SONG OF THE DAY: Me Myself and I (kudzu'd)

My original copy of the 3 Feet High & Rising tape was a bootleg bought at a truck stop near Simplicity, Virginia. The cover was a color copy with no insert. I played the fuck outta that tape. Of course, being a truck stop bootleg, playing the fuck outta it didn’t necessarily take long.
Decades later, as the white kids who latched onto Native Tongues less scary entry point into hip hop have grown old and now operate vintage boutiques, I remain firmly committed to the bootleg lifestyle. Being authentic and having authenticated items are two entirely different lanes to walk along.

SONG OF THE DAY: La Danza de Los Tigres (kudzu'd)

I went to Bread and Puppet Festival back in 1994 (I think), not knowing a thing about it. I’d quit my summer job because a dude I’d met once on a porch of some friends was going to Maine to rake blueberries, and wanted somebody to go with. So I went. Bread and Puppet was something he wanted to see one weekend while we were up there, and getting to upstate Vermont from east coast Maine, one Friday evening, with me and three other stank ass young hippie/loser/dropout/nomads stuffed into this dude’s tiny Mazda was a trip unto itself. Slept on the side of the road in a ditch, and then woke up and it was Bread and Puppets, the old full festival, a few years before the drugs and a stabbing or whatever got them to pare it down. And to be honest, it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, to this day. Blew my mind seventeen times over that day, probably compounded because I had no idea it existed when I was tossed onto a hillside and witnessed it. A wonderful blessing.
The woman who was part of our traveling foursome wrote me a few times afterwards, but I lost touch, mostly because I never wrote back. Classic Raven distance, even though in my mind there was none. My mind and the physical world don’t always line up real well. That’s probably why a giant freaky puppet show with schoolbuses creating a stage made so much sense to me.
Anyways, the dancing tiger for this video I slapped together is from an old Bread and Puppet Festival performance. These videos are never my music, but a 45 I’ve played enough to fall in love with it slowed to 33 and then ripped to cyberlord files, and then I dig up some sort of footage that connects to the song in my mind, and tweak it with some filters, glow it up, scribble a Southern Gothicc Futurism over it, and load into the internetz gutz, for whatever eternity this cyberlibertarian entity can actually hold out for before the digital crash. I own no part of this, yet the slapping of it all together, in the particular ways I do it, is a sort of art, like poking a rhinestone into your jacket. This is my bedazzling of the internet, and I will never go viral, but I never wanted to. I am from the old internet, where you just did all the weird ass shit you wanted to do, and threw it up inside the land of 0s and 1s, and maybe somebody else on the Earth was freaky like you, and enjoyed it. I hope you are freaky like me. If you are not, then why did you read this far?

SONG OF THE DAY: What I Am (kudzu'd)

This is a great one slowed down. Juggle that break for hours, in my opinion. As a young mark from the middle of nowhere, I loved this song and loved Edie Brickell. She married a thousand year old man, and I have a horrible headache today.

SONG OF THE DAY: Don't Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days) (kudzu'd)

This song reminds me of a certain era, where I had moved to southside Richmond with a woman who no longer liked me, and I rode a 10-speed bike to meet a dude at Dogwood Dell to go paint houses in the west end for six hours or so. Then I’d ride my bike to Carytown and work at a vet as a kennel attendant on the late shift. The morning dude was a chill dude named Reggie, and we just kept the radio on Power 92 because it was easy (and shit man, I think maybe 106.5 The Beat wasn’t even up yet… damn, I’m old) and at 5, they always had a mix for 30 to 40 minutes. On a good day, Reggie would have time to sneak half a jay in the alley out back, and on an even better day, he’d leave me the other half of the jay underneath the radio. In retrospect, from today, I can say life was simpler. But honestly, that shit felt fucked up then, too. Humans… we’re always into some shit, aren’t we? Nonetheless, because this was a nice up tempo, “Don’t mind me I’m just being a bitch, like I do sometimes” song, and I still have naïve hope the woman I lived with might give a fuck again at some point, this song stuck with me. Still love the song; hardly remember the woman’s name.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hell Bent For Leather

I got a tattoo in an old school tattoo shop the other day, and they were playing old metal, so heard a couple from Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, even Dio. Even though it was probably a streaming playlist, it felt appropriate. I was once a young metalhead with degenerate style unkempt longhair and a jean jacket with bona fide Motorhead back patch. Ozzy actually came on and me and my tattoo artist talked about how we didn’t know if Dio was dead or not, and I said I had meant to look it up but never did. Fuck looking things up online, to be honest. Anyways, when I first got a record player back in the day, I had a total of 5 albums, all of which were taken from my uncle’s bedroom in my grandma’s trailer, because I think he got kicked out or something? It was Kiss Double Platinum, Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz, and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid gatefold, but for some reason the other side of the gate fold was busted open and held a copy of Volume 4 without the cover. Not a bad first 5 albums starter pack, to be honest. Thus, I could have some opinions about metal, because a bunch came about during my formative years, but I’m also pretty old school and believe that if you have short hair and a college degree, you’re not allowed to have opinions about metal music. At all. Hard stop. Also, in case you were wondering, being a cop is like having a PhD in Dumb Fuck, so they’re definitely disqualified as well. Any metal that cops love is anti-metal in spirit. Damn, forget I said that, because that’s bordering on having an opinion. I’ll stay out the metal opinions business and instead focus on fighting cops, like my original borrowed/inherited/absconded record collection taught me.

