SONG OF THE DAY: I'm The Only Hell (My Mama Ever Raised)

A little known fact is Johnny Paycheck’s birth name wasn’t Johnny Paycheck. It was actually Zachariah Paycheck. He assumed the name Johnny after winning it in a cribbage match while on tour in South Wales in the early ‘60s.

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Worm

Dear fellow white folks – cancelling each other out publicly is crabs in a barrel mentality. That’s not to say it’s not necessary, but there should be about ten private conversations for every single public shaming you throw out there. There’s a shitload of work to be done to undo all that’s fucked up, and performative acts of social media branding ain’t that work. I don’t say this thinking I’m a beacon shining light of it either. I’ve got shit I need to be improving on, every day of my life. That’s part of what being human ought to mean though. Ain’t nobody perfect. But if you’re cancelling somebody symbolically through social media, understand that person is still going to exist with other humans in real life spaces, and ask yourself if your acts make them less of a threat or amore of a threat to others once you’ve cancelled them from your filter bubble.

Also, if you listen to this Funky Worm track, do you hear the part about “do I get paid for this?” Kick some money to a bail fund somewhere right now. Shit, we should be doing that all the damn time anyways. You know how many poor people, predominantly but not exclusively minority lose days/months/years of their lives because they can’t post bail? Then they agree to a plea for crimes they may not have done, just because it’ll get them out of jail faster due to time served? DONATE TO A GODDAMN BAIL FUND SOMEWHERE.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Wanna Go Home

The death of Nipsey Hussle highlighted how absolute legends of the west coast often times don’t get as noticed in the east, or by the hip hop intelligentsia which despite hip hop’s inclusive nature still tends to play respectability politics. West coast hip hop history is deep. Another dude that’s a straight MC legend, though not at the neighborhood savior level that Nipsey was, like not at all, but still is a lot of your favorite rappers’ favorite rapper, is Suga Free. Dude’s mostly been under the mainstream radar all along, but when it comes to the oddball non-traditional flows, of which we have more often than not nowadays, he’s an originator. And the weird thing is it don’t sound all that oddball to me – just different. I Wanna Go Home aka the county jail song is one of his all-time classics. There’s more videos of him performing this in the wild, beating on a table in various documentaries, than there is an actual video of the song when he finally was forced to release it on an actual CD because everybody knew him for it. That’s underground legend status. I love people like that – who are doing big shit in unseen ways. And RIP Nipsey. Dude made a definite mark, one that I hope was deep enough it is sustained in his neighborhood now that he’s gone. Unfortunately a lot of times, movements like that, despite all the token acts of support, rest on the shoulders of a brilliant and motivated individual to keep it moving. I hope he had hella understudies learning from him the whole time who’ll keep pushing that shit forward.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sound of Da Police

Seen a couple pretend new school muscle cars like Mustang or Charger, but specificially Mustang triggered this blurb thought stream – loud exhaust shiny newish Mustang driven by jarhead 1 on the sides 3 on the top white male, generally pro-cop as fuck. Maybe I was raised in a strange cultural vacuum of rural despair, but back in the day muscle car culture was delinquent and derivative of bootlegging culture, and thus had zero respect for cops. I mean they listened to the scanner to try and see if the cops was coming round to hassle people. This got me to thinking about how Nascar was a propaganda effect on culture, slowly taking a thing literally born from anti-cop anti-government bootleggers, assimilating it into corporate culture, covering it with sponsorship decals, taking away all the bumping and grinding and unsavory characters, to where a fuckin’ weasel-voiced shithead like Jeff Gordon is considered an all-time classic. What the fuck? This also got me to thinking about how a drunken drag racing buddy of my uncle back in the day became a cop, and that meant he talks funny like cops do, but he also saved me from a felony one time, which likely would’ve changed the entire trajectory of my life, so there’s a certain white trash privilege built into that, which poor whites utilize through that cousin or friend of uncle who becomes a shitty cop, which means we don’t talk about shit around them but still lean on for a favor if shit ever gets ugly. That’s exactly what my cop-hating dad did when I was looking at a potential felony back in the day. But I don’t think that makes me special or better. Shit, if the law was applied equally, I would’ve gone to jail, and my whole life would’ve been fucked up in a different way, which is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS TO A LOT OF FUCKIN’ PEOPLE, specifically minorities who ain’t got no cousin or uncle’s friend who became a cop for whatever fuckin’ reason. Which is why I say, as a white person from an economically-strained background, you should never be pro-police, even tacitly, much less riding around with a goddamned giant ass blue lives matter flag flying on the back of your fuckin’ ridiculous pick-up truck. Stop being class traitors, stop licking police state boots, and never ever ever believe that cooperating is to your benefit. They are liars. Shit, even when I was able to beat a felony, they lied to me to try and get me to implicate others, in order to “help” me. Fuck that. Don’t believe them. Lives aren’t born blue, they’re trained to be blue lives, utilizing deceit and enforcement of obedience and all sorts of other ugly shit, ultimately to generate revenue for the state and suppress elements deemed unworthy of helping. ACAB 1314

