SONG OF THE DAY: Do It (kudzu'd)

This is a South African funk band 45 I got on a lark amidst getting a few records off Carolina Soul auctions on ebay. This definitely is the bangingest banger from the stack though, as I didn’t even know the group, but damn this song is so sweet slowed down, just so thick and nasty. The negative side of accidentally finding a banger like this is I spin it so much when I’m playing records that I feel like I need a back-up copy. It’s become a foundational 45 for a slowed set. It’s also interesting how even at the international record selling discography sites, information can be sparse about large parts of the world. The internet still has its biases, even if the whole world has it. And I actually enjoy that lack of comprehensiveness, because it means you have to accept you can’t know it all, and you always gotta be seeking the shit you hadn’t been exposed to yet. Or you can find bezels of greatness beyond the scope of the mainstream digital focus (even in a place like discogs). There are always margins nobody thought to pay attention to, hiding somewhere on this Earth. And if you find them and they are great, sometimes it’s better to not tell nobody about it, because you’ll just ruin it by snitching to the whole damn world. Clout will never be worth it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hard Steppin' (kudzu'd)

I try not to dig too hard into the modern funk movement, or if I do, I try and do so with an open mind, because often times you find out the band is a bunch of white-appearing dudes from post-gentrification Brooklyn, or like based out of Finland. But at the same time, they often also try to put on their heroes from the past, and do so with full support and credit to those legends. So even though this particular music scene has a lot of what would be described as hipsters, it also has given new life to old, forgotten artists as well. I don’t know man, everything is always more nuanced and complicated that simple internet discourse can handle, and if folks are doing something they love with respect for those who came before them, it’s hard to get mad at. And I don’t know how to be part of a horn section, like at all, so I got no room to complain.

SONG OF THE DAY: Computer Love Part II (kudzu'd)

A solid proof of America's deep and inherent racism is a bunch of people love Bruce Springsteen still, for some reason, but ain't nobody talking about Roger Troutman. Neoliberal bullshit. Also this song should be the internet's theme song, but we blew it. Now libertarian tech dorks own the internet and we're like ten years away from the national anthem getting changed to a pun that 13 year olds think is stupid.

SONG OF THE DAY: Salam Alay

I was thinking about how full color vinyl records sort of corresponds with full color tattoos, neither of which are things that appeal to me, and feel a bit bougie. Anyways, I’ve been doing a radio show where I play 45s at 33 speed, and because of all this, and the over-fetishization of collections of records, I decided to return to an old practice I use to use, where I mark on the labels or sleeves of records I love. So every 45 I played last night, I vandalized somewhere on the 45 label or sleeve with a variation of a Dirtgod tag. Gonna keep doing this, and that way, twenty years from now, even if I’m losing my memory, I’ll know which records were the best by how fucked up they are from me scribbling all over them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Reet

The Habibi Funk series put out by Habibi Funk Records is one of the best bandcamp record labels going. This track comes from Habibi Funk 018, and thus far I've not allowed myself to get the LPs, because mostly I've just been playing 45s on my turntable, and LPs somehow got so fucking expensive even though nothing's really changed with them in twenty years. There's shockingly less record stores too than there were in the '90s, with many of the old school black-owned ones I used to love in Virginia long gone, and replaced by expensive white-owned ones with quite the mark-up on used albums, but always called a fair market price lolol. Plus, the majority of new releases are white-friendly albums on colored vinyl instead of just basic black, which is annoying as fuck from a DJ's perspective (or making mixtapes even). But that's what's selling. They've essentially gentrified record collecting. So much shit exists beyond the realm of that though, and I recently had found a junk/antique store with literally thousands and thousands of 45s and LPs, that I dug and dug through, cheap as fuck too. So I guess I appreciate a Berlin label re-releasing collections of stuff I'd never get otherwise exposed to, like Habibi Funk, and this Hamid El Shaeri release (and the Roger Fakhr and Al Massrieen ones before it... my other favorites from this label). There's a deep digging involved, and the artists themselves (or their family) seem to benefit from the releases. But there's a capitalist/colonialist mentality to a lot of record stores and labels nowadays that I feel weird about, but not entirely sure how to express it all. Nonetheless, good music is good music, and there's such an abundance of good music that's been pressed to vinyl (or uploaded inside the internet) that you have no reason not to find awesome shit to enjoy without going broke trying to have the In Things.

SONG OF THE DAY: Never Too Much

Tired of narcissists masquerading as body positive, when they look conventionally attractive. Tired of scolding progressives who don't speak the language of having to make broken shit work, because there's no money to fix anything. Tired of people who think they've been cancel cultured because they said stupid shit in a crowded room and somebody got on their ass about it. Tired of the "I'm white but I've experienced oppression" mental gymnastics olympic trials constantly happening. Tired of people in love with their own image, in an unhealthy way where they demand you fuel their egotistic serotonin by clicking little buttons and sharing as well. Tired of people calling themselves connoisseurs when they are consumers, who support their favorite media oligarch owning all the content they want to consume in one convenient to them place. Tired of what internet culture has become. Tired of thinking about dumb shit like Elon Musk or Kanye West or some other oligarch narcissist who is ultimately entirely useless to everybody within 100 miles of where I stand. Tired of the mass gentrification of thought that has come with web 2.0. Tired of so much shit.

What I ain't tired of? Driving back roads, from here to the horizon. Roadside kooks selling weird shit. Sitting outside without device. Open windows with curtains blowing so hard it knocks the plant off the dresser there. Dogs barking in the distance. The smell of a burn barrel going hard. Real life shit, as unmanufactured as possible, and with a good percentage of decay. It ain't real life shit if there's no decay.

