J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - August '09

Here is the top 13 plus-minus most played not skipped tracks on my stupid little gaypod silver shuffle which I never take out my truck and hardly lock the doors but I tuck it into my gearshifter cover thing that's all baggy and can easily hide things like this. That's what I does.
#1: "Uncle Sam Goddamn" by The Brother Ali - I don't know, after that one CD and seeing him live, I was all like, "Man, this guy is gonna be the greatest thing ever." Then he did a tour with Rakim and Ghostface Killah, and it could only mean bigger and better things. But then he put out that crappy assed CD that I can't even remember the name of but it sounded like a smart dude knowing he was smart and being really uninspired by it all. At this point, I'd say Brother Ali is more hype than delivery, though the potential is still there. I still like this song a lot, and my 10-year-old kid is all about it, but honestly his last CD had nothing even close to this. And if you want to be the Truth, you've got to do more than rap intelligently while making 50 Cent style hooks but with religious references instead of champagne ones and expect me to give a fuck. What color is this dude anyways? He better not go to Tanzania though with his albino ass.
#2: "Contrabando y Traicion" by The Los Tigres Del Norte - I am all about some norteno music, probably because being a shitty housepainter by trade, I have spent time cramped up into dilapidated vans and trucks owned by other whiter people than myself with assorted Mexicans. I'm not sure why, but this is probably my favorite norteno song, although to be honest, most norteno I actually possess was when I stole a bunch of Los Tigres Del Norte from inside the internets.
#3: "C.R.E.A.M." by El Michel's Affair - I'm an ol' Wu-head, through and through. And persnickety too, to the point I’m all like, “Man, they started falling the fuck off with Wu-Tang Forever,” and “Bobby Digital sucks a dick.” But that’s how I roll... passionate and hateful. Anyways, there’s been a slew of things to tinkle the memory machine of ol’ Wu-heads lately, including the super-dupe Memory Man DITC/Wu mash-up mixtape (which isn’t a mixtape at all but a digital file you can steal from inside the internet’s womb), and some of this shit right here by El Michel’s Affair, an old school style funk/soul band, most likely full of whiteboys I’d guess, probably from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Babylon, USA. But regardless of that, this is some good, laid back shit, some funk ass band recreating Wu Tang instrumentals. It’s so good in fact the one song they have where Raekwon actually raps with them is their worst song. Of course, Raekwon sounds bored as fuck half the time anyways. If Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 ever really comes out, it’ll be sponsored by Ambien (which is some fucked up shit that’ll make you see packs of dead people standing around your bed and shit).
#4: "Happy Hour" by Corntooth - Not only is Matt Conner my old roommate, he’s my favorite country singer of the past twenty years. That’s one tormented motherfucker half the time, to where I seen him want to kill a dude over a slice of bread and like pictures of ugly chicks scatting (not like Ella Fitzgerald either), and I’d like to hear more tormented workingman angry kill kill soothing country sounds. The band Corntooth is some Richmond music all-stars bullshit, which I guess half of them don’t kick it with the other half of them anymore, or some such bullshit like happens when big egos from small ponds hang out too much during their free time blocks.
#5: "Cold Rain and Snow (instrumental" by The Grateful Dead - My brother-in-law had given us an external hard drive chock full of music a while back, but I only hit it up every now and then, usually in searching mode just to see what’s on there, since there’s a lot of shit I’d deem of questionable sexuality. But I found some Dead thing that’s like alternate takes and instrumentals. This has come up on my gaypod a couple times and I hit repeat and freestyle wacky white workingman knocking off of work early to go sit by the river and wait for death to free me from this slavemaster world type freestyles.