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

Citizen Khan from the New Yorker

Oh man, this story here is amazing, and really drives home the true creation myth of America that could be real, except for whatever reason people won't let it. What if instead of a bunch of hipsters buying dilapidated parcels of Detroit, you just straight up relocated 15,000 Syrian refugees? What if instead of leaving it abandoned, the old historically black college or university in Southside Virginia (Saint Paul's) was turned into a boarding home/school for latino migrant children instead of sending them back? What amazing life stories could've been created, which would've only made this fucking place less sterile and hateful and narrow and fucked? (Also, this story really pushes my innate desire to operate a fucked up food cart/shitty restaurant into hyperdrive. It won't happen, because I'm already stretched beyond thin, but if only...)

13, Right Now from progaganda ass Washington Post

This story scared me because - despite the higher level of privilege (which is not to say we are not a privileged family, because I know we are - and I try to remind my children of this) - this reminds me a lot of my own 12-year-old. Technology has outpaced our ability to adapt, and we won't know the long-term effects of all this robot phone shit until, you know, it's been a long term. By then IT MIGHT BE TOO LATE!!! (lolol)

Bobby Shmurder: His Surreal Saga from Gentleman's Quarterly megazine

With the idiotic Troy Ave video making news, GQ jumped up to push this out about another NYC rapper who already went to jail. This story is sketchy as fuck though, and reminds me a lot of some "social media mapping" bullshit article I read a couple years back where NYC police busted a "gang" which it seemed highly probably were just a bunch of kids who lived around each other, and everybody's home was broken so they had not a whole lot of guidance. I think mainstream people (police, media, you know deep space white people organizational shit) underestimate how fractured a lot of communities are, and how it is natural human desire to try and piece together those fractures with a semblance of tribal belonging. Unfortunately, this is painted as "OH MY GOD! GANGS!" After reading this, I'm not sure what Bobby Shmurda did wrong other than be a teenager who got caught up in suddenly having money given to him in abundance.

45s on 33 – #16: “Open House at My House (Part 1)”

Where is everybody going? There are houses with no sign of people all over, other than NO TRESPASSING or PRIVATE PROPERTY signs posted because obviously derelict homes gonna get derelicted even more, always. But where has everybody gone? On top of this, most cities I seem to go around of various sizes have booming downtowns, at least in the sense of hammers pounding and nail guns shooting and cranes and scaffolding and basic (but very complicated) gentrificational rebirths happening. It’s a lot harder to get shot in a lot of places you could’ve easily been shot ten or fifteen years ago. But where have all those people gone that used to be there, that were mired in that shit to where shooting or getting shot at was normalized behavior? I’m not clear on where the human Americans have gone.

Through trick-nology algorithmic calculations, we have less jobless than ever before (they say), but I honestly know very few people happy about their work. There seems to be a pervasive frustration with stagnant existence, which generally is a nice way of putting, “I’m not getting anywhere in life, and in fact probably am sinking backwards, financially speaking.”