SONG OF THE DAY: Gentched Up

Working up a long-winded intro to issue 12 of my Southern Gothicc Futurist zine about gentrification, specifically in Richmond, and ‘90s era punk rockers’ direct involvement. That’s gonna be issue 12. Just about done with an all Top Tens issue that’ll be issue 11. I send them out in pairs to supporters of my patreon, and in fact just sent out issues 9 and 10 recently (or am working on it still). You can get those, zines only, direct instead of joining the patreon, $10 by Venmo (@ravenmack23) or Cashapp ($ravenmack23). Mark it with emojis as friends, because you know. Apologies to XL Middleton for hijacking his “Gentched Up” song to sell some zines, but it’s all related, somehow. Everything’s relative. And related. So what’s up cousin?

SONG OF THE DAY: Hands

Sometimes I still miss Richmond, but then other times I also tell myself it’s nothing like it used to be. They’ve gentrified the gentrification at this point. I was thinking about how so many suburban punks who went to VCU became the first wave of gentrification from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, and how that forever altered Richmond in ways that most of the folks probably don’t feel complicit in. In fact, the former lead singer of Avail constantly says “Richmond not RVA!” as if the RVA shorthand itself was guilty of gentrification alone, when it really was just building off the foundation that all those punks laid down previously. The city was hyped as the Austin of the East Coast or the Portland of the East Coast multiple times over. The only reason I probably didn’t help contribute to this gentrification then was that I didn’t have any familial wealth to borrow off of to buy a house in Fulton Hill or Southside or Northside or wherever the fuck else all those punks bought up places together. Gentrification has fucked up so much of America’s urban environments, and yet almost everybody who is directly involved in that gentrification process somehow feels like they’re completely innocent of it, and it’s other, wealthier, less cool people who did it. Being a fortysomething punk is about as bourgeoisie as it gets most of the time. The American pyramid scam – you never see the people below you you’re standing on top of; you only look up at those above you who you blame for having it all. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Ooh La La

I don’t get down with Run the Jewels like I once did. The internet loves them still, but each record’s felt less and less inspired, and to be honest, I got my fill on El-P verses by the end of the second one. I tried this last one but there wasn’t anything about it that really stuck out to me. I don’t listen to music as soon as it comes out necessarily, so it all gets inserted into a larger selection of music I tend to keep playing most hours of the day, so it doesn’t get that OMG NEW SHIT pop with me personally like it might for many folks. That’s some capitalistic bullshit though. Let the dust of the newness settle and see where shit stands for real. My shitty old iphone turned into an ipod is a true meritocracy, not a fake one built on mythologies which no longer apply.
All that being said, having Greg Nice on this popped my reminiscing heart, and had me thinking about how popular lemonade still is. So I did play the fuck outta this song at least. Can we get another solo Killer Mike project though? At this point, Run the Jewels is like a brightly painted and expensive organic taco truck at a mural festival in a neighborhood you used to buy weed in but can’t afford to even rent a one bedroom at anymore. El-P is the sound of gentrification during the Trump era. Sorry, that’s just how shit actually is.

SONG OF THE DAY: Grinding All My Life

The historical complaint against history was that the winners tell the story, thus we get a one-sided view of what happened. This is true in all contexts of culture. I say this related to “grinding all my life” because I got to thinking about the etymology of slang grinding, and how the act of slowly wearing something down in laborious act was turned into hustler mantra, as in “rise and grind”  or “grind pray” or all the uses of grinding now used more than people actually use power tool grinders. Here’s the weird thing though – online there was no real solid etymological slang site, just normal dictionaries which would barely mention the slang version. However, there was a significant amount of explanation, including a FUCKING WIKIPEDIA PAGE about grinding as it relates to using this slang in playing video games. At the Wikipedia page, there was actually discussion about how some viewed this as poor game design, while others considered a natural aspect of any quality game, to have a repetitive laborious task to complete certain achievements. And yet, no fucking etymology of the slang use in terms of hustling after dreams through perhaps not entirely legal methods.

This is further example of the gentrification of the internet, and how a certain comfort class knowledge is deeply explored in this medium that claims to be full of all information, when actually it’s just a wide expanse of narrow knowledge. Call it the Genius Syndrome, as in that genius website, which has nerd ass people explicating lyrics to verses, often times in hilariously ridiculous ways. But anyways, shout out to you if you remain grinding towards your dreams – this poison culture is like building sand castles and if you don’t tend that shit daily they gonna wipe you down with heavy tides of bullshit, so you gotta stay grinding at that shit constantly, or else you get swept out to normalcy’s sea, and next thing you know you’re sitting around playing video games, pretending you are active not passive in life, and arguing about shit online because you’re sheltered ass domesticated livestock existence feels more important to you than outside perspectives. Son of Boomer Sports Car White Male is Incel With Sikk Gaming Setup. Poison culture grinds larger than any individual, still, so props to everybody attempting to beat that shit back with various creative and/or illegal hustles. Fuck these devils.

SONG OF THE DAY: You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack

Sitting in the back of a training session at work oh fake work the backbone of Americanism, and we have “brain breaks” where we watch jaunty “fun” videos and there was one about coffee and how great coffee is and it’s all white people in here, not dirty white people but clean shineface white people who believe in Americanism still, and idk man I don’t enjoy this life I’ve stumbled into sometimes. Working with crackheads on a paint crew was a lot more exciting. I guess this is progress, but I’m not sure. Sitting at the back of a room full of bonafide white people where I feel completely uncomfortable and out of place and not myself and it’s Friday and I don’t really feel like giving a fuck, makes me wish it was my week to run this training and my brain break video would just be this Viper song.