SONG OF THE DAY: Danny's Song (live)

I don’t know who came up with the term “yacht rock” but I bet he’s an asshole (and I’m sure he’s a he). Whoever he is, I bet he actually gets mad about wanting to be acknowledged as the person who came up with the term “yacht rock”. I bet it’s in his social media bio, irregardless of what kind of character limit is there. (Yeah, I used “irregardless” as a word, because the type of dude who invents “yacht rock” as a term and then gets mad about people not giving him the proper credit for thinking that stupid shit up is exactly the type of guy that will explain to you how “irregardless” ain’t a word, even though when you read that shit, you knew what I meant, because that’s how words work, even if you refuse to acknowledge them being an official real people word.)

By the way, this double album got played a lot in my household growing up. I can sing the fuck out of this song any minute of any day, and when it comes on, I got a head full of memories playing with my secondhand off-brand toys while this was blasting. It's a double LP, but I can tell you from my memories, that my folks played Side A specifically way the fuck more than anything else (which this song is off of). Anyways, if I ever get married to the beech tree behind the house like I've been wanting to for a while now, this is gonna be our wedding song.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ghetto Red Hot

There are certain sounds that perfectly encapsulate early ‘90s era hip hop and its influence on other genres, and this was also a time I lived in Richmond and tended to walk downtown with Boogie Brown on Friday afternoons to buy records at Willie’s, and downtown Richmond back then was WAY DIFFERENT. You’d have tons of people hanging out, waiting on the bus, or just kicking it downtown on Broad Street, and cars would be cruising, just BLASTING music, like ungodly levels of blast, but which still sounded crispy clear with immense thump. There’s like 3 or 4 beats that specifically just fire up those memories in my mind, to where I can smell the heaty stank of the city again, and this is one of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumberland Gap

As a kid growing up, I called them butter beans, but somewhere along the way it became lima beans. There’s a lot of weird little things about the way I talked that got shamed out of me over the years, which I’ve realized was usually class-based shit that got projected on me from others (and felt pretty heavy). But it’s also weird because if I say “butter beans” today, it feels performative; like, I’ve lost the natural inclination to call them tasty little legumes by that name. And when I look at that as one thread, and start pulling at it, unraveling the sweater of my current existence, well, it kinda fucks me up. So I am going to fry up some chicken gizzards and eat them with butter beans tonight, and some leftover rice and mustard greens I have too. And I will set a single fried chicken gizzard and butter bean out in the back yard for the ancestors. I know they’ve been lurking lately because a lot of tricksterism has been happening, which is usually a sign I need to be listening to them better. Probably they’re mad because I talk so funny now.

SONG OF THE DAY: Born to Lose

Got this song title tattooed on my left shoulder, right above the peace sign that says LOVE I stuck and poked with my dad in his trailer when I was 16. That was my first tattoo… a stick and poke with my dad in our trailer (in case you needed a receipt for the “born to lose” claim).

SONG OF THE DAY: My Home Among The Hills

The calm and peaceful nature of a Christmas Day is always one of the most pleasant to be creeping around the train yard, even at the edge of drug-addled places. Everything slows down. Sunday mornings can be like that, too. I remember living in Richmond in the ‘90s, when it was always in the top 2 or 3 of murder capitals in America, and on Sunday mornings, you could still ride pretty much anywhere in the city without danger, because there was just a universal truce briefly. Christmas is like a larger version of that. I wish we could have days like that once a month, where everything just shut down, and it was known that no stores were going to be open at all, not even gas stations, and you just didn’t do shit but chill. That whole “peace on Earth” concept is way closer to “you gots to chill” than most folks are able to realize. We really do gots to chill.

SONG OF THE DAY: Abele Dance

Had an old roommate/friend who, whenever Manu Dibango would come on, he’d say, “Man… you da bango!” in a funny voice. He ended up getting all fucked up with me because I did a photography project with an ex of his, who he automatically assumed I was fucking because we took pictures of each other, along with another person, all of it entirely clothed lol. He had been doing this thing where he told me he was going through therapy, but there is a realm of people who find therapists that just end up sort of cosigning poor behavior, or the person just tricks the therapist to go along with things. I don’t know. I told ol’ boy to fuck off for even trying to have me have to explain some shit that didn’t even happen, and he blocked me on everything, everywhere. He still plays guitar in Richmond, and is in that Cool Older Musician era of his life where he does semi-predatory shit on the regular with women 20 years younger than himself. But it’s cool, man. Dudes don’t have to actually be better people so long as they make dramatic ass social media posts about how they’re so much better.