#6: "I've Got Dreams To Remember (Bitch)" by Otis Redding - Otis Redding is my favorite mainstream non-pervert soul singer and this is my favorite Otis Redding song. Much like millions of redneck men before me, who grow old but still drink and end up at parties where you pitch a tent to pass out in but wake up Sunday morning to start drinking beer again around the smoky coals of the bonfire pit and you request a soul singer to come on and the person in charge of music plays them but then your favorite song comes on and you do weird scoot wobble dances across the slick with dew grass, I’m gonna eventually be a greybeard and kick it like that to this song.
#7: "Something Went Wrong Again" by Thee Headcoats - When I hit the lottery, I’m gonna waste part of my money by hiring Billy Gibbons and Billy Childish to sit around and make music with me while we get drunk as fuck in my basement. I’m not exactly sure where Billy Childish is from, I’m thinking maybe Scotland but I know those non-British subjects to the Queen get all weird about their personal ethnic heritage even though to me, as an American, fuck them, so I’ll just say that whatever Billy Childish is, he’s a national treasure, and they should build statues of him, except not concrete ones but give stacks of old bicycles and scrap metal to mental patients and let them make giant whirligigs that are inspired by Billy Childish. If it looks like him, all the better.
#8: "Trap Door" by Jake One featuring MF Doom - I played the hell out of the MF Doom from this year, but for some reason this track where he’s just a featured guest catches my earball regularly. I’m not even being consciously contrarian where I’m like, “Haha, y’all be listening to his regular shit but I’m rocking the obscure stylings!” I just like the song a lot. I don’t even know who Jake One is, but if he’s a dude who just hooks up beats, I bet he’s got a fragile ego and really overblows all the work he does as this masterful musical masterpiece because he took the nerdlab time to learn how to push buttons and manipulate really great music that someone else found for him, or he happened to catch when listening to the first ten seconds of every song on every album he bought at some dank record store in a city 45 minutes from his home.
#9: "Castles Made of Sand" by Jimi Hendrix - My daughters really got into The Beatles for a while so I put some Hendrix on my gaypod to school them on something far less annoying and old people-like than the stupid Beatles. In actuality, in high school, I first started to discover my contrarian personality when out of a group of four tight ass homeboys, three of them were all into Jimi Hendrix, to the point that was all they played. I was the fourth and I’d kick shit, with a serious look and attitude, like, “I don’t know man, Santana was probably better, he had that whole crazy rhythm thing going on.” Oh man, such bullshit. I hate me some Santana now, but the Santana that’s still alive suffered the same soul-sucking cybertronic surgery that Cheech Marin got. You know, that’s how Oscar Zeta Acosta died, when the CIA abducted him and tried to steal his soul, but he just concentrated real hard until his heart exploded instead. In case you don’t know, Oscar Zeta Acosta was Hunter S. Thompson’s lawyer, the character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a big influence on that gonzo style. Whenever people give me Barnes & Nobles gift cards, I just order more copies of Revolt of the Cockroach People and leave them in hotel room drawers. It be my bible. Man, when I hit the lottery, I gotta remember to put Zeta Acosta books in dank ass hotels, like the whole Gideon bible thing, but in reverse, for delinquents and loungers.