I have a lot of funny working with crackheads stories, specifically from a period in Farmville which y'all got no idea about small town crackheads vs. city crackheads, it's like a whole different level of comedic behavior from tragic circumstances. But I don't really feel like sharing them openly on the gentrified internet because I fear y'all cowards might actually be too white. I'll be walking around most of the weekend though, catch me at the bus stop.

SONG OF THE DAY: Stay Woke

Been contemplating killing off all forms of social media because it continues to trip me out how gentrified internet stream of consciousness poisons our collective thinking wells. As if recent major elections in the world shouldn’t be enough to show that effect, recently there was a surge in white rapper beef news, all because Eminem dropped an album that allegedly dissed a bunch of other white rappers, so the world was forced against its will to discuss white rappers endlessly for about a week, because the internet stuffed it into all our brains. The whole thing was weird, because I never even listened to a Machine Gun Kelly song before, and all it did was make me google him and remember what shitty tattoos he has. Like, I’m a man that loves shitty tattoos, but his are not that for-real shitty style – they are the heavy coverage of someone with money who gets them all at once. But also the best hip hop related Machine Gun Kelly is the ill beat my man Boogie Brown made from James Taylor’s “Machine Gun Kelly” song, built off a sick sample from the first couple measures.

I listened to like two songs off the Eminem shit but it sounded exactly like every Eminem song of the past 15 years, but shittier, like Jimmy Iovine and the music illuminati built an Eminem song machine at the turn of the century, which they also used pieces of for their 50 Cent song machine, both machines Dr. Dre helped to engineer as he is very much key member of music illuminati now. But the Eminem machine hasn’t had any new parts in all that time, so it still spits out the same things it’s programmed to spit out, and sure it fits the criteria of “good” rapping, but it’s predictable and boring and ultimately worthless. Plus the machine is aging so it’s ever so slightly not as crisp in the edges it creates, so the edges are soft and pliable and it feels like a waste of time, which it is.

The fucked up thing is, Royce da 5’9”, who is mostly considered Eminem’s sidekick, dropped a pretty fuckin’ great album called Book of Ryan earlier this year, which has actually stayed in heavy rotation in the Dirtgod Abode. Whereas Eminem is mechanically manufacturing polysyllabic predictability, Royce is digging into familial traumas, to a pretty raw level, including calling out his own brother. While Eminem is like “my mom sucks” in his predictable cadence, with stale pop culture celebrity references interspersed, Royce is digging into a specific incidence of his dad knocking the shit out of his brother on Christmas. It’s very much the difference between these two MCs offerings as it is with commodity and art. In our culture, commodity very often masquerades as art, in order to make us believe we’re not wasting our time. And emotional triggers of adrenaline, like a bunch of high school kids crowding around yelling “FIGHT! FIGHT!”, are woven in as well with these fake ass beefs. But Eminem wasn’t saying shit, while Royce was, but the internet just ignored Royce entirely for the most part, while it went crazy over “best white rapper” conversations for a whole week. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s not some sort of underlying racism concealed in the music illuminati that causes all this. Or possibly (probably) the algorithm itself is racist. I’d say that’s likely, which also means the information you’re being fed – seemingly in a meritocratic way – is not based on actual merit at all. That leads back to the first sentence about how elections can be manipulated simply by engineering human consciousness, through these mechanisms now in place which we consider altruistic, and being more connected.

Of course, the immediate irony of all this is the title of the song of the day by Royce – “Stay Woke”. That phrase went from a call for awareness to cliché pretty fast, due to the internet blowing it up, so that it lost its meaning once grandmas and the very obviously unwoke would say “stay woke”. In fact, I’d say more online acts of wokeness are performative than of substance. Online personal brand signaling. (A twitter friend, Eric Nelson, once made a tweet saying “performative acts of wokeness” and that phrase has been etched into my head ever since, because of how often I see it happening.)

Anyways, sleep remains the cousin of death, and most of us are dying slowly, 24 hours a day. So stay woke (by hitting snooze).

MOTYOTD: Backlund vs. Snuka (June 28, 1982)

This is more of an FYI, because I'm moving more of my nonsense gibberish projects over to my patreon. $1 a month means you can see all that shit. If you don't want to see it, that's fine. I don't feel good about openly sharing shit online any more, because people are either horrible and looking to out you for anything on Earth, or everything is funneled through Yakubian algorithms. But I made this patreon post a public one, so you can read it whether you've signed up to support or not. But I encourage you to support my nonsense, because I've got a lot of it, and even though I won't be sharing it all here openly all the time any more, doesn't mean I won't be doing it still.

THE BACKLUND VS. SNUKA CAGE MATCH COMMENTARY

JJ Krupert Dec 2017 number four "whiteboy"

been contemplating whiteboy vs. white male spectrum

w/intersectional notecards in my mind

don’t feel like telling the internet

internet has its own ideas

about everything

& is quick

to tell

you

how

YOU ARE WRONG

-->

SO VERY VERY WRONG

Ja Ja Krupert November 2017 number nine "auditorium"

The cover of Mos Def’s The Ecstatic is a still from Killer of Sheep, a black-and-white movie made in the ‘70s by a dude named Charles Burnett. It is one of my all-time favorite movies – just an amazing fucking flick, but considered an artsy flick (although real as fuck) so lost to artsy flick world. I’ve thought about it a lot though with the media hype after Jordan Peele’s Get Out last year, as well as the awards laid upon Moonlight, all of which is deserving in my opinion (which it should be noted my opinion doesn’t matter ultimately), and especially after I saw Cornel West talk, and thinking in my life about voices from the marginalized (which, though a white male, to some extent what I come from is a marginalized place, although I certainly am able to put on the right type of costume and appear to be one of them who makes all the voices heard, if I could ever overcome my own feelings of fraud and discomfort). I tend to visualize the margins in my mind as the tall grasses at the edge of manicured society, right at along the edges of truly feral (the woods), and to be honest, I feel far more comfortable in the tall grasses (and even lost in the woods, but not really lost, just out there, like that old Leon Russell song) than assimilated. That does not seem to change, no matter how much work I do to make myself a more whole person.