But all these empty houses just sitting there, with signs protecting their ownership against anyone actually using them without given proper paperwork to personal property ownership system. That’s some weird shit. I am more likely to be harassed by law enforcement if I’m walking around some vacant property, publicly, even though no one is there and I’m doing no harm to it, than if I were running some sort of financial scam on a group of people, so long as it was a legally acceptable financial scam (like home mortgages). Regardless of what devil ass math is used, America certainly has no shortage of PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Legally, we love some private property. No need to simultaneously mention the criminalization of being homeless through vagrancy laws and ordinances, because those aware of such things are aware of such things, and those who don’t care already don’t care. But I’ve never understood, regardless of how callous a person may be, how you could care about inanimate structures and unoccupied parcels of land more than actual human beings. Even if those human beings made horrible decisions that left them in dire circumstances, we should be more apt to rehabilitate people than blocks of real estate. But we ain’t. Haters gonna hate, as well as redevelop with hate in their heart, exiling the hated to god knows where. There are some horrible suburban gulag ghetto tenements full of the exiled somewhere that none of us pay attention to or the common public knows about. Oh wait, that’s jail. Everybody’s in jail.

Shakespeare Greenheart sample

Some of you may or may not know I've been in the middle of a project where I "write" freestyle sonnets, off the top of the head, woven into heroic crowns. They got rhyme scheme like Shakespeare but syllable count like Alexandrine. This is one of them.

#043
Enamel earth-toned security cinderblock
perimeter holds infinite circumference
of existential potential, first born soft rock
head hardened by chance, by luck stuck behind this fence
or that wall, each and all of us seeing the same
sunshine skyline but trapped within our life’s details,
bigger picture baked into background behind name,
behind history, both true earned and false impaled
upon unsuspecting beings birthed upon earth
surface to nervously scratch out salt-wounded lives,
we’re all striving for comfort, for a sense of worth,
sense of self, knowledge of self through bright heights and dives
into darkness, but people’s people, born a hunk
of universal energy, feeling that funk. 

#044
Of universal energy, feeling that funk,
I speak feeling somewhat fake, taking stand in front
of attentive eyes, open ears, where I am punk
ass bitch in my own head, trying to keep it blunt
objectively, beating myself with strong failure
demons dwelling inside; still, I smile and deep breath,
try to loosen them bammas up, search and seizure
of ill negativity ‘til little is left,
enough I can quiet – maybe conquer – in time,
in incremental mental steps taken inside
my own world before emitted as free-born rhyme,
formed and fermented with intention but no pride
because humility is a feudal lesson
learned through osmosis, forced internal impression. 

#045
Learned through osmosis, forced internal impression
of external influences smashed through eyeballs
beaming as baby but fogged out from deception
over time, slow steaming, speed streaming cyber walls
until organic thought’s disrupted with dammed buzz
what which fuzzes the edges of pure grey matter
until black-and-white psychology’s all there was,
at least as you see it since real truth caught scatter
through advertising prisms, panopticon schemes
building pyramid scams on fault line foundations,
painting nightmare existence as red-white-blue dreams
lacking proper bootstrap grasping – shine caucasians
trashing rest of us, stuffed into history’s trunk,
speeding recklessly towards edge like bitch ass punk. 

#046
Speeding recklessly towards edge like bitch ass punk,
chasing compromised dreams shineface pimps done planted
with political smiles – political thoughts thunk
by political classes with upper-handed
grasps at ladders far above my birthright levels,
natural born prisoner class, steady struggling
daily to dance around rules made by these devils
pulling all the levers while both my hands juggling
a hundred broke parts in one thousand directions,
saying I lack drive with my single manpower
while harnessing labor through social conventions,
turning out mental prostitutes born to cower
in dark thought streams due to organized deception,
trying to right myself through written confession. 

#047
Trying to right myself through written confession,
chasing rambling muses that rumble like coal train
through my wide open mind, mothering invention
of tales necessary to escape life so plain
as to pain the soul where spirit’s still desiring
planes higher than physical me ever could reach,
trapped inside existence with synapses firing
magic creative sparks impossible to teach
other than being open to universe’s
flow – unexplainable by science’s process
of order and repetition plus proud curses
against anyone’s faith in believing what’s best
comes to pass without forcing my ways until dead,
embracing the chaos storming throughout my head. 

#048
Embracing the chaos storming throughout my head,
replacing the false safety of benevolent
mystery gods demanding worship of what’s said
in texts’ frozen prophecy, yet irrelevant
to my post-modern breathing; fluid existence
mostly adjusting on the fly as hourglass sands
slip the fuck away quickly despite resistance,
time keeps on dripping between my grasping ass hands
clasped into prayer ritual, more symbolic
than authentic sign of actual faith in things
unseen, unfelt, unknown as I roam and frolic
through my sensory delusions, which always brings
wild-eyed notions of life lived in ways like wildfire,
striving for quality, not quantified desire. 