Also, now that I think about it, he still owes Boogie Brown money for a bike he bought back in the day. So fuck that dude twice. I hope you accidentally see this, too, you weak bitch. With your jump roping ass.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cheatin' in the Next Room

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

SONG OF THE DAY: Aww Shit!

I used to play a lot of Tha Alkaholiks and used to be an alcoholic. I actually got the 12-inch single that was the first beat Madlib made that got released on wax, when he was still part of Lootpack. Tha 'Liks used to be an absolute favorite, so though I don't drink no more, I never gave up them. And I still say, in old head way that references archaic media, Side A of King Tee's Tha Triflin' Album, where Tha Alkaholiks made their debut, is one of the all-time best hip hop tape sides ever.

SONG OF THE DAY: Play At Your Own Risk

The history of racism in America affected the segregation of musical genres, which is a shame. It would’ve been nice, in retrospect, to have music jump those borders more easily. A great example of this for me lately is Planet Patrol’s “At Your Own Risk”, which was made of extra tracks not used in Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”, so has a similarity to it, like an alternate third jersey version of Planet Rock almost. But there was a time in my life, when I had just gotten my license, and on Saturdays the liquor store in Farmville would close at noon, but the one in Drakes Branch was open ‘til 6. And my dad would get his weekend’s liquor supply Thursday after work in Farmville, because that was payday for him, and the liquor store was usually the first stop. But generally speaking, folks would show up on Friday night to play cards at our trailer, and bottles would get passed, and if anything was left at the end of a long Friday night, it wasn’t gonna go long on Saturday afternoon. So we’d drive to Drakes Branch to hit the liquor store, so he pops could restock for the impending long Saturday night (which would basically be a repeat of the previous night most times, with most of the same characters). If it was football season, he might even have to double up on the Saturday run to make sure Sunday afternoon was covered for the Redskins game.
In retrospect, that drive from our trailer in southern Prince Edward County, to Keysville, then turn by the abandoned factory on 59 to get to Drakes Branch, turning left onto Main Street of a town that was already dying even then, that close to Reagan’s politics of doom that turned the doomed into The Doomed, “At Your Own Risk” would’ve been the perfect soundtrack. And it’s a long enough song it could’ve ate up most of that 10 mile or so stretch on 59. I do recognize and appreciate my dad’s constant wishful thinking back then, that one bottle liquor on a Thursday evening was actually gonna be enough to last the whole weekend. Too bad he never got the help to get closer to making that equation actually work out. That too is the byproduct of all our segregation and division, where we get fractured into our little silos of self-destruction and think we’re out here going through something entirely on our own, when in actuality in that 10 miles we just drove down the road, even out in the middle of nowhere, we just passed 50 motherfuckers going through the exact same shit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nous Savon Stout (kudzu'd)

One time a friend of mine stole a spaceship in high school, and had it hidden down a logging trail near where we lived. Getting in was really cool, because you realize you’re climbing into a spaceship, and also we were really high, plus had like two cases of Miller Genuine Draft with us, which is what we drank back then. But I remember the windshield being really hard to see out of, like it had a fucked up angle, and I guess whatever radar screens a normal spaceship uses to see ahead of itself was broken in this one, so we couldn’t really drive it in the daytime, because then somebody would’ve seen us, but we couldn’t really drive it at night either, unless we went super slow, because we couldn’t see shit. Luckily, there’s not a lot in the sky, but even then, a couple bowls too far into 1990s homegrown and more than a handful of empty MGD bottles clanking around on the ground, it wasn’t as fun as I would’ve expected. Plus we couldn’t figure out how to work the stereo, like in retrospect I think it had some sort of aux cord we haven’t gotten to yet, but back then we were just like, “How the fuck do we put a CD or tape into this thing?” I think the second time we went out, I took a little boombox with, but for whatever reason batteries die faster in the sky once you get outside the atmosphere. Shit never works out like you hope.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Want You Back (Z-Trip Remix)