Movies like Killer of Sheep hit me. Last night I actually watched Alambrista! (which also was pretty great), and one of the benefits of working at a TRADITIONAL PUBLIC IVY UNIVERSITY is having access to their libraries, which includes a pretty great DVD collection. (Yes, I still be watching DVDs. Young Dirtgod didn’t have access to a VCR until the ‘90s, so I was born to a behind the technological curve people due to finance, and am fine checking out what’s left of the fancy library DVD collection while y’all straight stream cyberbeams direct to  your pineal gland.) The weird thing is I feel stupid for wanting to watch good movies from other times, being trained to CAN’T MISS the latest yawner of epic media hype. That’s why voices from the margins tend to speak to me. Moonlight did not feel like a complete waste of time to me, like most movies do. Same with Get Out (though – as all horror/sci-fi movies tend to be – it had a gotcha finish where you’re not exactly gonna go back and rewatch it once a year like I do with Killer of Sheep).

A tag I use on this page is “gentrification of the internet” which on one hand is a ridiculous concept but on the other hand is perfectly true. The marginalized voices which used to be able to be found easily have been sort of graffiti muraled over by this common false-quirkiness (best personified by *weird twitter* or *dank memes*) which sort of makes light joke of all non-normal voices. But a true understanding of marginal voices is not attained. It just seems like shit’s a big fucking former bad neighborhood turned into coffee shops serving kombucha and microbrews, but as websites. However this political era reshapes the internet (current net neutrality talk) isn’t really reshaping so much as codifying what’s already been reshaped. Outsider voices are already impossible to hear through the din of social media and paid promotion and people with degrees well beyond baccalaureate branding their personal existences.

What does all this have to do with a Mos Def song? Nothing. But my man has found solace in Islam, as well as Africa, and I’d like to hear voices like that. And nothing is really stopping me, other than having to go down internet back roads instead of the traditional information super-highway with its stupid fucking billboards. And I guess Killer of Sheep speaks to me because I feel a lot like Stan (the main character), and I’ve had engine block after engine block get fucked up on me, often beyond my control. When I come out from the tall grasses into the manicured larger culture, I feel naked, and often can’t think straight, and tend to fuck up, or at least look out of place enough others more comfortable from lifelong existence in that realm are able to be super-predators of the legal kind on my ass, and after fucking up (yet again), I flee back to the comfort of tall grasses, and sometimes even back into the woods. And to be honest, rather than continuing to do the inner-work and feeling comfortable in that manicured (gentrified internet) civilized space, I’d rather all that fall apart, and go feral. Fuck your comfortable world; I don’t want it. I don’t want your values nor your non-soul-satisfying rewards. I hope all this forced order through digital control that’s been applied to everybody’s metaphysical existence fractures the psyches of the young into beautiful feral jihadists who destroy this poison culture (finally).

Aki Basho 2017 Honour Tanka Day 7: TAKANOIWA (5-2)

(slow motion absorption of open handed slaps)

a glorious day 

seven slobberknocker with 

vicious slaps galore 

Takanoiwa absorbed 

attacking energies well 

resilient big 

boy in the true big boy sport - 

sumo, ya bitches 

after slapfest was over, 

Takanoiwa waited 

when Kagayaki 

fell forward with a feeble 

attack - game over 

Takanoiwa tossed my 

boy, then stood victorious 

(watch full video, 

and see him twist his face like 

“damn, motherfucker”) 

(still though, “damn, motherfucker” 
with those bonus envelopes) 

[full match below, had to google in Japanese again, 

internet gentrification creates western hegemony]

[HH3os] The My Name Is Krazy OLD trio

(1st round match-up 19 of 27)

We are all stereotypes, so much so that someone amongst us will start acting slightly contrarian enough – a way of separating from the crowd but without creating alienation – and that will be so great looking to all the sucka ass normies that pretty soon the slightly contrarian opinion is annexed (dare I say colonized?) into a new sub-stereotype. Thus, I am a “writer” (always use scare quotes for any dumb fucker that calls themselves a writer; they are guaranteed fools) but also a “blogger” and also “rap music aficionado” and really whatever any other stereotype needs to label me to either agree or disagree with me conclusively, without regard, as quickly as possible. You see, the important thing is to label everything and everyone, not to interact with it. Once everything (and everyone) is labelled, then you will fully understand all the world has to understand. Good luck on your journey, fellow idiot human. Here is today’s expert (as in all-knowing) whiteboy (as in predominately European heritage, but not in Europe no more) analysis (as in talking too goddamned much about stupid shit)…

Danny Brown – OLD

(released October 8, 2013; #5 on 2013 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Danny Brown, during XXX, developed trademark Danny Brown dichotomy of high-pitched “I’m getting fucked up and don’t really give a fuck” style, and introspective calmer-voiced “damn, the shit I’ve seen is depressing.” As detailed before, I enjoy the depressing half of that dichotomy a bit more, but likely this is because I no longer get fucked up and am a depressing motherfucker a lot of times (not to mention depressed many times as well). With OLD, Brown begins to transfuse the two together more, to where sometimes he is calmly talking about rubbing on someone’s breasts right before going into what a fuckin’ hypocritical life he lives. The existential crisis is no gimmick here, and you can tell.

