SONG OF THE DAY: EVERYWHEREIGO

Just a great song, nothing to write here, other than this, which is actually nothing, but I feel like words are supposed to go here. Do people still do music blogs anymore? Why am I here? What is the purpose of this?

SONG OF THE DAY: Call My Bluff

I find the smart markery of GOATdom proclamations annoying as fuck at this point. People throw GOAT around all the time, to where a local rapper with a couple notable songs in a thus far short career is hyped up with GOAT ego boosts in every social media post, even though they only left their little world a couple times, one of which was a pay-for-play SXSW scam in all likelihood. And that’s no diss to anybody chasing their dream, by any means necessary, so much as saying lolol can’t everybody be the GOAT or else you demean the superlative. But I guess we do live in a time of instant proclamation and demeaning superlatives.
My music listening process for shit on an old iphone used as music box is a slow boil. New releases come out, and might not even get into the mix for a month or more, so I’m always behind the curve of saying, “Wow! This new XYZ album is definite Album of the Year!” I might not listen to that shit until next year. And being from Virginia, where ain’t shit to do but, well, fuck around on the internet like everywhere else at this point to be honest, when Pusha T drops a new project, it registers, even on my old contrarian head radar. So the songs slowly started making it into the old iphone in the car. This ended up being my favorite song (so far), but it’s not like it’s anything groundbreaking or amazing. It’s good though.
Calling constant GOATification a smart mark act is fitting, because fuck man, everything is like pro wrestling nowadays in the performative digital world we have had manufactured around us while we were standing still for too long. There’s a nostalgia to albums by folks with long-term hip hop careers like Pusha, so people always overhype them as being way greater than they likely are. It’s a lot like seeing a former WWE superstar wrestling at the state fair for some local indy promotion, and folks mark the fuck out for seeing the former Intercontinental Champion who main evented Wrestlemania one time, right in front of their eyes again. But ol’ boy ain’t hitting like he used to, or he’s just going through those things you remember from back in his prime. Sometimes it actually is still good, but a lot of times it’s just mimicking old shit, and something’s missing completely.
Most of the time, it’s not just individual effort that creates those shining moments though – there’s the wrestler you were working with, the environment at the time, how you were coached to pace yourself and how much time you were given to do what you do. So it’s interesting to me in actually looking up the album notes to Pusha’s latest, that Pharrell produced a bunch of it (and most of the songs I enjoyed), including this track. Neptunes’ production helped create a sparse but engaging foundation for Clipse’s prime, and Pusha’s whole delivery is built off flexing on that type of beat. To be honest, I kinda hate Pharrell as a whole, because I guess I resent Virginia’s hip hop reputation being so pop-oriented, due to his influence (and Timbaland too, I guess). But the man has been involved on some absolute bangers, and knows how to get grimy with his fruity loops. So this song worked well, not as some groundbreaking new era shit that sets a new aura and aesthetic for music that I’m gonna say is Album of the Year like some stupid fucking mark. But it’s a great song, like going to the state fair and seeing wrestling and like two dudes who used to be on cable TV twenty years ago every Monday night have a match and they absolutely nail the magic for three minutes, even though they used to be able to go an hour. It’s great for what it is, and that’s just as necessary, because our whole life can’t be GOAT shit, or else GOAT means nothing.

SONG OF THE DAY: Algerie Maroc

I would like to say something clever but am unable to think of anything, yet still want to whittle down my list of "songs of the day" that I have an arbitrary rule about posting once a day, so that the backlog doesn't get too high that I become uncomfortable because of all the stupid arbitrary rules I apply to my life on a daily basis. Nonetheless, this is a great song, because it wouldn't be on my list if it wasn't. At least not to me.

SONG OF THE DAY: Strange (screwed and chopped)

Explaining the mundane background soundtrack
which makes life less wack – this real life lacking
in actions which maximize feeling mack,
and mostly saturated with slacking
while appearing to be doing. Unreal…
and I didn’t feel like finishing, so that’s it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Teach Me

I'll admit, I'm hard headed. That's the whole post - there's no "but..." with a long-winded clever exploration into some sort of self-realization. I'm just a hard headed dude sometimes. A lot of times actually.