#049
Striving for quality, not quantified desire,
trying to survive endless sensory onslaught
of advertising brainwash as devils conspire
to consume your raw mind with identities sought
to be purchased with credit maxed out overhead,
far higher than could be paid off in one lifetime,
indebted genetics born deep into the red,
black marks by government name, scarred deep with sublime
precisions, decisions made with little input
by recipient except as necessary
for tacit endorsement of ass receiving foot
from birth, being beaten until cemetery
spots are readied to rest in peace your weary head,
born chasing numbers ‘til that six feet under bed. 

#050
Born chasing numbers ‘til that six feet under bed;
born chasing scriptures ‘til that promised paradise;
born reaching out, ignoring what’s inside the head;
born chasing head well-learned instead of heart real nice;
born using words to bitch, moan, compromise, complain;
born deciphering madness, pretending it ain’t;
born to self-medicate, to masquerade the pain;
born worshipping fallen angels, calling them saint;
born dead, born lost, born bossed, told what to do and when;
born to never question, to accept lessons told;
born domesticated, living inside a pen;
born chasing carrots instead of the stick to hold;
born following distractions until I retire;
try to focus beyond what’s at hand – to aspire. 

#051
Try to focus beyond what’s at hand – to aspire
beyond my external senses’ fences around
real truth – deep universal truth burning like fire,
natural animal yearning to reach new ground
unscratched and salted by poison souls before us,
pointing out the easy paths lacking supreme math,
they built with a crooked square, using damaged truss
and warped pine distorted by warped minds – it’s their wrath
inflicted upon the rest from their oak tree perch
plantation atop the pyramid, all-seeing
eyeball rounding up each direction, while we search
for underground connections, raw humans being
what we are – brothers, sisters, digging at new homes,
conspire with others to build networks like rhizomes. 

#052
Conspire with others to build networks like rhizomes,
bloodstreams like rivers, trading the knowledge we’ve done,
healing depleted livers born from broken homes,
fractured minds slowly pieced back together as one,
meditating hard upon the senseless, trying
to find concentrated truth with which to reclaim
lost half-lives, whole lives spent in avoiding dying,
clutched into protective internal ball, with shame
and pain in abundance, shoulders heavy with stress
carried from before we were even conscious, fight
or flight anxiety, physical escape less
likely than break down, so seek like temples of right
minds, just hearts, to trust and build and sort through your past,
spreading like spiritual crabgrass to outlast. 

#053
Spreading like spiritual crabgrass to outlast
glyphosate plots, to line us straight into low life
crooked existence pre-natal, folks fatal past
up family trees, pruned by the law’s well-honed knife
down to troubled shrub of nothing, shrugging shoulders
search for drink or drugs to self-medicate away
the painful moments alone; but yo – these molders
of folks’ behavior only hold the alpha day,
omega’s still rising, first three, then nine, growing
wherever each one reaches then teaches one-plus,
internal god we trust, thrust fire fists up, showing
our unified blossoms of resistance, no fuss,
just refuse, one re-psyched people wirelessly roams
social engineering, putting fear in hearts/homes. 

#054
Social engineering, putting fear in hearts/homes,
steering clear of heart desires, chasing trick treasures
of the flesh, sensory pleasures, idled mind roams
through devilish courtyards, mass media measures
empty spaces inside to be filled with messes
of nutritionless nothings, endless mental snacks
of celebrity facts, who fucked who congresses
gathering to gossip it back, wheezing mind lacks
deep breaths of fresh thinking, re-evaluation
of what circumstances forced upon us crudely,
re-examine what’s us real and what’s invasion
of outside poisons injected rather shrewdly,
learning to reject it, to nurture thoughts that last,
re-imagining ourselves as forged from what’s passed. 

#055
Re-imagining ourselves as forged from what’s passed,
born from essence written in cursive over hearts
in memorial ink, remembering outcast
black sheep we kept company with through fractured parts
of piecemeal lives, peacing god when meals fill bellies,
but mostly navigating beast’s belly, hungry,
feeling empty in twisted guts, poison berries
everywhere you look where lives lacking money
cluster and fuck themselves, by eating what’s at hand
in abundance – hopelessness and broken dreams lost
to crushing realities most can understand
on personal basis, faces that paid the cost
of being stuck behind secured walls, key and lock,
trying to touch green grass and blue sky while we rock. 

