buford P. Coltrane

trying to shave/steal my beard

for its magical powers