SONG OF THE DAY: Loc'in On The Shaw

Tone Loc's tape gets overlooked a lot because he's seen as a one hit wonder by our fickle ass culture, even though he was still making music, voicing cartoon dogs, and getting into shootouts with the Boo-Yaa Tribe years later. Before The Dust Brothers got famous helping hone that wild ass Paul's Boutique sound for the Beastie Boys, they worked on Tone Loc's first album, which means there's all these amazing but forgotten beats. "Loc'in On The Shaw" is exactly that too, one of those "let's ride forever" beats that a person can freestyle to for at least 7000 miles before getting tired. I once woke up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and my alarm clock ipod randomly played this to wake me up, so I called in sick, and took a leisurely drive west, ending up in Montevideo, Uruguay, thirty-seven years later, having lived three lives along the way, in eastern Kentucky, the borderlands near McAllen, Texas, and finally in Montevideo, walking to see matches played at Estadio Cenentario when possible, sight of the first World Cup, spray painting haiku on alley walls in my horrible mangled Spanglish. Finally, I had to work on Monday, so I drove back home, playing the beat almost the entire way back as well, but deciding when near Texas to play DJ Screw's Syrup & Soda mixtape instead. When I got to Virginia though, I was worried my racist ancestors would be mad, so I put on some Willie Nelson for the last stretch. All of that happened in 2018, which shows you the timelessness of these beats lost on a Tone Loc album nobody will listen to because they think all he did was "Wild Thing".

SONG OF THE DAY: Allah Hoo Allah Hoo

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is basically the King Diamond of Sufi devotional music. Tons of qawwali music inside the cybervoids, tons by this dude, but I prefer to just listen to ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO ALLAH HOO on loop, in the woods, chanting with the crows. I wasn’t gonna say nothing smart about music but then I accidentally explained who he was a little. Pretend I didn’t. Pretend none of this happened.

T00K KVM1 Y4M4SH1T4...

took "Kumi Yamashita"

picture to remember their

name, then blurs made it artsy

SONG OF THE DAY: Regal

yesterday was cutlass 

today is regal 

my heart must be drag racing 

the blossoming of the redbuds 

means the aroma of racing fuel 

is not far away 

SONG OF THE DAY: Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

-->

An unlimited war on terror, but never no war on psychic terrordome constructed over top us all like invisible bubble, filtering what information is fed, feed lots of fear and loathing and self-hatred, fattening us with lethargy of spirit, then being told to consume a fresh identity, over and over, rebranding ourselves as if that’s how nature works, as if we aren’t natural beings, as if a new style of clothes corrects the essence of who we are, which we mistakenly believe is flawed in an abnormal way. The welcome to the terrordome sign faded and old, because it’s nothing new at this point. Children having grown up their entirely lives inside the terrordome, to where they say, “you don’t understand, that’s just how it is,” because the notion of there not being a terrordome no longer exists in the human brain. “It is what it is” I say to the mirror, and I wonder if my eyes really are duller than they used to be, or if I’m just seeing things. The terrordome is the full realization of the prison in all metaphysical space. I’ll go back to my feedlot desk next week, after the “holiday”, after a new year where I resolve that somehow it’s all going to be different, but the steel has expanded – there is no great escape on the books in the immediate future. Not that anyone can see. What will spark that moment? What person in the street who just happens to light a fire, perhaps of themselves, immolation of self in final act of frustration, and we all go, “yeah, yes, YES” if we are there in person and see it happen, as the flames dissipate the illusion of all this. And it won’t circulate as viral sensation, because the revolution will not be digitized, the algorithms are pasteurized to conduit you unto the fear and loathing and self-hatred and purchasing of new identities through consumption. But live in real life the moment will flash bang into a tiny grenade of chaos that will begin a trigger like long string of human firecrackers, and a great escape attempt will be made. Might not be successful, at least not for everyone, but we shall see how many dents we can put into this terrordome when it happens.

TOP TEN DR. DRE-SEUSS CHRONIC-INFUSED APPLES UP ON TOP

#1: digital sedate/mentality master bait/heart pump bloods stagnate
#2: derp syzzurp sippin’/synthetic time keeps slippin’/off track world trippin’
#3: language sounds weak rhymes/military horns end times/gabe’s trumpet sublimes
#4: infinite surface/makes finite mindframe nervous/misjudging purpose
#5: the struggle is real/personal jihad peace meal/multi-verse reveal
#6: (wack not whack) grammar/(attack teh intact) jammer/(i’m prisoned) slammer
#7: census deceptions/shard mirror self-reflections/cheap recollections
#8: welfare motel sex/floating grocery store checks/survival concepts
#9: I remember when…/8’s enough, no 9, no 10…/ink-filled livestock pen…
#10: purpose misconstrued/genetic language “light”-hued/declaring blood feud

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #4: "Eye Examination" by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien

When I was in the college, I did a 12-page paper on this very song, for a linguistics class, breaking the shit down to a nerdgasmic compound. At the time that was crazy clever, but what with the internet, that's been lost. I'm not sure how you'd be clever nowadays with everything meta times twelve all over the place. But I've always dug this song immensely - actually have the 12-inch single for I think "Dr. Bombay" but to be honest, I don't even know, because all I ever played off the single was "Eye Examination" proving that B-side not only won again but made A-side obsolete in my brain.
I went to college at VCU, which is in the news for basketball glory. Kids filled the streets at campus when they won their Final Four game last weekend, except a lot of campus is like a couple blocks over from where I remember, because they've expanded like fuck, trying to chase off the negro crimelords of Jackson Ward, and expand the big industry of higher education to revitalize the Broad Street corridor around the campus there. Used to be a place called Ivory's where people got shot every weekend. Like seriously, every weekend. Dude opened up with a machine gun one night, and abandoned his hot pink Beamer right on Broad Street. I always wondered if he just ran off or got in someone else's car or what. Seems a big waste of a pimped out Beamer. Ivory's is gone though, as is the Hardee's and the old strip club that was the most decrepit concrete building ever, that got tore down while I was still in school there. Industry is the key to revitilization.
They showed a park there where the students were encouraged to celebrate, but none of them really filled the park, which was odd to me and my wife because when we went everybody hung out there, including the homeless. But the school took over the park - Monroe Park - and put benches with center armrests to keep people from sittin' sideways on them, and put a campus cop shop in the center gazebo-like building. I guess no one goes there anymore, like it's a red zone of unlounging and the kids preferred to fill the asphalt going around it. That park is where I first met my wife. I was high on acid. That's college.
My linguistics paper on Del's B-side song that won again, I really was proud of it, more so than most things I did in college. I still have the word processor I wrote it on, but the thing is broke, and you can't use those disks from one to the other without them being reformatted, but I still have a box of those disks from that word processor. I have in that box about 80 pages on a novel I wrote about some coked out ambulance EMT guy who was stealing tattooed skins off of dead people, and there was this background uprising going on where naked people with torches - like hundreds of them - would just storm through at times like a tsunami wave of feral humanity. The novel really sucked, and I got sick of the main character, and didn't want to hang out with him anymore. I wish I could see what he's been up to, locked up in those obsolete word processor disks all these years. I wonder if he ever finished making his wall-hanging?
STEAL "Eye Examination"
NEXT: You can run but you can never hide, not even when you are concealed!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - March '11 #12: "Think About It" by Otis Redding

This is another Otis Redding song, and I was gonna write something about soulful music and how it was a rainy Sunday and we made a giant playlist of soulful chill ass music and it played all day long until the whole 8 hour list was done, and then we started it again. But I couldn't really get into the flow of that stream of thought, so I typed shit, then deleted, then typed, then deleted. Conscious is a hard thing to overcome, and I realize the correct term is "conscience" but I am being wrong on purpose there because when you get conscious of what you are doing, you lose the ability to do it so easily I think. The human condition is to think too fucking much, and we all do it, and try to make ourselves feel better by mocking others who do not do it the way we do it. And oddly enough, as I get lost in the nothing, I talk about how we think too much, and realize, "Oh yeah, this song is called 'Think About It'." And it is.
That's the beauty of a good goddamned song. You can talk and think and get hung up in your world all you want. For me, that means I am trying to go back to work today, not feeling sure about it, still have a fucking oozing 2-inch deep wound on my abdomen, but feel like an unproductive member of society at this point. But why do I care? What makes me have a work ethic for a job that I regard as a transition towards doing what I truly want to do with my life? Shit man, I should be on short-term disability and riding this the fuck out as hard as possible you'd think. But I can't. I think too much, and wonder if someone is being let down by me not doing more than I am, in my work. And then this is my work too, and I wonder if I space out and don't do things for a few days if I am letting down people who come here, looking for their escape. Do people check every day? And at the same time, I'll talk to someone who says, "Yeah, I look at your shit once a week, and goddamn there's always a ton of shit on there." To me, it's constant, but to most it's random. How do you navigate through it? What the fuck is wrong with me?
Well, that's the thing. This is what I do, even if we haven't really nailed down what it is yet. I mean, I know, and there's a process, and we'll be pulling the tarp off of some other things this year, and maybe it will make sense. Or maybe not. It's hard when you overthink it. And really all I do is overthink.
Which is probably why a song by Otis Redding asking the ol' lady who is about to cut out the door to give it a second thought. It is easy to imagine when you are a tortured cerebral basketcase that the other person has not given it the proper brain look from the right angle, like you have. And also the greatness of a song is to capture that moment, to be sad and broken-souled because the person you had invested so emotionally in is bankrupting your ass all of a sudden, completely withdrawn and bound to be gone. Who hasn't been there? Why the fuck don't people make music like that anymore?
I'm getting hung up on things again, because I just thought about it and wondered where I was going. I am going nowhere, at least not with this. It is a song. A great fucking song.
STEAL "Think About It"
NEXT: The fantastic tale of the origins of an urban culture that has been domesticated by devils to plow the minds of the sheeple!

