SONG OF THE DAY: Cheatin' in the Next Room

If you’ve ever wondered how there’s a ZZ Top and a Z.Z. Hill, it’s because Billy Gibbons – always a purveyor of the rawest things in life – was a huge fan of Z.Z. Hill and somehow combined B.B. King and Z.Z. Hill into ZZ Top. Billy Gibbons won’t wrong. This track was towards his later years before he died, when he was on Malaco Records, doing them down home ‘80s blues that were entirely their own vibe. I’ve actually been on a Malaco Records kick the past few months, and any time I’m digging in some 45 crates, if I run across a Malaco single, I snatch it up, regardless. Folks often only think of blues in the old ways, but damn, it’s some good ass stuff out here that’s been made since the old blues days, and nothing captures a certain life aesthetic quite like blues music. Of course, there’s also some horribly bland ass sterilized blues that’s been made the past 40 years, too, by dudes who listen to talk radio all day at work, but dick around on an expensive guitar as a hobby. That ain’t the blues, that’s propaganda. Propaganda never has the same soul as real shit (whether you’re talking about music, politics, or anything). On the old "Down Home Blues" collections commercials that run constantly on local TV, this was one of the songs that got the highlight title lyrical line. I could probably recite that whole commercial, line for line, because they played it on Channel 13 every damn day while I was trying to watch Scooby Doo after school.

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Been Having An Affair

If multiverse theory is true, somewhere in the endless expanse of universe, there's a whole planet full of humanoids who all look like Latimore. I wanna go there. That has nothing to do with this song, other than Latimore and Tonya both recorded for long time Mississippi record label Malaco Records. But a planet full of Latimores probably gonna have some hilarious cheating scenarios too though.

SONG OF THE DAY: Chains and Things

This came off a “Wu Tang sampled this shit before” collection I took off a music blog somewhere or another. RZA’s mom’s record collection must’ve been dope as fuck, to be honest.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm In The Mood

I used to have a knockin’ boots situationship with a woman who always dimmed the lights down low and played old blues music, like every time. It actually was nice and created quite the vibe, plus her bed was small, like an old school twin bed which is great because you gotta get serious, no room to escape and dilly dally. Because of this cellular memory in my physical body though (with serotonin exclamation marks), when I hear certain old blues music, it gets me all riled up. And of course it does, because just look at this song. That was sexy ass music, designed (by divine minds not actually purposefully designing too hard with the brain) to make one inclined to do just what we was doing while we was listening to it.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Pity The Fool

I AM WEARING OVERALLS BLASTING BOBBY BLUE BLAND TYPING IN ALL CAPS TRYING TO PRETEND IT DIDN'T GET COLD AND HEATING OIL IS TOO FUCKIN EXPENSIVE. BOBBY BLUE BLAND IS PERFECT FOR THIS TYPE OF ENVIRONMENT TO BE HONEST. SADLY AS A YOUNG WHITEBOY EVEN A RURAL WHITEBOY I DIDN'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ZZ HILL AND BOBBY BLUE BLAND, BUT I'VE RECTIFIED THAT SITUATION. WHITE PEOPLE HAVE TO DO A BETTER JOB OF REDEFINING WHAT WHITE PEOPLE MEANS.

SONG OF THE DAY: Whole Lotta Meat aka Hey Little Girl

There’s a local blues show that goes for approximately 74 hours every Saturday night on NPR, with some old ass dude who looks nothing like he sounds hosting. He shaves his face, and never had his electricity cut off for non-payment. Thus, he doesn’t get it. But this is a brave new world, where you don’t actually have to get it to act like you get it, and if you act long enough and hard enough, people politely go along with believing you got it.

Anyways, there’s such a wonderful large body – no pun intended – of old blues songs about big women, which is enjoyable on the very basic level, but also even greater when you think about some dude sitting around, thinking about writing a song, and decides to go all in on glorifying his big ol’ lady in a song. One time I wrote an entire 14 poem crown of sonnets about loving big asses too much, so I got banished to a mountain range which was giant asses, occupied entirely by stick women who exiled me from their community because of my over enthusiasm in the actual realm about big asses. That’s a little too much to explain in three verses and a chorus, so I appreciate the way bluesmen kept it simple.
There was no video for this song I could find, so I made one, but don't worry, the owners of the music maintained their copyright, so if you watch this video 13,000 times in a row, you'll make them seven pennies, not me.

