J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #8: "Tangled Up In Blue" by Bob Dylan

I cannot speak too highly of Bob Dylan, though I do not actively dislike the dude. He is one of many things that are from the '60s, which is ahead of my time and has been hyped incessantly at me that doesn't necessarily equal the same awesomeness in delivery to match the hype. I mean, I dig Nashville Skyline, but I don't regard it as a groundbreaking shattering of barriers between genres or anything or some sort of validation of country music for not-stupid people so that the horrible beast that is alt.country could be created in the early days of the internet much much later. And off of both Greatest Hits albums, there's some stuff I love and there's some stuff I don't love. His brilliantly poetic lyricism sometimes seems fucking stupid (most notably off the top of my head, that "smoked my eye and punched my cigarette" line or whatever it was has always annoyed the fuck out of me for some reason). But honestly, the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is one of my all-time favorite theme albums, and I have used it as my background music at times while walking railroad tracks near Arvonia with an old guy called Patchwork who has a bunch of goats and eats them and thus I have had some really tasty goat meat tacos with homegrown cilantro but on some bobo ass Richfood brand taco shells while sitting in scratchy crabgrass pockmarked with wild onions in Buckingham County, Virginia State, America Country, Earth Planet, on and on until the break of universal dawn. In fact, I walked with a bucket of slop to my pigs today and was noticing how tall the wild onions were and it made me think of Patchwork and how I hadn't seen him since probably last August or so, before football season started. Then I tried to pull up a couple wild onions to chop up and put in the coconut chicken and slow cooked veggies I was making, because I love the hyper energy that a wild onion will add to a meal. They're strong so you don't want to use more than one or two, but it gives food such a wild taste, and makes your gut buzz and also makes my penis hard. I think wildcrafting foods is a good way to make yourself have babies if you are having problems with that. I am not going to go into any nature/earth/virility/fertility tangents, but you can see they are there for the running with if you'd like to do so on your own.
Anyways, after thinking too long one day at work about the "Wagon Wheel" song by Old Crow Medicine Show which is just an extension of a studio outtake from a Dylan session, it caused me to download a bunch of shit like the tapes of The Band and Dylan fucking around, and a whole history boxset of The Band, and a whole bunch of Dylan, including both of the first two volumes of his Greatest Hits. So I played a lot of it for a while, and for some reason this rose to the top of the play count. I think that maybe my daughter was bumping it as well on her Ipod and it helped spike the ratings, because she likes to do that knowing my weird methods to calculating the J.J. Krupert list. In fact, on our shared Itunes, no one rates anything except for me, because if something is listed on the J.J. Krupert list, it gets a first star. And then for as long as it remains on my little 4gb Ipod, and has more total plays minus skips over the lowest total plays minus skips of the 13th place new song each month, it will get an additional star, obviously maxing out at 5 stars. These are the strange mathematical parameters that rule my life at every corner. I do not know why I am this way, but it is the way I am wired. But my oldest daughter knows this and knows with a shared Itunes, she can bump shit on her Ipod touch, and run the score up if something is actually on my J.J. Krupert as well. In fact, I had her make a playlist of her favorite songs that I haven't rated (thus haven't Kruperted with yet within cyberworld) and I will probably do a month where I just bump the stuff she wants me to bump, just for the fuck of it. She is 12, and has close friends from her age to like 14, and at some point the terrible wall between knowing I have a website and actually reading my website is going to get blown open. I am not sure how I feel about that. I'm going to have lots of 'splainin' to do I fear. But then again, I don't really shelter her from too much. She doesn't know the more far out nefarious conspiracies, and I don't cuss around them for the most part, and obviously no sex talk. Good lord, none of that. I don't even want to think about that at all, ever, though I will.
Well, "Tangled Up In Blue" got up on here somehow, and just last week I pretty much scrapped everything that was on the J.J. Krupert Ipod and replaced it with all different stuff, a full 4gb shake-up because I thought I should, so I'm not sure if there's even any Bob Dylan left on there right now. And thinking about that, I don't even have the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in cyber format, just two copies on vinyl, somewhere in the stacks of vinyl. If I could be sure the toddler wouldn't decimate it just yet, I'd have the USB turntable hooked up to the home computer and be pumping the albums again, as my other four turntables are all out in the camper, hooked up in strange piles of electronic madness, in early preparations for the return of ancient hobo recording techniques. Which brings me back to Patchwork, because that dude can babble an interesting story, and I'd like to just record him talking his gibberish and throw it over top these loops I've been making from soundboard recordings of old Little Feat shows from the '70s.
STEAL "Tangled Up In Blue"
NEXT: More straight up apocalyptic return to the earth after the irradiation of the surface musical scripture!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #13: “Life In The City” by Michael Franti & Spearhead

This is a daughter creeper – or a song that she listens to and has run up on my Krupert count. When I realized it was still on my gaypod, I took it off, but decided it best to write about it anyways because I have nobody to impress here. And my daughter likes me writing about her music. Except I don’t like Michael Franti music much. It’s like Wesley Willis got on brain meds and started making happy music for tips in a tourist district somewhere in San Diego.
I know there are people who are even friends with me who think there is nothing better than Michael Franti music, and it’s so positive and chill, and that’s great. But I do not buy it was world music or even something enjoyable beyond like two songs. He has like three songs basically that he repeats over and over. I also do not think the rest of the world is like this, all chill and happy and sunshine beams everywhere except your eyeball. Shit man, I just read tonight how Jamaican chicks used to take chicken pills that they give to fatten up chickens to make themselves have rounder bottoms and wider hips. And now everybody is using cake soap to bleach their skin, like literally bleach it, and there was a picture of Vybz Kartel and he looked like he had a disease. But it was him doing it on purpose. And yet he made “Thank Yuh Jah” last year, which was The Song of 2010, and it was world music I guess, and came from reality where you rub bleach soap on your body and wear clothes that look expensive but you probably got from an outlet store and you did some nasty things but hey we all do. That’s the rest of the world. Hell, that’s here too. I don’t understand this easy-going world music vibe at all. Where is this fucking chill ass barefoot world?
I used to have the first Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy 12-inch back in the day, “Television – the Drug of the Nation” and was into them, which was Franti’s old band. Bought the vinyl in that record store that used to be on Grace Street in that building that ended up being the Red Light Inn strip club, which that place may not even be there anymore either, as they clean up that area for VCU to be a more fucking chill ass barefoot thing itself, all easy to go to college and get in debt and not be hassled by junkies and bikers and redneck strippers and sketchy black dudes and the beautiful assortment of homelesses. And Dirt Woman selling flowers. Man, that’s my fucking problem with world music and Michael Franti and chill ass barefoot utopias – not that it’s annoying or anything, but that it’s not as beautiful as the real world around us, even with all it’s flaws and imperfections and fucked up scars and crazy folks. This real world is all sorts of freaky and scary and fucked up and yet there’s still all sorts of little slivers of beauty, either as a collected landscape or a single item, and that’s what makes it perfect. Michael Franti sounds like a soundtrack for gentrifying the perfect real world we already have, and getting a new wine shop and maybe a boutique or some other high end named place selling thrift store type things but a very select inventory at a very select price. Fuck that.
Still though, if I was in a Michael Franti mood, this would be the song I played first, then another would come on and I’d be like, “ugh… Michael Franti.” But it always takes that second song at least.
STEAL “Life In The City”
NEXT UP: Big K.R.I.T. is still here!