#10: "Purple Stuff" by Big Moe featuring D-Gotti - I should mention that I only bump the screwed version, so if you go to the youtubes and search “Purple Stuff” and see the video with the 300 pound black dude in the shiny purple suit and that little crazy leprechaun running around and the music’s all normal speed, understand it doesn’t sound right unless you slow it down like DJ Screw would’ve done. It doesn’t hurt to see how a hydrocodone pill tastes either.
#11: "Straight Gangstaism" by The Geto Boys but actually The Convicts - 3-2 was Big Mike’s rapping podna in The Convicts, and they got a Rap-a-Lot deal to get Big Mike into the Geto Boys to replace yelling ass Willie D (who I think I read is selling real estate in like Kurdistan or some shit nowadays) because Dre was trying to get The Convicts to be on Death Row since they were Snoop Dogg’s roommates... all of this is gleamed from smoked out memories of reading Rap Pages, so don’t hold me to it, although if I just wrote it on the internet then it must be true, so go tell your friends. Anyways, 3-2 has a remarkably unworthy career for a dude who was featured on two banging ass tracks from that era - this song and “Pocket Full of Stones” by UGK off the Menace II Society soundtrack. This song is just some gangsta ass memories of childhood and how good it feels to grow up and be a successful street thug nonsense, but man, the Rap-a-Lot crew of anonymous, barely credited producers who made their tracks back then were on it on this song. I can’t even explain how the piano or whatever the fuck it is throbs at your brain when you’re high. And Big Mike’s crazy style (highly underrated in the world of the rapping music) that gets all hyper like Outkast but’ll slide into the drawliest drawl all of a sudden, it sounds perfect. 3-2 does that shit too, but with about nine cotton balls of Puerto Rican blood stuffed into his mouth. It’s a great fucking song, and easily one of the best five Geto Boys songs ever, and it don’t even got Face, Bushwick, or yelling ass Willie D on it.
#12: "Higher Field Marshall" by Prince Far-I & Peter Broggs - An internet dude inside the Secret Clubhouse who is into the dub music shared this at one point, and it has survived a long life inside my gaypod, and rarely gets skipped, which is impressive considering I stole a bunch of those Trojan boxsets a while back and threw them in the mix and it totally burned me on all sorts of dub/reggae/ska all that for a while. Man, that shit gets repetitive as fuck. Maybe I don’t get high enough. (That could mean to get high more often or it could mean to get even more fucked up on a daily basis. I won’t tell, just don’t make me take drug tests for my food stamps.)
#13: "African People" by The Jay Boys but kinda Madlib - “Indian Reservation (Lament of the Cherokee People)” song by Paul Revere and the Raiders is one of those old ass corny AM radio songs that I actually liked. It’s got some weird things going in in there, and plus it’s some straight up white guilt poor indian people lyrics to top that off with. So to hear a weird dub version about Africa, man, that really taps deep into my white guilt. Haha, not really, but that made me think of how much I hate those shirts that say COLO(RED) or whatever, to bring awareness to Africa’s plight as pit of the world, at like $20 a pop. Why don’t I just buy some cheap ass t-shirts and send them the change? Fucking white people. We ruined Africa by thinking we knew what was best for it, and now it’s all fucked up with child soldiers and people killing albinos for their bones and eating the brains of your enemy to prove a point, so we, as white people, think we can fix it and make it better because we know what’s best for it. Sometimes it’s best to just get the fuck out of the way. If you’re drunk driving and you run over some lady, don’t go trying to put a splint on her broken leg with a 2x4. Just let it be and let everybody figure out how to move on on their own.