But beyond this growth of the two Danny Brown styles into one, like two birch sprouted closely together in the woods, he also realizes he has moved along the timeline away from some of the concepts of his earlier shit. He specifically mentions how trifling that is in “Dope Song”, how he’s not sitting on the stoop selling drugs no more. His life has changed, although it’s still fucked.

Don’t get it wrong though, he’s still talking about sexing with mad art sluts. (I put “with” in there and oddly it took away the sex shaming of it a little, because it was not being done to the art sluts, but with the art sluts, and there can be no denying that “art slut” would encompass one Daniel Xworth Brown as well.) But the multiple facets of DB are blending together, and he’s also attempting to trim away some of the redundant phat that’s starting to feel repetitive to him (an interesting thing, considering the next album in this trio). I don’t know, I didn’t think beforehand I liked this better than XXX, but afterwards I think I may. It’s better than I remembered, and I actually already remembered it as worthwhile. Danny Brown talks shit, and might grate on some folks nerves, and damn does he dress funny, but that dude is more honest than most fuckers cosplaying images for rap industry. If there was one rapper I’d like to see a serious documentary about (not one hyping up new album), it’d be Danny. SIX STARS (******)!

Pusha T – My Name Is My Name

(released October 8, 2013; #50 on 2013 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

It was about two-thirds of the way through this album the first time (each joint gets played twice through, beginning to end as manufactured creatively, in case you ain’t know how scientific my process is) that I became completely numb to the effect of cocaine rap. It is stupid and pointless, and the only reason people around me hype up Pusha T is because we have nothing else that has prominently come from Virginia in hip hop, other than bullshit pop machine stuff like Missy Elliott or Neptunes or Timbaland… basically robot music ready-made for the mall. So Pusha T, relatively speaking, seems legit. But fuck man, the cocaine rap shit is so… fucking… boring. I mean, I guess I can kinda give him half a prop (not a whole one) because he was one of the originators of that style, BUT GOD WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING RHYME ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE? Even mix in a different drug you are pretend moving on the streets. I don’t know, I hope it’s because he actually did have dirty hands at one point, and has cleaned up but still feels like he has to rhyme about that world, and is not comfortable with rapping about his new life of riding to Starbucks and shopping for sofas and mundane shit like that. But at this point, I’d rather hear him talk about an 40-minute drive through heavy Tidewater traffic to get to the Haverty’s furniture to find a new living room ensemble than more fucking cocaine rap. (The song with Kendrick briefly tricked me into tolerating cocaine rap for about 94 seconds each time, for full disclosure.) ONE STAR (*)!

YG – My Krazy Life

(released March 18, 2014; #27 on 2014 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

YG is Compton gangsta rap, but on that new era of non-gruff voiced style, where we finally admit that squeaky-sounding motherfuckers are sometimes the most psychopathic, putting behind our patriarchal beliefs that deep voice means more alpha. Maybe. YG uses the n-word a lot, like more than even n-word heavy genre of rap music does, and as expert whiteboy, I am unable to use the n-word in real life, naturally, and I fully accept them. I have had best friends at times who were not expert whiteboys like not even a little you could see it very clearly, and they would call me their n-word (lolol one time I was introduced to Mos Def by my boy Rob as that – his n-word, which was perhaps the most awkward moment of my life to that point), but growing up in the rural south, riding a schoolbus where there were three white kids, and the other two were my younger sisters, and also have legit racist family members, I stay the fuck way from that word. But apparently I don’t even type the word either, as this YG review has started out showing and proving, which seems weird to me. But if I don’t say it, should I type it? Is that perpetuating racialisms, or am I being ridiculous?

Doesn’t really matter, because this is the internet, and it’s far more important to put forth the appearance of righteous and interpersonal nobility than to actually do that in real life. This is all a grand theater of personal branding except nobody is buying shit so fuck it, let’s keep pretending. (Side note: if you still believe in any of the mythology behind America and exceptionalism and all that hoo-ha, you are as bad as the n-word users, but on an entirely different plain separate from education and environment, and one built on well I don’t know… kinda started rambling too long and forgot where I was going. But let’s pretend there’s a horrible historical word that begins with Q, and we can’t even say it due to the history involved. You are a fucking Q-word. I hate you.)

Oh yeah, the music… It was okay. I mean nothing extraordinarily great but it was entertaining, and it was fun to not say the n-word but think about how fun it would be to shoot a bunch of motherfuckers. Also when you really break down the logistics and economics of shit like breaking and entering (a favorite of YG, if his lyrics are true testimony), crime doesn’t pay, like not well at all. But if it’s the only job you can get, insert shrug emoji. THREE STARS (***)!

THE WINNER: I am someone who has had a love for drugs and self-medication in the past, and dabbled in petty criminality, nothing major (all felonies avoided, narrowly once or twice), so I’m down for drug-addled reflective crisis of self, not acting like street overlord or hard as fuck. I’m not hard as fuck; I like sitting in the back yard and just fucking loungin’, minimal drama, easy thoughts all day long. Danny Brown is the only one of these three I think could share a plastic Adirondack with me. YG would be chill probably, and I don’t know, Pusha T would probably start talking about politics or how Hillary should’ve gotten elected or some shit. I imagine he’s kind of a Q-word in real life now.

[HH3os] The Born Like Purple Fishscale trio

(Penultimate match-up 1 of 3)

To recap the unnecessary, 81 albums were sorted chronologically into sets of 3 to do battle. In 1st round, 81 albums became (and are still becoming) 27 winners. 2nd round saw (and sees) 27 become 9. Thus this penultimate round, as this thing develops (or disappears) is the top 9 albums according to this entirely non-scientific method of me playing them two times through while driving my family’s second vehicle – a shitty 2004 Chevrolet Venture minivan – back and forth to work. These are 3 of those 9 almost finalists, and it is also spring, so I have gone from late winter driver’s window cracked mode to both front windows down, vibing the fuck out, at least in the evenings because in the mornings full window blowout makes my hair look all fucked up like I am a dimwitted child, and my personality already has enough “dimwitted child” spice to it that I don’t need to add-on through appearance and jeopardize my continued employment.

