SONG OF THE DAY: Grey Winds

You might not be as woke as you think you are. Just woke enough to call everybody else toxic and retreat to your turtle shell of digital identity, while the real world continues to spin on a wobbly axis outside. At some point, real shit has to get done. People have to eat, and not be stuck out in the cold rain or snow. Some folks care more about cats than humans, but put forth this revolutionary persona. When shit starts falling apart (lol start… it’s already falling apart), you’re gonna have to be able to do shit you don’t wanna do with people you don’t wanna do it with. And you’re gonna have to know how to navigate that bullshit. I worry about how many dysfunctional people are culture has created, shit, perhaps including me.

SONG OF THE DAY: Waves

Got to see Ibeyi perform earlier this year, which was cool because I didn’t really know shit about them but had enjoyed some of their music. It’s two sisters and they obviously love each other deeply and are both hugely talented. My takeaway as an observer is that one sister is like a really good Democratic politics PSA, which sort of turned me off because I have no faith in electoral politics or voting or politics or democrats or America or shit man I barely have any faith in faith itself any more. The other sister who maybe didn’t have the same level of perfect voice the political sister did had a beautiful voice with just a touch of harshness, which somehow made it better in my fucked up opinion. Also the second sister (who might be the first in their relationship, but is second in how I retell this as an outsider observer) could twerk with abandon, in a way that showed she enjoyed enjoying herself, despite how fucked up the world is. This perhaps will sound fucked up and objectifying, but you can actually tell a lot about a personality by their twerk. Much like scrawny white girls used to pretend they had ass back in the old days of Sir Mix-a-Lot, a lot of people who lack twerk personality will performatively twerk, mostly due to social media posturing. But there’s a certain metaphysical aura about being able to shake your ass with apparent abandon while still being in control – definite metaphor for how you live your life. Some asses lack the abandonment foundation, or just don’t even have the ass meat (which is metaphor for life experiences) to truly twerk. Other asses are just too wild, and you know that person is fucked up and you will make horrible mistakes ever involving them in your life, even for something as simple as bumming a cigarette. But some folks can shake with reckless abandon, all while maintaining perfect control, and you know they got their shit together but also will let loose when they need to, which is for me the perfect politics. Too much politics is goddamned serious and always woke and still somehow in that woke state from an extremely economically privileged position where you can afford to stay woke all the time because you are sheltered from the storms of actually existing like a piece of shit in a system that works to crush your spirt every goddamned day of your life. Fuck politics and fuck being comfortably woke. But good lord, the lumpen masses plumpy asses that can be woke but wild, educated yet feral, can be politically aware enough to know the world is fucked and we should fix some shit, but also self-helpful enough to know you gotta still shake your ass and get wild and rub on each other and try to manufacture some serotonin and dopamine in the ancient ways to stay hype enough to remain properly woke… that’s what the other Ibeyi sister was doing. And it made me love her, forever. She is the one singing on this song, and her voice crackles with imperfection in the most perfect way. Nothing real is perfect. Political purity tests pasteurize us of being real. Fuck politics, shake your ass, smother the patriarchy in enjoyable ways. Hard work will always be hard work, but if you don’t make it fun, everybody will just quit and go fuck around behind the building instead.

F0LKS PR3T3ND1NG TH3Y'R3 R34DY...

folks pretending they're ready

for revolution, without

realizing traumas attached

SONG OF THE DAY: Working Class Man

A lot of my interactions with punk music growing up were interactions with people further up the class scale than me, often times speaking to me condescendingly for not knowing something. That’s always been my problem with punk to be honest. On top of this, in the places I’ve lived, there started to be this pseudo-southern image cultivation on top of that class issue, perhaps best exemplified by the PBR craze among seemingly scummy types in mid-‘90s Richmond. I found that shit untrustable in a lot of cases, and for the most part the folks who tingled my “nah, don’t trust ‘em” intuition have panned out correctly. I will never get the rear view mirror looking back on what you did a long ass time ago thing, because – in my mind – you ought to still be doing things. I don’t believe in that notion that people are wilder when they’re young then get more conservative with age and live more normalized lives, and also thus reflect back on their younger adult years as something special. Why the fuck ain’t you still challenging shit? Ain’t nothing really changed for the larger world. You just settled down and into the channel you already were following. Anyways, I’m open to all people, but tbh I find allegedly “old punks” who are blatant capitalists or entirely stable middle class denizens tiresome af. Growth is a real thing, I know that, so I don’t expect you to be G.G. Allin until you die, but goddamn don’t be sitting there with $2000 worth of visible tattoos drinking an $8 pint of beer trying to talk to me about what’s real and authentic. Because you’re not speaking my language.

TH3 D1G1T4L W0K3 ST1LL B3...

the digital woke still be

ignoring the obvious

poisons outside own window

SONG OF THE DAY: Wow Freestyle

Sadly I go by a method of having listened to this shit on my stupid car ipod (an old iphone converted to music only), and I’m still a few months behind on these because I don’t owe the internet shit at this point. I move at my own speed. But then fucking Obama put this song on his year end Best of list, so I feel corny as fuck still posting it up. But to not put it up would simply be an act of contrarianism against self, which tbh I’m not above doing. Fuck all presidents, even the alleged good ones. Nobody good ends up being a president.

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).