August O.C.D. #5: Historic Porn

Look, don’t tell anybody, but once in awhile me and the ol’ lady might try to watch a porn movie. Very rarely does it actually happen though because very little porn is geared to be enjoyable to a functioning couple. Mostly it’s weird, control freakish bullshit meant to be viewed by weak-minded dudes who want to control the world they feel so lost inside of all the time. At least that’s how I see it. I’m not sure what’s stimulating about having three dudes standing around one girl and trying to blast cumshots on her face. That actually seems kinda gay to me, to be perfectly honest. In fact, a lot of man/woman porn seems ultimately gay to me, not in the sense it’s gay porn but in the sense it’s for guys unable to admit emotion to women or bond with them, but can do that with their bros, at a woman’s expense. This often involves her ass as well. Very odd. But anyways, I’ve sought out porn that might be interesting to both of us and not make us feel all creeped out or bored or whatever, and here are some things I’ve noticed. First off, porn video stores really get lazy by the fact they’ve got porn. I mean, they sort of separate it into categories, sort of, but beyond that, nothing. You’re thumbing through flicks trying to find something, and honestly, you’re gonna see something fucked up in the process. And once it’s in your brain you can’t make it go away. It sucks. Secondly, once you find movies that might not be bad, nine times out of ten, they end bad. Like what is the deal with newer porns (meaning since 1989 in my mind, and not featuring Randy Spears or Tom Byron) doing this thing where it’s sex, but you have no sound from the sex, and soundtrack is some generic ass music like a new age musician trying to make what they think is rock music? Does anybody like this? Shit, if you’re gonna dub over the sounds of the people completely (which sucks, by the way), you might as well just play some old wacky ass funk music and kick the whole porn soundtrack stereotype in full. This new age rock crap is terrible. But also, it seems no porn anymore is really about a storyline, which doesn’t have to be that great, but it’s nice to have a little story to explain why those two chicks are fucking that one guy in the back of a tractor and trailer, don’t you think? Doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer story or anything, just a simple tale to tie the scenes together.
But ultimately, what I want on my quest is historic porn, meaning set in the olden times, with chicks wearing lots of clothes that may not ever come completely off. We watched Pioneer House not too long ago, and oddly enough, that shit was highly sexual to me. And this dude in Australia sent me some old porn tapes of his, and sadly most of them sucked. Poor dude spent a ton of money mailing them to me. But there was a Dracula porn flick from the ‘70s or early ‘80s that was kinda cool, except the historic porn was very sadomasochistic. What I want is just some good sweet old school historically accurate porn, set in an old log cabin, perhaps along the river where flat-bottomed boats of trade poled by regularly, and all sorts of wild encounters happened from that. In fact, that’s a good idea, and if I could make it, I’m sure I’d get wealthy, because people love porn and spend money on porn like mad. Except those that spend money on porn like mad are social misfits and total malcontents and only want to watch nine dudes stand around glad-handing each other while they commit bukkake on some chick’s face. Fucking world. I wish it would blow up sometimes.

Friday Love/Hate

I love how much dumpster vegetables I've been hauling in for my flock of chickens every week. There's a store that I don't think too many people hit and it's chock full of shit every day when I hit it at the perfect time coordinated with one of their produce dudes. Seriously, I throw anywhere from five to ten gallons of food in the back of my truck every time I check it. Them chickens of mine be getting fat off some watermelons and cantaloupes and they love that corn, which I used to cut off the cob until my wife was all laughing at me about it, so now I toss the whole thing in there. All the chickens have names now too. The americauna pair, which are the oldest, and now not the biggest, are Erishkagol (rooster) and Innana (hen), but Erishkagol is a pretty ass rooster, all speckled with green ass feathers. I like to get him out and stroll the yard carrying him around. That type of shit apparently helps keep a rooster from being an asshole, which they are prone to be. The three RIRs ended up being named Lounger, Luna, and Katya. Honestly, I can’t tell them fuckers apart to this day, but I do know there’s one of them that always rolled with our youngest chicks who were the outcast of the flock once they moved into the big pen, so that one red is Lounger. All you have to do is watch them for a few minutes and the Lounger will work the flock, kicking it everybody, and you know to yourself, “Oh yeah, that’s the Lounger.” The two white leghorns are still called Gwen and Cheap, and I can’t tell them apart either, and white leghorns are some ornery birds that I can never catch when I go into full-blown Rocky training mode inside the pen trying to get a bird. Plus my walls are only like four feet tall with bird netting over that, so I can’t do more than squat run after them. The buff orpingtons are the tight one though, yellow with fluffy ass legs, but one of them's a rooster. We call him Dixie and his girl is Daisy. That shit's funny to me. And then the austrolorps, I thought at once were a rooster and hen, but looks more like two hens, and Dixie runs that little crew of Daisy and the two austrolorps, who got named Fancypants and Swaggerbritches. And really the whole point of all this was to tell you those two chicken names, which are absolutely ridiculous. No, I didn't make them up
I hate the Bruno movie already, just because without it actually having crossed my eyeballs, I have bore witness or read far too many egghead cultural dissections of society at large in relations to this stupid fucking movie. You know what? Borat wasn't nearly as funny as the TV show was, especially since a good bit of it was recycled schtick. And really the only thing left for holmes to do would be Ali G goes to Africa, but he won't do that, because you're not supposed to make fun of the helpless, only the ignorant, except for the fact that many of the ignorant were helpless in their achievement of that ignorance. So when you make fun of them and feel good about yourself with your liberal, do-good judgements, your thoughts are logging chains and you are dragging them mentally behind your Prius pick-up. Racist fuckers. Go back to Wholefoodsica.