Cam’ron – Purple Haze

(released December 7, 2004; #9 on 2005 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From their 2005 year-end best albums list write-up:

Oh, Pitchfork, you're so December 2004! It's called deadlines, rabble-rousers, breathe out. Purple Haze, right now, remains as important and combustible a rap album as has been made this century. So much blood and ink has been spilt (though it has sold less than 700,000 copies to date) that it's easy to forget the virtuosity contained therein.

This snippet speaks to fallacy of internet opinion scientifics – because everything is predicated on URGENT IMMEDIACY! Like Kendrick Lamar dropped a new video last week, and there were literally hot take thinkpieces galore the very next morning. Nothing has a chance to percolate (word to house music), marinate (word to E-40), nor ruminate (word to Rumi). This is under the guise of deadlines, but c’mon man, websites are not printed and do not need to be at the printer by December 15th in order to be on the newsstand by December 28th. Pitchfork had an arbitrary deadline for their 2004 year-end list, which they probably actually started working on well before Thanksgiving, likely near Halloween, in order to DROP THAT AUTHORITATIVE LIST as quickly as possible at (near) the end of the year. So Cam’s hot ass mixtape had to catch super-fire, and then purple smoke linger in the air long enough to be not only included but near the top of the following year’s list.

It’s also funny to see the blurb writer of then mention how much had been written about this mixtape. None of it survives. This is the futile “building cultural sandcastles” effort of the internet – we stress ourselves so fucking hard to make timely (meaning immediate) content, and that shit ultimately is obscure almost as soon as you click publish. Which causes constant existential crisis in the (lolol) creator of content, because ultimately all your acts are extremely fucking futile.

I am okay with all this. Part of the motivation behind having three albums go head-to-head was to counter this desire to either always love everything or hate everything. Something has to be better or worse than the other two when put head-to-head (-to-head) like I have conjured up here with this HH3os shit. The false culture of eternal immediacy is also why I decided to play all three albums, one-two-three, beginning-to-end, once, and then again a second time, to give it a slow back-to-back boil, and see what actually got cooked out of the process, instead of just getting caught up in that smart mark frenzy of wanting to proclaim everything the “OMG! LET ME JUST INSERT A BUNCH OF CORNY MEMES ABOUT HOW AMAZING THIS IS!” of forever, like two times a week.

Of course this process means I have now – in this HH3os Pitchfork process – gone through this Cam mixtape six entire times, and like the briefly alluded to Rumi before him, Cam has embedded bezels of wisdom. The specific cranium crusher for me this past listen through was “can’t get paid on an Earth this big, you’re worthless kid,” because of the last three syllable rhyme patterns of those two lines, but also the deeper meanings one can read into that if they wanted. I mean, sure, perhaps Cam wasn’t speaking to the existential futility of consumer capitalism, but you can crack those lines open and find plenty of fruit to support such a claim. That’s the beauty of great art – whether conscious of unconscious (or sub-conscious) – it does shit like that. Cam was dialed the fuck in as to doing that in this period. SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE STARS!

Ghostface Killah – Fishscale

(released March 28, 2006; #4 on 2006 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

The mention of sufi mystic poets with regards to Cam is fitting for Ghost as well, because no rapper is more I Self Lord And (Am) Master as fuck than him. No rapper is more of a mystic, and in fact, when it comes to the oft-made Action Bronson stole his style comparisons, it could be argued that Bronson is just a superficial, far-less-mystical version of Ghost (which is not a diss, believe it or not). From the 2006 albums of the year blurb at Pitchfork:

In other words, no matter when you heard it or in what form, Fishscale became your favorite rap record, maybe for hours, maybe forever. Exactly how it became Ghostface Killah's most lauded is more difficult to explain. It's not his most compelling album lyrically, nor his most progressive album sonically. Still, Fishscale most vividly displayed Ghostface's versatility. Even when forced into revision by his abiding (but impatient) fans, he retained his signature faculties-- ludicrous imagination, elaborate storytelling, tortured soul singing, and dirty jokes for days-- all while evolving into a wiser, gentler armchair hustler whose charisma spanned race, class and creed.

The position being put forth here is actually the most gentrified of positions I could have ever hoped for as I work this gimmick under loose theme of “gentrification of the internet (as seen through Pitchfork specifically)”, because the blurb writer is saying, very clearly, that Ghost is still the same, but more accessible to all, thus better than ever. The gentrifying personality desperately wants to believe what they have access to is as authentic as ever, and nothing has changed. The experience has just successfully been opened up to them (but not everybody because only they are true enough to the original authenticity to feel comfortable gaining access to this world – the gentrifier has to always distance themselves from base commercial development; they are “renovating an abandoned warehouse”, not “building $800K condominiums”.

That being said, this album is pretty great, for some unexplainable reason. I mean, it doesn’t do anything necessarily different than other later period Ghostface albums, but it still stands out. I think this is because there’s less clunkers on it than other later period Ghost albums. When one is a mystic scratching at superficial reality’s hidden realities, it’s easy to lose people. Or lose yourself. Ghost didn’t get lost too often in this one. Even when he did (that skit giving directions), it was moveset that helped establish whatever was coming next. In my opinion, as former expert whiteboy Wu Fundamentalist who now lives floatingly in the esoteric realm of primitive boom baptistery (we handle snakes daily, and drink home-fermented doogh as tests of faith), I’d put this album as his second best ever. (Nothing will ever top Ironman. I believe that to be perhaps the greatest Wu solo album ever, tbh.) SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY-THREE STARS!

