SONG OF THE DAY: Angel From Montgomery

I ain’t much on Sturgill Simpson, on the surface because his music felt like that forced “I’m different than regular country music” style anti-country music. “Even a black sheep is still a sheep” is a saying that has stuck with me about being too reactionary forces you to be attached to that which you’re reacting to. But beyond the surface level, he wears a cop mustache, which I never trust, even ironically, but especially in his case because his dad was actually a narcotics officer in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. You should not ironically be looking like a cop when your dad was an actual cop, and one of the most dishonest and deceitful sort. But Sturgill Simpson does, and I’m supposed to trust that. What my father taught me might’ve been discombobulated, chaotic, and filtered through the haze of drugs and alcohol, but one thing I remember clearly is DON’T TRUST COPS, OR PEOPLE WHO TRUST COPS.

I say all this because they had some sort of bullshit country music awards show a few weeks back, and some people had retweeted a Sturgill Simpson opinion about how disappointed he was at the fake ass country music awards show, they didn’t take a minute to mention the deaths of John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker. Of course he positioned it in that cooler than thou light, that he only watched for a few minutes to see if they did it, not like he watched the whole fake ass thing. Of course he watched the whole thing though. But it’s also not like the fake country music industry gave a lot of love to guys like Prine, Hubbard, and Walker while they were alive, to be honest. Why would you expect different in death? Country music has always been fake as fuck, but since the ‘90s, after the rise of Garth Brooks in Nashville, it’s turned into even more of a mechanistic churning out of neurological trickery that sounds like music, behaves like music, so it must be music, when in actuality it’s just Wal-Mart muzak meant to market the American Empire. And it’s worked. The majority of people who consider themselves "country” are more likely to identify with sitting in a Wal-Mart parking lot than sitting by a creek, and they consider that to be what country means, especially when the Lowes is right there too. Wal-Mart/Lowes combination strip mall developments are a thousand times more country than a tobacco field in 2020 – ain’t no recount on that vote, because that’s how the majority feels.

So Sturgill Simpson taking his social media soapbox stance against the ever-present hypocrisy of country music industry just made me think, “lol, of course Sturgill Simpson did that.” His whole angle is positioning himself as a manufactured black sheep in opposition to the regular sheep. And he’d be played heavily at hipster breakfast restaurants in gentrifying spaces right now, if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

Anyways, John Prine died from complications related to Covid, which of course all those Wal-Mart parking lot country folk don’t think is real. All the sheep think they’re black sheep, overthrowing the wolves, but it’s just a bunch of fucking sheep, rambling around in various strip mall parking lots, lost in the buzz of late capitalist empire.

D0LL4R ST0R3 CH4R4CT3RS WH1CH...

dollar store characters which

perpetuate police state

outlaw white dude fantasies

P30PL3 PR3T3ND1NG C0VNTRY...

people pretending country

so long that pretend country

now regarded as real shit

IO-SP33D1NG SL0WLY VP 4ND...