Friday Love/Hate

I hate, absolutely hate being incapacitated like I have been. It has been nearly three weeks since I first bed-ridded myself, and my nature is not to sit still much at all. Today I was feeling better, and walked through the yard twice, plus stood around the house inside a lot. Tonight that made me feel like parts of my organs were falling south through my crotch. I am done with it. But I’m not. Frustration is a motherfucker, and I am a frustrated motherfucker.

I love the strange world we live though. I have a friend dumpster diving for my pigs tomorrow. That’s really the only thing I could think of. People are bringing us food, which is really great and I appreciate it, but I am craving all the bad things in life. I want to wander back roads to weird defunct steel mining towns and eat at shitty Chinese buffets and take pictures of railroad tracks beside smokestacks. Shit man, I’ve started taking pictures of things from my bed, which is a very difficult canvas to continue to find inspiration. At least my narcotic prescription ran out so I have my brain back to full functionality, though this boring as fuck love/hate probably is not a testament to it. Oh well… I thought I would’ve wrote 9 novels by now while laid up, but it’s been physically impossible to stay comfortable for more than an hour or two on the best days of the past three weeks. I ain’t bitching, because most all the world has it worse than me. And this whole thing had kinda been a test for me to make sure the path I’ve chosen to switch up on in the past three or four months is the path I really want… and it is. Fuck you World. I’m gonna take your ass down. Bully me all you want, but I got you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my water bottle is empty, so I’m going to take four minutes to wiggle my way upright off the couch, take four minutes to walk the twelve or so normal steps around the corner into the next room to the refrigerator, think how I want something to eat but not be able to bend down to open the bottom crisper with baby carrots in it, so I’ll eat a cheese stick, take four minutes back to my couch aka nighttime bed, position myself to be barely comfortable, click the button on the remote to see what time it is and how long it’s been since I took Advil or Tylenol, focus on whatever Iron Chef episode is now on my TV screen… (By the way, BIG motherfuckin’ UPS to Russ Mac in Georgia for sending all those DVDs a while back. I never actually watched too much of the Iron Chefs, but have been working my way through them all this week. I want to have that book out too, to full-on nerd out, but I only remember at night when everyone’s asleep and it’s in the peach crate by the toilet below where I can reach. Yeah, I can’t even put socks on right now.) Then I’ll sleep uncomfortably for a little while, wake up, let the internet make me a little stupider for a few minutes, click the Iron Chef back to whatever episode I fell asleep on, and repeat it all, in a slightly different order. In the morning, I’ll be really afraid the toddler is gonna come running in and Superfly Snuka me (like she has done already) so I’ll wake up with the light outside the window and uncomfortable wait for everybody to wake up, when I’ll relocate to the bedroom bed, read a few short stories, think about how awesome this short story I’ve been planning in my head is about someone doing asemic writing in an abandoned school, think about how I’d like to just do that in that old hospital in Staunton by the Frontier Culture Museum rather than write a story, then I’ll think about the hospital and how awesome old abandoned mental institutions are and why they intrigue me so much, which is probably because in the olden days they would’ve just put me there, which would probably be cool because then I could just draw pictures with soot like James Castle or actually do asemic writing all over my walls except I’d be restrained physically so they’d give me paper and probably an electric pencil and I’d make weird drawings like that instead. I actually filled about ten pages of a notebook trying to work up a new personal graffiti font because I don’t like the one I naturally have developed as it’s not cholo enough. I got some good things going on early, but was having trouble with the second row of letters (H-N) from that toy I learned my alphabet from as a kid, which I still divide the alphabet up by (A-G, H-N, O-T, U-Z). And I really didn’t want to skip rows, so I just worked on A through G a whole fucking lot because I just couldn’t wrap my head around a good way to do an H. That’s part of the problem right there, trying to “wrap my head” around something instead of letting my head unleash itself upon the dilemma. We are too filled with false knowledges about minor things to really allow ourselves to unleash anymore. I am not sure where I am going with this – probably nowhere, just rambling, like always, but without a point, like often. But my ass is starting to hurt so I’m going to shut down the laptop and shift myself painfully about two inches one way, an inch back the other, and see how Hiroyuki Sakai and this French dude do in this lamb battle. I’ll probably fall asleep and wake up craving Aladdin’s from Richmond circa 1996, but hey, my mind, it’s a fucking thing, what which lets things in and shakes around like Boggle and then things come back out and I just go, “Hmmm, intriguing idea,” and then worry about work because there’s so much to do when I get back.

