SONG OF THE DAY: Jo Lean (Slurred & Blurred)

Jo Lean video 

SHOUT OUT TO DJ BRILLIANT, SLURRING IT AND BLURRING IT. He told me he'd never really listened to this song before he fucked with it, slowing it down and chopping it up. True artists understand the essence of the material they're working with, even without analysis. Without thinking. Shit just comes to you, naturally, like McDonalds bags full of fries to a pack of crows.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hey Nineteen Miles Per Hour

I’ve been on a mission lately to listen to far more 7-inch 45s on 33 rpm speed, sometimes even bumping the pitch shifter that extra 10% too. You can’t slow it down enough sometimes. Actually all the time. The real world’s regular speed is fucking stupid. Nobody needs to be rushing around all the goddamned time, or wearing watches, or having their phones blip bloop at them angrily because your physical presence hasn’t navigated the complex obstacle course of pata-modern life fast enough to be at some fucking bullshit ass GPS coordinates at some entirely arbitrary time. Fuck clocks, fuck appointments, and fuck rushing around. Slow everything down, to a crawl. In fact fuck it, I’m gonna start going on crawls, literally crawling down the sidewalk just to get a better feel for certain parts of town.

SONG OF THE DAY: tH3 r4p (45s on 33)

Millie Jackson has it down pat, recognizing the space needed in alternative relationships, and also setting her own boundaries, specifically the lack of washing other people’s funky draws. But mostly listening to this classic vinyl rip into cyberworld reminds me I have my turntable hooked up again, and purple christmas lights, which I should just call life lights because they’re more for regular life than christ things, and I’ve got a giant stack of 45s over there across the room, just begging to be slowed down to 33, to manifest an intention to slow down this life itself. MP3s don’t have speed, so we think this rapid-fire pace is the way the world is. Shit man, J. Cole just dropped new tracks yesterday and already half the world has declared them a triumph or failure and people steadily cranking out thinkpieces about SHIT THAT CAME OUT YESTERDAY. Slow the fuck down y’all. Slow the fuck down.

June 27th Mix 2016

In honor of June 27 - DJ Screw Day, I had meant to do a write up about how much screwed music has been part of my life the past decade-plus, and how that spirit is influential on why I bother to listen to and rip old 45s at 33 speed and write convoluted serialized tales of time travel and bastard overlords and such (45s on 33 – daily operation all through the summer, last year and this and hopefully beyond), but then life became overwhelmingly depressing, and it’s been all I could do to keep moving through the sludge. But here is a mix of the 45s on 33 from last year’s list of 100 that have been the most played, according to iTunes data analysis. Please enjoy responsibly.

track listicle

1. tR0GL0DYT3

2. fLy l1K3 4n 34GL3

3. dR34Mz t0 r3M3MB3r

4. s4m sT0N3

5. cRYST4l bLV3 p3RSV4S10n

6. b0Rn p00r

7. r4MBL1n g4MBL1n m4n

8. sT4GG0L33

9. tVSh

10. c4LL1Ng d0CT0r l0V3

11. m1ST3r sP33d

12. y34h y34h y34h

13. d0Wn 0n tH3 c0RN3r

14. gH0St w4Lk

15. tH3 r4p

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45s on 33 – #11: “North, East, South, West”

To the north of here more immediately is a commercial clusterfuck that’s been developing just over the county line, where the Wal-Mart and Lowe’s and a weird diamond interchange that is confusing but not really just because you are going the wrong side of the road as they want to get people off the interstate quickly, even though not that much traffic is happening there, yet. I guess that’s a sign of things to come if they’re putting in housing sub-divisions and commercial complexes (more like complicateds) and shit like that. Far north is DC where the cultural decisions to move in directions like that are made for this nation I happened by chance to be born inside of.

To the east more immediately is just roads to Richmond, all of which I know in finding various paths to a nexus of my existence as an adult. Sometimes I go interstate if in rush, other times I go back roads if I want to vibe to the nothing much. Farther east is the Atlantic, where I need to dip myself more often, baptizing the filth away, absolving my self of the sins of being homo sapien as much as possible.

To the immediate south is Buckingham County, with a large percentage of working aged men lacking jobs, unemployed or disabled or given up, and it’s a sad place but people get by, somehow, probably in ways we all shouldn’t be proud of. Further south is not really that much further because that’s the gateway back to Southside Virginia, which is has had larger cultural influence on me through my presence there than anywhere else on earth. Southside Virginia is beautiful but also fucked, and being it’s not in the mountains, it lacks the known fuckedness of the Appalachians. But it’s like flat Appalachia basically, and I am simultaneously proud but embarrassed of it.
To the immediate west is the mountains, where I run off to do reverse baptisms, kiss the clouds a little while and try to get mind right through elevated state. This is a very necessary activity. Mountains and oceans are the twin rechargers of human mentality (heart), and thus rivers are sort of the conduit between the two, thus also fairly necessary. Further to the west is the rest of America. It could be suggested I should have seen more of all that, but at the same time it’s hard to fully experience even the tiny little region you are already in, not to any deep level, and at this point in my life I think I’m more dedicated to that depth of area’s knowledge than accumulating random distant spaces like baseball cards.