SONG OF THE DAY: Shake That Thing

There is an abandoned soapstone factory in the woods around here, like a giant structure made of soapstone slabs with no roof where narrow gauge train used to roll in and get loaded up. I do a lot of wandering, so accidentally discovered that if you’re sitting around down there on a new moon that falls on an increment of 7 as a day (like the 7th, 14th, 21st, or 28th), it turns into a spirit dive, so you see (hallucinate? who knows, nothing is real, especially not reality) an old bar take the form of the building, and a bunch of weird characters (me included) are all hanging out. I never drank the first time I was there but the second time an old dude named Juney told me it was okay, the wine didn’t actually have alcohol in it, or anything, like if you drank it nothing came out the cups, but it got you drunker on the vibes by pretending, so I did. Great time. That night an old spirit they called Haze started banging this song out on a homemade cigar box guitar, loud as fuck he was yelling the song, and all the spirits – man, woman, other – just started shaking their (our) asses like wild, “MAMA, SHAKE THAT THANG! DADDY, SHAKE THAT THANG!” for what felt like hours and hours and hours but I couldn’t tell time at all because it was a dark new moon and the kerosene lanterns (hallucinated) in the joint were the only light. When I made my way back up the hill, I’d only been down there about 15 minutes, but I was sweaty as fuck, and somehow I lost a sock, but still had my walking boots on. Never quite figured that part out, hallucinations or real or whatever. How the fuck do you lose a single sock without taking your shoes off? It was one of my favorite socks too, blaze orange Polo crew sock. Shit kinda bums me out but I hope a spirit just took that shit as a memento. Still though, what the fuck?

SONG OF THE DAY: Down In Mississippi

Honestly, sometimes I just blast blues music with all the windows open and the back door propped so that the cats can come and go without worrying me. Sometimes cats that ain't even mine come and go. Fuck it. I can understand their plight. It's some good shit in here.

SONG OF THE DAY: Listen To My Song

Darondo makes me want to fuck. Not creepy power fucking or weird collecting Pokemons fucking but good ol' greasy fucking in purple lights, everybody involved being all about it, no hidden agendas or hang-ups, everything out. It's a fucked up world right now, although maybe it's always been this fucked up, here or there, and it's all relative. Either way, there's enough art to make us feel like shit, to make us feel hopeless, to make us feel inspired to aspire to motivationally inspirate. Good ol' fucking art gets left out the conversation, which is unfortunate, because damn if we don't all need some serotonin still. And if you're out there not getting that serotonin release, stuck in a situation where it doesn't happen, or you accidentally ended up in a routine where the other side of the bed realized they don't like your type no more, recognize it's a big ol' world out here. Somebody wants to fuck you, in a most wonderful way.

SONG OF THE DAY: Why Do Everything Happen To Me

The guy that puts out the vegetables at the Food Lion in Scottsville is never wearing a mask over his mouth and nose, just sort of dangling, strapped to his chin, usually with a shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not the type to snitch to a manager, and the manager there has that redneck hip hop dude from 1991 who got a woman pregnant and is gonna do right by her the rest of his life look anyways, so he probably wouldn’t even care the guy wasn’t wearing his mask, and would just do that, “Look man, people complained. You just gotta be cool about it.” And fuckface would still be wearing his mask as a chin strap a week later.
The weird thing about our culture – if you can call it that – is how proudly stupid people have become. Even smart people. Shit everybody. If our culture is anything it’s one of self-importance, where we think we have to share our goddamn idiot thoughts on every single subject on social media. And then trending topics force us to give opinions about shit we didn’t even think about or care about otherwise. And it all gets to feel so stupid and overwhelming that when I’m trying to get through the stupid fucking Food Lion during a pandemic with rising numbers, and just grab the things I need, and I see the idiot pear-shaped redneck produce man standing there looking like a goddamn cartoon warning against electrocuting yourself from 1949, setting bags of onions out, I just wanna stomp him and the whole world into pulp. But I can’t, and don’t. I just buy my useless shit and go home, like everybody else, until the credit behind my name runs out, and I’m sleeping in the cold earth again.