10-speeding slowly up and

down Blue Ridge foothill country

roads, hoping trucks don't hit me

MNZ: B&W Magazine March 2011

Very occasionally I'll buy the fancy photography magazines, mostly for pictures for the shoebox full of same-sized magazine cutouts that I've accumulated for over a decade now that I used for the old beerbox haiku and am planning on starting to scan into the cyberwebs because I am bored with the pictures you find inside the cyberwebs. At the same time, I feel weird about that because these are real actual magazines in my life that I'm not sure I should throw into the 1s and 0s boxes. But whatever.
I am convinced that somehow these art photography magazines are aware of my sampling purposes, because all too often most all their photos are just a little too small for my purposes. They know what's up, and people are possessive of the eventual potential awesome ramifications of what I may do, because the trend in our minds is to purchase awesomeness. These people want to maintain all control of who purchases their pieces, even if it's just a vague corner of one snapshot of this or that. Capitalism has poisoned us in so many ways.
The occasion upon which this issue was bought was because it had Shelby Lee Adams in it, who is this dude from Kentucky who did some normal photography work, but then made his name off of taking pics of his hillbilly brethren in their natural dwindling habitat, doing the things they would normally do. He utilizes lots of light and portrait style poses, but in normal spots, to make some pretty spooky stuff with some pretty scary people. Liberal elite types have accused him of exploiting the poor, and perpetuating stereotypes, which is kind of funny that the elite have to defend the poor from being exploited by the elite. But also, the problem people seem to have is it's not straight photojournalism, which I guess ruins the poverty porn aspect of it. If you are looking at awesome pictures of fucked up hopeless poor people, I guess it's better if you are just sneaking pictures of them without interacting. Shelby Lee Adams' most famous scene may be a grinning Deliverance-harkening family sitting and standing around a hung and slaughtered pig. On that day, Adams actually purchased the pig, so that the family could slaughter in the traditional ways, and have the pig. They would not have afforded the pig otherwise, so some have suggested Adams is setting these people up to exploit themselves.
The thing is - and this is all gone through in detail in a movie called The True Meaning of Pictures - he does these portraits and pictures of families, give them copies, and lets them allow or not allow him to use them for his books and shows. They may not get paid royalties off the images, but the families he is in constant contact with definitely receive compensation from Adams, in the form of food he may bring by, or simply the friendship. And let's be straight here - if an AP photographer snaps a Pulitzer winning photo of a woman with her face covered protesting in the bloody streets of Tripoli during the Libyan thing going on, and that photographer gets mad scrilla off the use of that photo, it's not like he's back out there searching for whoever that woman is to give her a cut of the action. The crying woman in that infamous Kent State shooting photograph from the '60s (or was that in 1970?) didn't get shit except a life of questions about, "Hey, ain't you the chick in that picture?"
I like Adams stuff a lot, because even now, those way lost poor ways are being sterilized by Wal-Mart. Tacking tin coffee cans over holes in the wall or floorboards of the house is being replaced by cheap Chinese goods. Seriously. Wal-Marts are big with country folks, and an hour drive twice a month to spend government money on cheap goods is a common thang amongst these folks. I saw how it changed my own grandparents when it came to Farmville, Virginia. It has an effect, and that effect has trickled deeper into the hollers and hills than I think most people realize. The ability to scrape and scratch it on hardscrabble ground is being phased out.
Part of this is white guilt though. White people are trained to believe white people automatically have it better than everybody else. And there is truth to that, just so you don't think I'm going off on some WHITE PEOPLE WAKE UP tangent here. But that is a segment of white people, not the entirety. There are a bunch of broke ass piece of shit white folks who have been pieces of shit for multiple generations, and stand very little chance of escaping that in the next couple generations. So to white people who are not fucked from birth, these shitty broke ass broken white people are examples of bad white people - those who are racist and ignorant and were the ones who probably enslaved and exploited others. Problem is, these broke ass and broken people have never had the social position to do such things. It's just plain old ignorance, no mass conspiracy to keep the rest of the world down. These fucked up hillbillies are as apt to become part of the wealthy elite at birth as your average inner-city crack baby, which is to say highly unlikely.
But fuck it man. Nothing's gonna change. Poor people are gonna be fucked, and rich people are gonna make the rules. They elected a (half) black President, and hillbillies are still doomed and the inner-cities are still crushing zones for the soul. And if a guy wants to take spooky but oddly beautiful pictures of a tiny sub-set from one of those wretched of the earth groups of doomed Americans, then goddamnit, I think it's a good thing.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – October ’10 #8: “Tuesday’s Gone (demo version)” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Today is Tuesday. Somewhere on this earth ball, something that still calls itself Lynyrd Skynyrd is going to mindlessly muddle their way through an extensive catalog of songs. And outside behind my house in the camper trailer that I use as a studio, for writing for songing and for breathing creativity into my skullfucked brain, there is a copy of the Street Survivors LP with Steve Gaines in flames from before the plane wreck tacked up onto the wall. There is also a Zodiac Mindwarp LP cover tacked up. Those are the only two album covers I display. I know they sell those frames that you can put your favorite album covers inside of and get all upwardly mobile hipster asshole and act like it’s high art, but I can’t do that. Like seriously, I would feel stupid paying more than $2 for a frame like that, and I would feel stupider putting an album cover in a frame on purpose. That is why I am not a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2010, because I am aware of what makes me a fucking dumbass.
This song is a demo version, which means it has an extra meander to the piano part in the beginning, before the regular thing that we all know and recognize cranks up. To this day, I feel like Ronnie Van Zant was one of the great pop cultural philosophers of the past 40 years. I am thankful he did not live long enough to lose his hunger and become a fat soul sloth living off his former glories. So very few of us are lucky enough to hear our inner-prophet’s voice that is really sad when those that have unlocked that ability then become corrupted by earthly treasures and the emotional control of other humans.
STEAL “Tuesday’s Gone”
NEXT UP: An ode to cough syrup, but not from Houston!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - July '10 #10: "Easy Wind" by The Grateful Dead