DOOM – Born Like This

(released March 24, 2009; #48 on 2009 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

This only got 48th on their year-end list? Oh, I guess a lot of dope as fuck hipster masturbation rock must’ve come out too. From their year-end album list write-up:

The complex rhymes and truism-flipping still act as DOOM's lyrical catalysts, but they scan even more vividly as true crime warped into surrealist dementia, delivered with a voice that's just raspier and brusquer enough to give it that extra push toward antagonistic malice.

It is hilarious to me how both the regular review and year-end recap heard such scary malice in Doom’s delivery. Though I doubt any of these writers would publicly be that way now, it feels “All Lives Matter”ish, afraid to just accept the reality of violence and retribution and well, just being like “fuck y’all!” to whoever. Like the Bumpy Knuckles message towards the end, just throw your middle fingers up everywhere, because fuck everybody, they all haters anyways. This is used as false defense a lot now, pre-emptively accusing anyone of being “a hater”, but at the same time, this goddamned Earth feels more full of hatred than ever. Motherfuckers love to hate. And when other people you have othered hate back at you, there is this strange human (through digital realm, or cybertronic) ability to consider other’s hatred as inauthentic. Only your hate is smart, and dumb hate is just stupid. You have to be intelligent enough to know what to hate to hate the right things properly. This is internet thinking.

Doom’s Born Like This is amazing, a dark masterpiece of not giving a fuck, and fuck anybody who gets all too woke on your ass and tries to “problematic” Born Like This into erasure. SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX STARS!

THE WINNER: All three are classics worthy of rattling the shit out of my crappy minivan’s door speakers. I’d say the only thing that actually separated the three was the time of year I listened to them. It’s springtime – purple dead nettles all over the ground, violets creepy crawling from here to there, and my favorite – the redbud – is blossoming all over, both in planned spots as well as those beautiful little scrappy feral redbuds shining purple in the woods everywhere.

Doom’s Born Like This is very much a dark winter album, meant for barrel fires or pallet fires or pallets fires where you put barrels of flammable liquids on top of the fire, and then it explodes, and catches the city on fire, and you laugh and laugh as the sirens eventually run out of power as the city still burns. But it is not that time of year in real life.

Ghost’s Fishscale is not far from that, but earlier, late fall going into winter, when you’re first pulling that thick coat out every day, feeling armored up for the pending cold. You’ve not hit the darkest winter solstice period yet, but you can feel it coming, and are trying to maintain just a little of that hard-dicked summer warmth positivity, to help you through the spiritual hibernation of deep winter’s cold cruel world realities. But it is not that time of year in real life.

Cam’s Purple Haze is corner store fried foods wafting out thick cracked glass door covered in cardboard ads. The air is hopeful, even if you know everything is fucked, because fuck it, you don’t have to wear shirts all the time (this is not a gender-normative statement either… be free, women, reject the patriarchy), and life is better even when bad. And it is that time of year in real life. So Cam wins, due to seasonal variations, and goes to the finals.

[HH3os] The Only Born 4 Cuban Nothing trio

 

(2nd round match-up 3 of 9)

THIS PROJECT IS ALREADY TOO DIFFICULT BECAUSE THE REDBUDS HAVE BLOSSOMED SO IT IS SCREWED & CHOPPED SPRINGTIME ALREADY (Allahu akbar!) BUT I AM LISTENING TO CRAP ASS RAP MUSIC FROM SEVEN YEARS AGO BECAUSE OF IDIOT OPINIONS OF CONSUMER CULTURE AT LARGE BUT PITCHFORK SPECIFICALLY. I would prefer my pitchforks be of the “red pitchfork green field” fierce rural socialist resistance to colonial overlordery, tbh. But hey, this is Amerikkka in our year of consumption 2017, so instead I will listen to horrible rap music while I drive back-and-forth to my horribly unfulfilling job, all so I can write unnecessary self-ordained expert opinions into the endless sea of futile uselessness that is the internet. One love!

Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing

(released May 30, 2008; #36 on 2008 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

As I said would be the method for these 2nd Round matches, here is snippet from the original Pitchfork review:

On The Mixtape About Nothing, Wale emerges fully-formed as a rapper and as a thinker, a lightning-witted, irreverent guy blessed with both an infectious swagger and a sound moral compass-- twin gifts that enable him to accomplish some of the mixtape's most audacious feats.

Though there was a funnier and much-dated quote about how Wale rapped “an iPod mind to you Walkman guys” (lolol IT’S ONLY BEEN 9 YEARS AND YET THIS SOUNDS LIKE IT’S FROM 50 YEARS AGO AND THE POLICE WERE MURDERING BLACK PEOPLE AND RACISM WAS STILL THE RULE OF THE LAND PRE-CIVIL RIGHTS… oh wait, maybe that’s a bad example), I chose this one because it painfully drives home the parallel I suddenly realized in my dumb Amerikkkan pop culture soaked brain while listening to this mixtape again (and again)… Wale is the hip hop equivalent to RG3 for DC.

I’m a few hours way from DC, but have lived in its cultural footprint most of my life. Grew up in southside Virginia (a hopeless drug-infested shithole that got Redskins games on the TV) and now live in what is probably central VA, though I consider it the fringes of southside still for psychological reconciliation purposes. I don’t consider myself a part of DC, but we did used to drive up there for drugs back in the day, and it’s where one would’ve went to see shows which wouldn’t come close to our stick ass back roads existences. But I grew up a Washington football fan, and was up through RG3’s first season.