Murphy's Stout

AFFORDABILITY: Look, I do not remember particularly what the cost was, and goddamnit I hate these stupid parameters I make that no one holds me to but if I switched off it somebody would be like, “What is this shit man?” as soon as I did it, like how your lottery numbers always hit the day you don’t play them. But I do know a few certain facts... One is the Murphy’s Stout is one of those fancy limey dude canned beers with the apple widget floating around inside that performs some sort of garbage science that Americans have never figured out or just don’t need with our waterbeers. The other is I never buy those four-packs of oddly-shaped beers with the rattling innards unless they are on sale, because breaking down to $2.50 per can and you’re not a normal tall can but a limey tall can, that does not compute. But if it goes on sale, it tricks me into thinking I have sprung upon a bargain, so I go with it, even though nothing we ever buy, even on sale, is a true bargain, because they still profit off selling rotten tomatoes and throw away more shit than I could hope to ever buy on a daily basis. But I do it. You know why. I was gonna write “Baaaa-cause” but that would be fucking retarded. So I’ll just leave it hanging with me admitting that and still seeming like a dumbass over the possibility shared. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I remember enjoying the Murphy’s Stout and it filled my head with wonkiness, much like my penis fills with blood during springtime drives around humans that lack their own penises, so far as I can tell. I know Murphy is a real dude, who I think lives in Alabama, or maybe Colorado, but bro, if you ever want to kick it in VA, bring some of your beers and we can roll to the river at Hatton Ferry and get our chill on, let the dogs run around and chase sticks and otters and crap like that, and scope out all the high school and college kids in groups doing the river tube rental thing from the place that shows up with buses full of people like every 20 minutes, who all climb into the water in a giant explosion of sound and laughter and beer can opening, and then float the fuck away, leaving us with our silence and a couple of their beers, which they are always only too glad to offer me when I ask for one, probably to keep the bearded, badly tattooed, in all likelihood hillbilly rapist guy with the big black dogs from ruining their life with elaborate victimizations. It’s fun. Holla at me, Murphy. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Murphy's has a beer can that is odd style because not commonly known, yet nothing about it stands out for me, especially compared to wacky limey cans like Boddingtons or Guinness. But whatever. It is a can, so you can crush it, which makes any logo look great. I have, for about a year and a half, been collecting whatever beer or soda cans that get flattened along my road, hoping to eventually bind them together using solder or tacks or alchemics or brain magic or something to make giant sheets of wall hangings. You can't do that with beer bottles. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Don't know no Murphys anymore, though I have in the past. One was a straight up gonna be educated redheaded wise ass. I saw a picture of him on the Facebooks, but you can never tell if those things are the real deal or robot attempts to hijack your soul into wayward trajectories. I am not much for Irish pride type shit, ever since "Jump Around" became that extreme folksy song about walking in other people's shoes, so I don't really give a fuck about who makes Murphy's. I would hope it's bonafide in the flesh Murphy people, but most likely it's some sort of inanimate entity represented publicly by a sharp logo that performs psychological trickeries without you even knowing. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I have no complaints over this here Murphy's Stout. Most limeyland beers I think I will hate but I don't mind, though I still halfway hate most of them, depending on how pretentious the real life people I've drank them around or with have been about the limey factor. Because of this, Boddington's Pub Ale is probably my least disliked of all the limeyland beers, but I'm not even sure if I have any real life drankin' with folks Murphy's Stout times to draw extreme prejudices from. I vaguely remember perhaps some nights of drinking it in Richmond back in the day, perhaps at that fucking hole in the wall Irish place right around the corner from the Science Museum, but I vaguely remember a lot of things at this point in my life, and a lot of times they either never happened, or somebody told me about it, or I saw it in a movie. Like I don't think I really ever jumped my car over a creek to escape a cop chasing me, cutting across Old Man Hatfield's ryegrass fields, but it's in my brain as a memory. Broke both tie rods, and it was a bitch getting my car to pass inspection two months later. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 STARS!