I went to the first Bonnaroo, which feels crazy now because I’d never do no shit like that. Even took my toddler. We got good camping spot right behind the main stage field, so a lot of times, me and Boogie Brown just sat on the roof of his Dodge Prospector truck and watched shit. The final headliner was that Trey dude from Phish, who by that point I had already become painfully tired of. My ex-wife wanted to go in for that one though, so we had the toddler, me and Brown, and were chilling at the truck. DJ Z-Trip played the transition set between whoever was before Trey and the Trey dude, and I guess mash-up DJing wasn’t huge yet at that point, and to be honest, Serrato Scratch probably wasn’t even out, so he was working from records, and it just cracked my skull wide open. It was like the promise of a genre of music that didn’t exist yet. Unfortunately, mash-up culture didn’t pan out as wonderfully amazing as originally hoped for, and is pretty limited by copyright ownership anyways.
I actually kicked it with Brown last weekend, working on some new Prolo material, and we were talking about music, and how there’s gotta be some new thing eventually, doesn’t it? But where will it come from? Has the digital age overexposed all the world to the rest of the world and no absolute mind-blowing newness incubates in some weird creative corner by itself? It seems like all possible combinations of genres has likely been tried, and anything brand new can’t be thought of as easy as a common combo. Hip hop has become so boring, which makes sense because it’s 50 years old. Rock-n-roll pretty much died after the early ‘90s, and just turned into boring ass indy rock or throwback vibes, and that was a rough half century after it first exploded.
The ultimate problem with trying to come up with something that’s never been done is most of our brains only think of what already exists. It takes a mad flash of universal lightning spark genius hitting, not just one person, but a collective, where the idea happens simultaneously in a few different minds, but close to each other, and they power each other further up into some wild ass new thing. I’m too old for that, my mind far too saturated with worn edges and fuzzy fissures to be struck like that by the universal magnetics. But I’m still pretty wide open to enjoying it. I’m bored with culture. It’s too goddamn predictable.

SONG OF THE DAY: Every Day of the Week

When I was actually in the 1990s, I thought shit like this was wack, mostly because I was young and trying too hard. Now that I’m old, I love some of this stuff, because when you’re not trying so damn hard to be perfectly cool, you actually get to enjoy things. You know how they always say kids are growing up too fast? I wish young adults got old too fast, too, and we could shave off the hater years more easily, especially if life expectancy is going down. Ain’t time for hating ass years if you’re just gonna die quicker anyways.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rolling Stoner

I didn’t know until I just looked up Yaya Bey to write about this song that she was the daughter of Grand Daddy I.U. of The Juice Crew. I am so old that boom bap figures have grown ass children making songs I listen to now. Also, what the fuck, he died in December? The internet is great for helping me find out some music I was listening to is related to a guy I kinda remember from back in the day, who also just passed. Life is precious; the internet is a distraction.

SONG OF THE DAY: Graveyard Train

Grew up on Creedence, so much so used to stare at the album cover for Willy & The Poor Boys and I actually thought it was the little ass abandoned train town our post office was in. For reference, this was before school, so I mostly just hung out at home or at my grandmother’s trailer, no social activities, so riding from our house by a dairy farm to the post office in Rice, Virginia, where they had like six brick buildings all in a row together, that was big time. A few years back, when I was still married, me and the family were riding back where I had grown up, and I took them down the road that old house had been on, which dead ended into a lake now because they created a reservoir where a dump used to be. The house was gone, but the house next door was still there, and some old lady was sitting on the porch. I got out and asked her about the house that used to be next door, assuming she was an old lady so might’ve lived there a couple years, I don’t know. She didn’t live there when I was a kid. “What house?” she yelled, rather crazily. “In the field, there used to be a house, I lived there when I was little.” “Ain’t no house there now!” she yelled. “Yeah, I see. When was it torn down?” “Ain’t no house over there.” I gave up at that point. You can’t return to the past.

SONG OF THE DAY: Jackie

I think this song is about Roseanne's sister from Roseanne. They did a reboot of that show but Roseanne wasn't woke enough so they kept doing the show anyways and Roseanne was cancelled, which means she instead just gets given money by rich dumbasses who believe history moved from east to west but the world is flat and it doesn't get any further than California, except maybe Hawaii but only if you're on vacation. Nobody lived in Hawaii before vacations. Anyways, I like this song about the sister from Roseanne, and I like the old Roseanne because it was a tv show reminiscent of my own fucked up family and in fact the last time I visited my uncle Ray who used to be a biker and had a big toe for a thumb because of the time he almost got murdered and lost three fingers on one hand from the shotgun blast at close range, Ray was in the hospital and had learned how to swallow his food some weird alternate way because the normal way sent food and drink into his lungs or some shit, we watched Roseanne on the hospital room TV. The whole trip was very magical in a fucked way, because he used to ride with the Pagans MC, and then when I was leaving, an elevator was stuck but halfway between floors, and two women were freaking out, so I helped them pull the doors further open and helped them up out the elevator. Then I got on the other one and a guy got on with me wearing a shirt that said "Support your local Pagans" talking about the outlaw biker club not the people who shop for expensive crystals at metaphysical shops. Anyways, I never watched the rebooted Roseanne because it got cancel cultured before I could watch. Haha, that's not true, I just never gave a fuck; cancel culture ain't real.