#056
Trying to touch green grass and blue sky while we rock
life like last breaths, good days to die like Crazy Horse,
slitting the snakeman’s throat, escaping chopping block,
stopping not for forked tongue promises – lies, of course,
like always, shinefaces consistently stake claim
to whatever they deem has value, deciding
and deeding, writing and reading their own kind’s name
as most prominent, dominant force presiding
over the course of human history, teaching
English dreams and American scams to the young,
brung up to worship demon overlords, preaching
opiates and submission to ropes from which hung
all our people before, cheap resource human stock,
enamel earth-toned, security cinderblock. 

Heroic Crown #04
Of universal energy, feeling that funk
learned through osmosis, forced internal impression,
speeding recklessly towards edge like bitch ass punk,
trying to right myself through written confession,
embracing the chaos stomping throughout my head,
striving for quality, not quantified desire,
born chasing numbers ‘til that six feet under bed,
try to focus beyond what’s at hand – to aspire –
conspire with others to build networks like rhizomes,
spreading like spiritual crabgrass to outlast
social engineering putting fear in hearts/homes,
re-imagining ourselves as forged from what’s passed,
trying to touch green grass and blue sky while we rock
enamel earth-toned, security cinderblock.

Solitary Confinement

So hey, I was gonna share some articles that showed up this morning in my reader feed, because they related to each other and also related to what I was babbling about in my sermon portion of the Hand-to-Hand Haiku in Cville the other week talking about prisoner class/political class. In a nutshell, what I said was if you have a dog in the fight - if you give a fuck about Obama/Ted Cruz type shit, then you are political class. God bless you, you have a voice in this shit. But for many, most of us, that shit is irrelevant. We don't know what stocks are, we don't have bank, we battle daily, weekly to keep from being a prisoner, literally or financially. It's a constant fucking struggle. Now I'm lucky enough that I've avoided the hardest ends of prisoner class - and make no mistake about it, it's a lot of luck involved in that. There's no merit to this shit, no you earn your way out of what you're born into. It's a lot of luck, and good timing, and shit man I don't know. But contrary to the constant proclamations on the flat screens, shit is not getting better for the American empire. Well, check that, for the Imperials, it probably is better, and data supports that. But for the mass amount of people living underneath the imperials, it is getting worse, and all the economic shit they talk on the flat screen is, again, irrelevant to real life shit. Thus, more people are going to find themselves doing dirt to survive (as in Duke freshman student convincing herself that doing porn is somehow financially empowering her family), and because of that more people will find themselves into the deeper realms of the American prison state.
Which brings me to the articles to share, both about solitary confinement. I was reading the Outlaw Bible of American Essays the other night in bed, and it had this Iceberg Slim piece talking about getting out of the pimp game finally, and how solitary had completely fucked his head up, made him crazy. (And interestingly enough, I was discussing with my wife how probably the reason the pimp character is so respected in lower classes is because it's the closest thing to indiscriminant successful capitalist that socio-economic level sees - manipulating others into making him profit.) That was 40 years ago Iceberg Slim wrote that. And the use of solitary confinement has done nothing but expand as the prison industry has expanded (and privatized and been monetized). Anyone step out of line? Lock them away. Rehab is not even considered a viable option, or communicating or teaching people to learn to value themselves so that they can value others. But hey, I'm going off on some grandiose humanistic bullshit with all that. Let's just talk about what solitary does in a real sense. And these two articles contain that info.

What Solitary Confinement Doest to the Brain (from Aeon Magazine)
Aeon is one of my internet favorites, but this is an article outlining the actual neuroscience studies being done about solitary confinement. I can tell you from my own dirty work in the field of science that a lot of what has long been considered psychological manipulation - both in terms of criminal punishment as well as most of our western advertising - is not a simple psychological trigger but an actual manipulation of the brain with negative consequences. Unfortunately, this type of advertising or punishment/reward system is a major foundation to our western capitalist society, so it'll never be admitted as morally wrong without suggesting our way of life is immoral. I'm here to tell you that I believe what American advertising does constantly, what solitary confinement does to prisoners, these things should be seen as morally wrong a hundred years from now. However, morals are not decided by any universal code of right and wrong so much as they are by the mightiest hand which inscribes the history book. Morality is decided by whoever ends up being judge, not by the masses as a whole. This is true for dictatorships, democracies, and everything in between (including corporate kleptocracies like we have in America 2014).
Now take all this info with a caveat - that science thinks it can explain everything. It can't. But at least sometimes like with these studies in this article, it's at least still trying to challenge the common beliefs put forth by the corporate kleptocracy. I would imagine though, that once too much info is found out, whoever's behind the research will get quieted down through lack of funding or support.