RG3’s first regular season was, for all intents and purposes, Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, because it was amazing, fluid, and confirmed all the promise we’d been hyping ourselves for. There were so many slick moments of transcendence you couldn’t help but get into what was going on.

And yet, that first year of RG3 ended in tragedy (as expected if you knew the Wash. R-words under Dan Snyder). In this analogy I’m establishing, the NFL post-season would be a music industry actual record release. RG3 fucked his knee up on shoddy turf being play-called to plow head-first into oblivion, and the Redskins did not win a single playoff game with their franchise savior RG3.

Wale never had an actual album come close to touching the tight cleverness of material and theme that this mixtape did. It’s probably why he’s released multiple works since which attempt to rehash this mixtape in one way or another. Wale plays for the Cleveland Browns now. In fact, I saw just this very morning that there is some event wrapped around Wrestlemania called Walemania where you pay $15 to watch a fucking podcast happen live, where wrestling personalities of various obscurities are interviewed right before your eyes, and then there is a Wale performance too. This is certainly the hip hop equivalent of being engaged to an Estonian woman and hoping to have a shot at competing for the Browns back-up QB position in a couple months. The sadness of humane ebbs and flows of potential/promise and actual end results never fails to make me feel melancholy.

And yet, good for Wale. If he loves professional wrestling, and loves rapping still, and has somehow managed to figure out a way to hang out with a bunch of wrestling dorks and get paid off it, to continue hustling non-traditional means of money-making, then that is beautiful too. Sometimes our individual promise and potential misleads us into believing we deserve more than we will ever get, and if one can adjust from that into a happy lane in life at lower crescendo, then bless that motherfucker who does so.

Still though, this mixtape is amazing. SIX STARS!

DOOM – Born Like This

(released March 24, 2009; #48 on 2009 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From Pitchfork, in a good exhibit of internet gentrification:

The overall subject matter can get grimier than Madvillainy converts are used to. "Absolutely" envisions a widely organized revenge plot against the entire legal system-- from snitches to police to judges-- where offending parties get their lattes poisoned and their tongues ripped out. "Rap Ambush" compares his M.O. to an insurgent attacking troops with guerilla tactics. And "Batty Boyz" features more concentrated homophobia than damn near any hip-hop track I've heard this decade…

Here is the thing about gentrifying personalities – they want to be part of something they are not born unto (haha, ties into the Born Like This aspect), but don’t want to fully accept it. Now granted this review was done back in 2009, and mainstream consciousness is way more synchronized to revolutionary philosophy than it used to be. But at the same time, revolutionary potential is still quickly diverted by proper channeling of mass streams of consciousness into shit like hashtag resistance or #NotMyPresident. Gentrifying personalities will consume underclass anger and the violence that comes with that, as a tea kettle release for their own feelings of inadequacy, but outright assaults on the entire system are a little too much. I mean, America is already great, right?

The early call-out on the homophobic nature of “Batty Boyz” lyrics is classic gentrifier high-brow way of being able to call out segments of the underclass for being too ignorant to be saved, but in a way that does not use racial or economic classifications to do so. Only problem is, it can still pretty much be applied in such ways when you see who is judge as unworthy. This is how hashtag resistance movements are able to pretend to be saviors of The People, all while writing off a large chunk of them as being too fucking ignorant to be worth saving. This is all just collateral damage to the geopolitical gentrifying personalities.

Anyways, despite it being *problematic*, fuck anybody who doesn’t realize this album is A THOUSAND STARS great. The IRL antidote to the *problematic* principle is that age old asphalt adage, “Real recognize real.” Your actions speak louder than your words. Yeah, your words get too stupid, we not gonna try to even see what your acts are gonna do, but still, SO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE IN THIS AGE think just because they say all the right things, they deserve respect. Fuck that. A lot of y’all are still fake motherfuckers pretending to be righteous. Gentrifying personalities, trying to convince everybody (probably including yourself) how fucking true you are. But you don’t even recognize the reality of everything. And it’s not really your fault – you can’t recognize something you don’t know. “Real recognize real” but also if you don’t know it, nothing gives you that knowledge other than getting thrown into it. You can’t tip-toe into the fringes of real, pick out the parts you like, edit out the pieces you don’t, and pretend you’re real now. (And yes, that last sentence is meant to read exactly like what gentrification does to physical spaces.)

Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II

(released September 8, 2009; #5 on 2009 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From the Pitchfork review at the time:

The last time a Wu-Tang record came together with this kind of personnel and succeeded under a grand conceptual vision, we got Fishscale, and calling Cuban Linx II Raekwon's equivalent to it isn't out of the question. Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.

I do not disagree with any of this, and in fact my description of Rae’s win in the 1st round of this idiotic project stated that this was one of the truest returns to Wu-fundamentalism you could find in the late Wu canon. It’s weird though that we all still expect Wu to be true to some sort of Wu-morality from a quarter century ago. And yet it’s pretty obvious, in those unexplainable gut intuitive ways things can be obvious. RZA doesn’t feel as Wu-true a lot of times any more, even if he’s the official business head of the whole thing. Rae and Ghost tend to seem like the grizzled old Orthodox ministers of Wu-fundamentalism, and though I’m ranking this album second time through less than a thousand stars (closer to THIRTY SIX STARS), I am thankful I was forced by my stupid desire to create content for nobody (The Content for Nobody website) to visit this album, which I always assumed would just make me feel sad for the lost innocence of unpolished early Wu.

THE WINNER: Obviously, a thousand stars beats anything lesser. A night sky of a thousand stars, as limited as that might seem to those who lay outside at night IRL, is still a pretty great number for pop cultural review purposes inside the digital realm (which could really use more laying outside at night imo). So Doom and Born Like This moves on deeper into another level of self-constructed nonsense. THANKS FOR PLAYING!