You know what I've said like a million times to be contrarian? How awesome the Grateful Dead would've been if it had been Pigpen who lives and Jerry who died, because then it would be a shitty drunkard blues band. But you know the truth? Either way was fine. Chicks with no underclothes and their breasts hanging out who liked to do drugs and buy you a Newcastle because it was one for $3 or two for $5 so they were saving money and just general overall fuck it vibe. Hippie chicks are Raven kryptonite. I cannot help it. The colorful skirts and unshaved yonis and turquoise jewelry and oh man when they have dreadlocks too? Raven Kryptonite.
This is still, by about a thousand miles, my favorite ever The Grateful Dead studio song ever. I have listened to a billion times in my life. I have sang it walking railroad tracks drinking wine. I have let it twang in my vehicle and cause me to pull over and buy two double deuces and go sit by the river. It is that type of song, brah.
STEAL "Easy Wind"
NEXT UP: The greatest R&B madman that the state of Virginia has ever produced!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May ’10 #4: “5 Shots of Whiskey” by Hank Williams III

Hank Williams III's new CD The Rebel Within came out the other week (honestly, I never know when things are actually for sale, as I don't for buy nothing anymore, because I have children to support; but I've been teaching them the need to support their favorite artists who are not attached directly to major corporations that will just steal all the profits anyways, because I believe in a music industry, just not one that's so goddamned sketchy; the point is, my children will be entering that age of discretionary income wasted like mad on music, so fuck you music industry, because I doubt my 11-year-old would want to even buy half the crap she wants to buy if I hadn't have exposed her to it from stolen internet songs, which works like radio used to work, just you can't horned cocksuckers can't manipulate it so easy), and though it was a great CD, better than his last one (I can't even remember the name of it), it's still a step below Straight to Hell, which is just such a goddamned great double CD, it sets a high bar to live up to. I know that Tricephus would rather do the metal stuff, and it's almost a country song in itself his whole life. Bastard son of an Populist outlaw country musician who was the neglected son himself of one of country music's most classic talented tragedies, dying in the back seat of a Cadillac. The young bastard grandchild wants to do the metal music that his heart loves, yet is beyond his ability to stop it, about a thousand times more talented at the country bullshit, because in that realm, he does something that nobody else does. In metal, it's the same ol' same ol' when he goes at it, nothing terrible but nothing special. So he gets forced into being what he doesn't really feel like being, by fans, by sketchy industry types, and by the modern necessity of seeing a goddamned paycheck go into the bank every now and then. Good country music is basically always about being trapped, and you either sing about how you are a simple and god-guided enough person to find peace and happiness within that trapped life, or you get fucked up to deal with that trapped life. Usually, the best country music combines the two, a Saturday night/Sunday morning dichotomy turned into toe-tapping jingles that help all the other sad sacks of shit staggering along the surface of the earth deal with their own life's trappings.
Oddly enough, as the new Hank Williams III came through the internet a few months ago and hit my gaypod's rotation, I found myself going back to the Lovesick, Broke, & Driftin' CD by Hank Williams III a lot more. I know he hates that album, due to the record company bullshit with Curb Records, but it's a great ass album, all the way through, with no down parts whatsoever, which you can't really say for The Rebel Within, which sometimes tried too hard to mix in that metal/punk ethos, to where it sounds forced and corny, like a public access TV show character doing junkyard commercials locally in his urban hipster idea of how a hillbilly would look. Shit, I think I'd enjoy Hank the 3rd just doing evil fucked up metal lyrics all normal wide open country style than forcing the punk bullshit into the mix. It's not like anybody other than him even does wide open country style anymore, making it not that normal. Crappy, sterilized, bullshit that dabbles in doing three hours worth of irresponsible indulgence is marketed as spirited outlaw salt of the earth music by Nashville nowadays. They don't have a fucking clue.
Anyways, "5 Shots of Whiskey" is off of that Lovesick, Broke, & Driftin' CD, and is a good fucking song to sit there and stare at an alcohol glass you are trying your best to keep empty, no matter how often you fill it back up. Trapped music for trapped lives. If that ain't country, then fuck you bitch.
STEAL “5 Shots of Whiskey”
NEXT UP: Feel good funeral dirge that hopefully is played at my actual funeral!