SONG OF THE DAY: Open the Door (Alternate Take)

Otis Redding is one of my all-time favorites. His voice has just never been matched. I'm about to light a few sticks of incense, draw a hot bath, plug in all 39 strands of purple and pink holiday lights, and vibe the fuck out.

SONG OF THE DAY: Drowning On Dry Land

Been listening to a lot of old blues music lately, because when it feels like the world is ending, it’s important to remember you’re not the first person to live under a bridge. You can still have good times, with wild sex by the burn barrel light as the stable world buzzes past overhead, oblivious to you. Perhaps it’s better to live in the margins, in oblivion, without the attachment of normal ass expectations, which always fail to come through. I mean, I had a what felt like the end of the world in the past few years, but here I am today, with more gibberish poetry in my heart than ever, and blood still pumping to most of my dick. It’s never the end of the world; it’s just a change you wasn’t necessarily prepared for. But you don’t have to prepare, you just gotta keep existing. Too much preparation might even get in the way sometimes. Anyways, none of us are the first, and we won’t be the last. We’re just another miniscule human blip on the universal consciousness.
This is all a fairly simplified way of feeling confident in my life not feeling absolutely fucked in this very moment. It’s easy to see the benefits of continuing to walk along the tracks when you’re not actively in the mood to lay down in front of the next empty coal train. But I’ve been there too. And I’m here now. And even though I might get there again, the point is the train’s not for you anyways. It’s for the coal to be scraped from inside the Earth. Life doesn’t necessarily have a point. So fuck it, you might as well keep walking along the tracks, wander off, and enjoy your goddamned self a little.

SONG OF THE DAY: Where She At

Sometimes I realize I don't live in an apartment building with picnic tables in the center area where we hang out and play dominos or spades because the apartments are hot as fuck and all they have is window units but they're old window units and plus that's expensive to run so the cost to comfort level is not that good, but also you can't leave the windows open all the time because lolol this is America, motherfuckers will take your shit when you're not paying attention, so we hang out at the picnic tables, hoping for a breeze, enjoying when the sun is setting down behind the building top so we're in the shade, enjoying our shared existences. Normally I don't ever think about how that's not my life at all, but whenever I listen to Z.Z. Hill, it comes to mind, because I imagine we'd listen to a lot of Z.Z. Hill sitting out there when it's too hot to be inside.

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: I'm a King Bee

It’s weird that blues music got watered down by old white dudes, because good blues music is straight up a soundtrack for fucking, and nothing about old white dudes with goatees and funny hats is sexy at all. In fact, that’s my litmus test for blues music. Does it have a good fucking rhythm, and make you wanna fuck? Then it’s good blues music. And let’s be honest, most of life’s blues come from fucking, either accidentally fucking the wrong person, or not being able to fuck the right person. Sometimes you double down on the poor choices and end up in a situation where you can’t even fuck the wrong person, but you really want to anyways, and that’s when the high quality full life blues kick in.

This made me wonder the etymology of “blues” and a rapid internet search told me it perhaps stems from a 17th century English expression for “the blue devils” one sees during severe alcohol withdrawal. But like all of the most wonderful things, there’s no real known beginning of what “the blues” means, nor really when blues music started. Shit just kinda came together, like cultural gumbo, and then it existed bigger than anybody realized, and now it ain’t going away, because once obsessive old white dudes get ahold of something, it’s stuck in for good. I refuse to believe the true etymology of “the blues” doesn’t have to do with fucking, or lack thereof though.

SONG OF THE DAY: Poison

[verse one] 

friend, I must WARN YOU 

I sense something strange in my mind 

situation is SERIOUS 

let's cure it 'cause we're running out of time

it's oh so BEAUTIFUL 

symbiotic relationships with the Earth 

they seem from the start 

it's all so DEADLY 

when not thinking with our heart 

it's driving me out of my mind! 

that's why it's hard for me to find 

can't get it out of my head! 

miss her, kiss her, love her 

WRONG MOVE WITH REGARDS TO LIVING IN ACCORDANCE 

WITH THE EARTH YOU'RE DEAD 

[hook]

that culture is POISON

never trust a big wallet and smile

that culture is POISON

POISON!!