The Plot from Solitary from New York Magazine
California has been one to use solitary more aggressively than anywhere else, in an attempt to squelch gang violence inside (and outside) of the penal system. The story of how sworn enemies in Pelican Bay's solitary housing unit were still able to plan out and stage a huge hunger strike, statewide, is fairly amazing, and also testament to the outlaw spirit. Oddly enough, as negative as all this "corporate kleptocracy" "prison state" shit might sound, I don't feel overwhelmed by it personally. People are people, and people will always resist bullshit oppression. We've done it since the beginning of time, and regardless of initial intent, every government known to man has always become corrupted by special interests hijacking its once pure intentions. People are people - those few at the top and the masses beneath them in the pyramid scheme that civilization has always been. Leadership cartels get run the fuck off, and old ways become new taboos all the time. All the fucking time. No matter what anyone does to try and stop it.
That's actually a part of why I don't do so much online any more. It's a means of exposing creative spark to light, immediately, but without the real life tinder to help that spark explode into something huge and warming and cleansing and that can burn bullshit the fuck up into ash. This medium called the internet is promised as a revolutionary tool that connects blah blah blah but that's already been hijacked to a large extent by corrupted intentions. And who can even say the entire point was not for that hijack to take place anyways? Keep it street, face to face. You can make connections through this medium, but unless you build them in real life, it's not a solid connection. That is true whether it's one person who shares your same special interests, or one hundred thousand people you want to occupy public space with in frustration. Build in your physical life. The Revolution will not be digitized, but the commercials will.

a few things I should point out in the off chance your eyeballs see this

Of note is there is our what seems to be now monthly HAND-TO-HAND HAIKU JAMBO at BON Performance Space/Coffeehouse/Drum Zone/Psychic Realm, this Thursday evening at 7:00 pm. I shall be hosting with the mosting as always, and sharing a New Writing story, which is my new-fangled oral story with heavy dose of digital reality interwoven. Winner of the jambo will receive one of my lovely railroad haiku spikes. I think there is a Facebook event page for the thing but I killed my Snitchbook, as should you.

I think I logged back into Twitter, but I'm not really talking on there. Too much fog and noise and pretending to rattle cans against bars when actually it's just car keys jangling on the way to the market. Comment here in these various posts. Perhaps we begin a discussion here. Perhaps you email me and I email you. Perhaps we send postcards, or share cryptic buzz blurring markings on freight trains together.

Life is good, motherfuckers, always remember that. No matter how much you click and refresh and the foggy mosquitoes of buzzzzzzz get around your head, remember you can go outside. If you are already outside and the foggy mosquitoes still ding and blip bloop at you from handheld devices, remember that those motherfuckers still come with a power button. Use it before it's too late. Eventually they won't even have a power button, that shit'll shoot straight into your mind, and dudes will be proud of that shit, and somebody will make a funny tumblr of white guys having shit shot straight into their mind. Don't pollute your mind. The human body is highly adaptable, and will always move towards survival, but there's been no definitive study done in my back yard laboratory as to how fast the mind can cleanse itself from over-pollution. And once you brain things, you can't necessarily unbrain them.

If you are local, I hope to see you Thursday. If you are global, I hope to see you some day.