(7s) Fred Durst List #1 - Shooter Jennings

If the Fred Durst List were not a list but a title belt that famous people would pass off to each other in the back of my head as The Ultimately Most Deserving of Raven Smashing Empty 64 oz. Private Stock Bottles Over Their Head, then without a doubt, Shooter Jennings would be the holder of that title for a few years running now. The popularity of Hank Williams III and modern "outlaw" country has been tough for me to swallow. I mean, the whole alt.country movement was bad enough, full of suburban sterilized souls and outright Canadians pretending to be rurally aware and full of the darkness that grows wild where I grew up like honeysuckle vines and Wal-Mart parking lots. But man, some of these fake outlaw country v2.0 guys fucking kill me. Kid Rock, for example. That Lynyrd Skynyrd/"Werewolf in London" song that played everywhere a couple years ago, oh lord man, it made me wish for more Al Qaeda funding from abroad. But, and this is probably an embarrassing admission on my part, Kid Rock has done like two or three songs that momentarily entertained me, although they all eventually faded into played outness (except maybe that "Only God Knows Why" song, which if it catches me just right, like driving to the river on a hot day with beer between my legs, it still makes sense to me).
But Shooter Jennings' music, if you've never listened to it, is the most pretentious wannabe outlaw bullshit that has ever been made. It's obviously music made by someone who doesn't really understand outlaw living at all. Being a wealthy kid who got into exclusive clubs as a teenager to get drunk is not really true outlaw behavior, and Shooter Jennings always comes across like someone who'd be more comfortable on an episode of The Hills than sitting around a picnic table with a beer cooler centerpiece. He had a show on the Sirius satellite that I listened to for about seven minutes a couple of weeks in a row, at the beginning because it must've came on after something good, maybe Hillbilly Jim's Moonshine Matinee on the weekend, and good lord it made me want to smash the world in frustration for not being able to kill the satellite sending the waves back to earth. Pretendery and pompous. And when you look at the dude, it's such a stylized ruffian look, with greasy looking hair that has grease added after washing with organic lavendar conditioner rather than actually left unwashed to get that natural greasy look going. (That's an interesting aside, the pretentious nature of "organic" as opposed to just doing it, like making three thousand degrees of extra effort to prove you are not doing the same stupid shit makes it better. On food, I understand the labeling, because I don't like feeding my children slow cancer, but at the same time if you're eating Angie's Organic Frozen Pizzas all the time, it's still processed and comes from a big nasty ass factory with giant vats of things being pressed into shape by machines operated by Mexicans.)
I have become certain that at some point I will cross paths with Shooter Jennings, and I will get to smash him, should I choose to live my dream, and I feel bad, because the best dog I ever had got his name from the dude's dad. But at the same time, later generations of awesome people end up sucking. I was supposed to paint a house for a dude who used to be the dentist for the family that the guy named Raven I got my name came from, and I was gonna get the gig because of that connection. But I never got back to the old dude, so he went another way, and I'm sure he was all like, "Man, this damn Raven guy is nothing like old Raven Speed was. These turkeys have turned this world all to hell." And then he'd complain about the Mexicans probably since a couple of them live on our road now and one of them has wrecked into the same embankment in a curve two times in the past five weeks. But he did it into the yard of the asshole former state trooper who lives down the road from me, so I think it's funny. That former state trooper dude used to call our old landlord when we didn't cut our grass. Now we own the place and let it grow all the time, and have junk cars and chickens and pigs and a tipi and a freezer on the front porch and a pile of scrap metal and there's nothing he can do about it. What's up now, bitches?