45s on 33 – #13: “It Ain’t No Use”

Got that dilapidated camper love style, hiding out with extension cords running seventeen miles from your ex-mom’s house down back roads through logging trails mostly so you can keep your stereo plugged in and play them old Z.Z. Hill jams with exactly 36 tea candles lit up keeping it bright. Then maybe something gets kicked loose along the strand, or somebody unplugs it because let’s face it human beings are real dicks, and the lights go out so the music stops, but you still got all those tea candles, and you’re still in the dilapidated camper and everybody smelling like lavender oil, and that’s all good while things are active. But eventually you’re gonna be laying there on that weird plywood with mattress on top of stretch that also makes two bench seats and has the table that folds out because of dilapidated camper engineering, and you’re laying there thinking, “fuck man, my alarm’s not gonna go off now” because of the extension cord being unplugged. Sure, cybertron people got robot space phones with alarms that blast retro computer sounds at melodious irony level so you wake up with snarky smile on your face. But dilapidated camper motherfuckers like you ain’t got robot space phones – you’re using a fucking burner like season three of The Wire, which is ancient history, and in fact you still know where the three pay phones that are left are located because sometimes you use the one by the truck stop on 15 South to call people, not really because you need to since you actually do have your season three of The Wire burner by Tracfone, but because it’s cool to get three dollars worth of quarters and make some phone calls while people drive past and you smell fried chicken from the E.W. Thomas, so fuck it.
But eventually the tea candles burn out, and you’re laying there naked with another naked and you realize fuck getting up, fuck alarms, fuck extension cords full of electricity, fuck all this other shit that gets in the way of laying around naked. Not nearly enough laying around naked in our so-called civilization.

45s on 33 – #20: “Between the Sheets (instrumental)”

Perhaps it’s because I was born a poor Southside Virginia boy with a sandpaper soul, but I never understood the allure of silk sheets, or silk pajamas (although Claire Huxtable sort of did them right in my mind for a while), or silk boxers. I understand silk boxers the least of them all, because why conceal natural nastiness within ornate finery? And that ends up being where I stand on silk sheets as well, because generally life is a nasty and somewhat ugly endeavor in which one tends to get stankified. It is impossible to be clean when slipping into bed, thus the silk is useless. In addition, hopefully there will be some nastiness in the bed as well, which also negates any premium qualities of silk sheets. And I would prefer to encourage nastiness in my life than stifle it for whatever benefit silk offers in sheet form.

As for being clean when you go to bed, that is often in my mind the defining distinguishing characteristic between shitty physical work and lazy (yet also shitty) non-physical work – when do you shower. If you shower in the morning before work, you are most likely cubicle livestock. If you shower after work, it is because you are nasty from work, and probably not comfortable polluting your home environment with the toxins of construction, so you shower immediately after work. Of course all this assumes one showers every day they work, which is kind of a privileged assumption in itself. But fuck, I’m writing words in a secret works file while sitting at a desk, because I think anybody gives a fuck what my stupid mind thinks through language. Privileged assumption is sort of my forte. And yet, I still don’t like silk sheets.

August O.C.D. #2: Cumbia Rebajada Music

A random link inside the internets turned me onto cumbia rebajadas a while back, and honestly, I had never really listened to even cumbia music, which is a percussion-heavy latin music popular amongst mainland latinos more than island latinos. Rebajadas came from a DJ in the '60s who's radio ran out of batteries, causing the record to drag, pumping up the bass sounds and warping the vocals but the high end percussion still popped like crazy. Of course, this is the basic DJ Screw music story, except it predates it by about 30 years. Oddly enough, the guy who originally did this to cumbia music is now in his fifties, lives in Houston, and is an air conditioner repairman. He had a flea market stand in Mexico proper where he sold his mixes of slowed down cumbia music, and as far as I know, he still has a stand down there. I'm not sure why, but slowed down music heavy with percussion really speaks to me and I could listen to it forever. In fact, upon finding about cumbia rebajada, I downloaded whatever I could find online (there's two good mixes to be found online: Sonido Martines' Las Rebajadas Van a Brooklin and Dr. Auratheft's El Maldito Accordeon) and drove my wife and kids crazy with it. The fact there's so little of it to be found sucks, because I've played out what I have, but in that time, did break up those two mixes into individual tracks in Audacity to shave off the chaff and keep the wheat. My search for such stuff also led me to an album called The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, which is pretty goddamned amazing too. Chicha is a hallucinogenic drink popular with with the more indigenously inclined, and this is music made for and by such folks. I don’t think I have to tell you that music with lots of clangy drums and a repetitive-yet-catchy-as-fuck rhythm made by people under the influence of mind-altering substances is usually a good thing, so long as the people aren’t white as fuck. Even then, it often works still.