- Raven

LEARNED ELDERS: Charles Manson

Mr. Charles Milles Manson has always been an intriguing character to me. I sought out every piece of press I could find on him at one point in my late teens, because he's the epitome of the great jailhouse con man. He would've been a great professional wrestling manager, or spoken word slam poet, had his life ran in a different direction. As it was, he was a hillbilly born to a slut mom, who ended up in and out of correctional facilities from a young age. Once he was released to the general population and wandered himself into the Haight-Ashbury freak scene of the '60s, he had spent more than half his living life behind bars. In that time, he learned how to reflect on people, to be able to see what they wanted him to be and reflect that back as immediately as possible, to personal gain. And either drugs or normal mental illnesses from an abusive childhood warped him, but he held onto that first-rate con man's ability. It is how he had women clamoring to live in squalor with him, and how he had one of The Beach Boys trying to hook him up with a record deal. And if you've watched all the interviews and read all the pieces on him like I have, obsessively, it's what he does to this day. You sit him in front of a Geraldo Rivera or Diane Sawyer who wants to demonize him for primetime ratings, and he will throw that back at you, talking about stacking bodies to the sky and killing off the world because he hates everything about what you are. But that's exactly what they want. You put this same man in front of a Nicholas Schreck or some other adoring fan, and he will talk of how he's a victim of society's constraints, simply a too proud revolutionary who was railroaded into a life of confinement, because he wouldn't accept their confines while he was out. He is tapped into this talent unlike most people on this planet, and it's why he's such a prominent figure to this day.
That being said, beyond the hillbilly prophet angle, beyond kicking the cosmic kung fu from beyond, he has intrigued me because here is a guy they threw in jail and said killed the '60s. He was going to be executed, even though he actively did not kill anyone (although according to the story, he probably did kill Gary Hinman, which was not related to any of the sensational murders the media jumped all over, but just a drug deal gone bad), he was considered the man who did all these things. He made others do his bidding. That's really amazing, with the whole creepy crawling philosophy, and general brainwashing that would be involved. Even with the help of LSD, that takes a forward thinking hillbilly conman to pull off such a move.
But then the death penalty was briefly revoked, so he got put in jail with an impossible parole, because damn, they didn't even want people to read his final statements in his trial for fear of it brainwashing the public. And that was in the '70s. Now, here we are in 2011, and Charles Manson still sits in jail, not on death row, but never getting parole, especially the way he turns it into another tirade and rant because there will be cameras there. He is always working the crowd, although I don't know if he knows who the crowd is anymore. But he hasn't died yet. And sometimes I like to believe in my mind that this little man - same guy who told a judge during his trial he could kill him if he wanted to, and then sprung from a seated position with a pencil in his hand to jump over top a table and land about five feet away, in front of the judge, so quickly that everybody for a moment was like, "What the fuck?" as Manson just stood there, waiting to be held back, but knowing he had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if he wanted to, he could - that this little man will outlive his actual sentence, no matter how many hundreds of years it is, and be a 237-year-old crazed wizard looking hillbilly Californian, and they will be forced to release him. And he will stumble off into the desert and creepy crawl his way through eternity.
He truly is an amazing man, and no amount of media demonization should take that away. We do not all end up being good with our amazing born-this-way talents, that get perfectly cultivated into sharpened precision by whatever life we happened to be thrown into. The story the system likes you to follow is if you are amazing, use that for your own financial reward, and get rich. Sometimes though, you are on the wrong side of the system from start, so regardless of how amazing you are, you'll never get rewarded, always held down or blocked out. At that point, there's nothing left to do but fuck shit up to your satisfaction. If it's not gonna let you benefit at all, you might as well smash it up however you can. That's Charles Manson, and few have been better at it, or more charismatic in doing so. The day the news headlines tell me he has died, that's gonna be a day that I'm sad for a fucked-up, serial criminal, maniac. Because the dude is one-of-a-kind, beyond a doubt, and there ain't too many folks like that, good or bad, on this boring ass earth.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #11: “Live Free Or Die” by Hayes Carll