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #5 - The West Virginia Documentaries of Jacob Young

Jacob Young is the guy who introduced Jesco White aka The Dancin' Outlaw to the world at large. He also did an equally awesome documentary called The Wild and Wonderful World of Hasil Adkins. Honestly, I don't think either of those dudes would have had the cult popularity they had in the past 20 years if it wasn't for Jacob Young's documentaries (although The Dancin' Outlaw 2 is pretty terrible). Oddly enough, these DVDs are hard to come by, leaving me rigging my shitty Farmville pawn shop VCR into the hi-def super TV my bro-in-law got us last year, turning coaxial into RCA cables somehow, with homemade splitters held together by masking tape, and watching Jesco get all, "you best stop makin' them sloppy slimy eggs" inspirational in fully blown apart super pixelated effect. Fourth or fifth generation VCR dubs don't blow up well to the wide screens of today cyberhappy world. Man, I miss them days, hooking up two VCRs and making mix videos of retarded bullshit. Now it's all on Youtube, which is easy I guess, but there's something heartwarming about having some weird mongoloid punk rocker from Ohio mail you some weird offbrand blank VCR tape with Larry Williams giving directions that just typing "Larry Williams directions" into the youtubes doesn't give you. I know that sounds old manly of me, but shit man, it's true. I'm all for technology making our life easier in some aspects, like being able to take money out of the bank at night through their robot machines, or not having to stay up until 11:10 at night to see what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow morning and whether I have to get up 15 minutes early to warm up my lazy ass truck.
Anyways, Jacob Young also, before he did the Jesco White and Hasil Adkins things, made a short documentary called Appalachian Junkyard, about junkyards in West Virginia. I am a big fan of junkyards, love walking around them, especially the permanent family ones where they don't recycle stock, so once you find your make and model in a far corner down in the bottom where the old potato chip truck painted to say SLUTZ is at, you know it's there, and has most everything you need that you didn't already cannibalize off of it. Sadly, two summers ago, when scrap metal prices went sky high, a lot of old junkyards sold off their stock, thinning down the beautiful expanses of junk cars rural America once had. Even the Mahan junkyard down in Farmville sold off a bunch of their shit, from what I heard. That place was where my love of junkyards started, being a kid and tagging along with my dad to go look for shit, being a teenager and getting drunk in the treehouse and trying not to bust my ass coming back down the ladder steps. Tell you what though, that's a beautiful ass junkyard, with a full-sized muscle car buried in it, as well as Big Pug himself. In fact, oddly enough, there are two junkyards in Cumberland County, Virginia, where I went to funerals at. And I guess that's why the nonsense from the documentaries about Jesco White and Hasil Adkins spoke to me and still do. It's not so much a "haha, look at them, they crazy," thing, as it is I can relate to weird ass people like that. Southside Virginia got punked out by progress though, and them wild ass good ole boys all got replaced by short hair responsible Toby Keith fans. Fucking sad.
And where I live now, man, it's nothing but short hair responsible ass police-respecting Brad Paisley-loving assholes. It sucks. I want a rural world where the Jescos and Hasils can still flourish and people still fight chickens and they’ll never pave the roads and the cops don’t even respond to calls in certain parts of the county until the sun comes up. The road we’ve lived on for ten years has always been paved in our time here, but apparently only got paved like twenty years ago. Now it’s nothing but McHouses and well-to-do people cutting their grass four times a week, and our home insurance company just sent us a stupid letter saying we had to move the “unlicensed vehicles” from our property and the furniture off the front porch (I hope they don’t mean the freezer too, because that’s the best place for it) and unhook the extension cord running from the side window to the camper in the backyard. What the fuck kind of world do we live in? The fucking assholes have obviously won.