I saw Hayes Carll on the Jay Leno Show the other week, and actually tuned in to see it specifically, of course waiting until the end of the house, because who can tolerate fucking Jay Leno without wanting to stab America in the fucking throat with old railroad spikes? The song he did was off his new album coming out later this year, and it was a lot of song and I couldn’t get the real total feel for it, but I have faith in holmes. The fact he’s getting pre-release buzz and his record industry insider handlers are getting him onto the Jay Leno Show means something I guess (although it could just mean he’ll be deeper in debt to the record industry after this album).
This “Live Free Or Die” song is off of the Trouble In Mind CD, which if I was to be an opinionated asshole inside the internet, I’d tell you was the best americana/roots country album that’s come out since Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams. If I wanted to go all out and be a contrarian asshole about it, I’d say something like, “Trouble In Mind is what all those neighborhood gentrifiers lining up to eat whole wheat bagels at 11 in the morning at the same retro-kitschy hole in the wall they were drinking PBRs at at 1 in the morning last night want to think Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is. But what does it matter anyways? All they’re gonna be playing on the house speakers while you wait for your whole wheat chocolate chip pancakes or avocado and sour cream free range omelet is either Johnny Cash or some sort of bluegrass version of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.” But mostly I just want to say this is an awesome song about going to jail in New Hampshire, which has always seemed to me like one of the better places to go to jail. There’s a lot of biker types up there, and my immense fear of being man-raped seems less overbearing when in a state without a large black prison population. Not sure why that is. Perhaps the tossed salad guy from that one HBO special being so goddamned scary, or maybe just the general stereotypical mandingo sexual appetite mythology perpetuated everywhere I look. Or maybe I’m just racist. I mean, white guys would probably rape me just as easily as black guys.
This is a feel-good jail song though, about stamping out license plates after stabbing a guy who was cheating with your wife. There’s no man-rape involved whatsoever. Jail songs would not be so feel-good if they were all talking about man-rape, though I read a stat one time that said for every one rape of a woman in America, there’s four rapes of a man in jail in America. Jesus, no wonder I’m so freaked out by that shit. Why would I read something like that and then hold onto it as gospel fact? Sad thing is, I probably read it in a Loompanics Unlimited catalog or something anyways, which means it was probably a freestyled fact made up on the spot by some wackjob writer. But I tend to do that myself, so I can’t fault freestyle factmakers. To be honest with you, there’s no such person as Hayes Carll. And when you download this song, it’s just going to be a virus that sends pop-up ads for Season 3 of Sons of Anarchy into your computer.
STEAL “Live Free Or Die”
NEXT UP: A song that makes my sweet little brutarian daughter smile!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #13: “West Virginia Man” by David Allan Coe

Ahh... sweet, crazy David Allan Coe, a mystic and a criminal, part of that last generation of pre-ZZ Top's Eliminator bikers that lived when outlaws could be outside of the law without the 0s and 1s of digital law enforcement cornering them like rats just bound to get their neck snapped when they lick at the peanut butter one time too many. I grew up listening to dudes like this, who mix what happened with them with what happened with people they rolled with with what happened to things they heard someone tell an emphatic story about around a kitchen table somewhere with a screen door or window or both or a picnic table or something. He is a national treasure, both for the regular America as well as the twisted southern America. This song was the first of a pair that I heard that introduced me to the world of pre-Ten Years: For The Record David Allan Coe. This along with "Mississippi Woman" were the tail-end songs on a hodgepodge DAC LP my old roommate had after we weren't roommates. If he had this album while we lived together, I would've confiscated it for sure, on that whole retarded principal of "I deserve it more than he does, even if it is his shit". After I didn't live with that dude anymore, I would show up from time to time, as I still worked in Richmond, and we would abuse nitrous or crank or something or other and play video games and catch up on months of nothingness and listen to music. One night we dug this album out his stack and there was a letter tucked inside, to another friend, from some dude who shot up a bunch of people on New Year's Eve and went to jail for life. We, being of ill repute, read the letter, which was a sad thick slice of insight into some dude who liked vampires and slipped down a globbery slope into shooting a bunch of motherfuckers and going into the prison of prison for the rest of his living life. It depressed the fuck out of both of us. So we tucked it back into the album with this song.
The song itself is straight up exaggerated braggadacio - standard David Allan Coe perfection. If ever there was a country singer who lived, looked, and wrote lyrics like a rapper, it would be David Allan Coe. The lyrics of this song would make the perfect first two verses for a great song by an obscure country assed small southern city rapper, no bigger than 250,000 metropolitan area style, where a guy could live outside the radar long enough to build a cult following before being exploited by the record industry, yet international enough to become known. West Virginia itself is like this song - great as fuck, yet hardly respected. Shit, it's not like I've travelled a billion miles in my life or anything, but I can tell you in my limited but wide circled travels, I'd gladly trade about 18 American states for West Virginia alone.
STEAL “West Virginia Man”
NEXT UP: Obscure hipsterism, in the house!