100 VINYLZ: #70 - The Best of John Coltrane: His Greatest Years 2xLP by John Coltrane

(1971, Impulse Records)
Man, I had a hard ass time finding the info for this double LP online, so I'm guessing it's not that common. It wasn't fetching fat dollars on ebay or anything, but it wasn't showing up all that often or easily in google searches for Coltrane discographies.
When it comes to the jazz music, I like freaked out skychasers like Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra more than the other standard classic stuff that whiteboy music experts tend to like (although that might be exactly what they like and I'm just playing myself). This is a nice collection of stuff from some of Coltrane's better years, and honestly is the only Coltrane I have on LP. I had like 7 or 8 tapes as well that I bought back then, but shit, tapes are obsolete even to me, Mr. Anti-technocracy. And I don't really think I'd need anything more, although if I could Coltrane's Sound on LP, I'd jump at that.
One time, me and Boomer were wandering around North Carolina, looking for some piece of shit armory building to watch some piece of shit wrestling show featuring Buddy Landell vs. Ricky Morton, where we'd most likely get drunk in the parking lot, stumble in, and soak in the sociological mayhem of multicultural underclass Carolina. But we couldn't find the place, and there were burned out buildings along semi-back roads, like they had riots but in the country. So we go up to this convenience store for me to go in and ask directions and buy another 12-pack, and the lady behind the counter gives me some half-assed bullshit, going right back where we were, but just deeper into the muck. Boomer figured we should ride through town and see what else was going on, maybe get a hotel room beforehand if we can find one, and some pimped out Cutlass cuts into the parking lot quickly as we're trying to pull out, Boomer stops, I look up, and there's one of those roadside markers saying "John Coltrane was born a block from this spot in..." with all the rest of the pertinents. I had no idea he was from Shittown, North Carolina, but it explained a lot.

100 VINYLZ: #71 - 21 & Over LP by Tha Alkaholiks

(1993, Loud Records)
I had for a long minute lived with a crazy girl in college we still refer to as The Bi-yotch, and she had a stereo that I used for the records I would play and the tapes I would buy. Well then I finally slid away and moved in with some dudes, including my man Boogie Brown, and it was your normal shitty Richmond house with one dude per room and overpriced rent and lots of weed smoking and beer drinking. When first living there, I hadn't shifted out of buying records, because I already had such a large collection, you had to be constantly adding something to it, because a record collection lives and breaths on shelves and inside of milk crates and wants to be fed and trimmed down and shuffled and fingered and all that. The first time I heard Tha Alkaholiks was on a King Tee single (which I think is on this list later actually), and it was some good shit. Their first group single, with Tash finally on it (he was in "Club County" at the time of the King Tee recording), so I had to have this shit when the full-length LP was at Willie's. But I didn't even have a record player. My wacked-out super-brain roommate Crazy Jai had gotten one of those little kids record players, a Sesame Street one, no shit, with a Big Bird head on the arm with the needle. So there I was, in my shitty room, mattress on the floor (eventually to rest inside a 2x4 frame on some milk crates in lounger fashion, till I broke that shit fucking a chick one night... yeah, that's how I roll), with my brand new Tha Alkaholiks full-length LP playing on a Sesame Street turntable. It was one of those moments too goddamned retarded to really imagine correctly in a visual way, which I seem to get a lot of in my life. But Tha Liks were the shit.
Looking back, amazing to think that Loud Records started out with only two groups - these guys and Wu-Tang, making it automatically better than pretty much any rap label in existence nowadays. I mean seriously, everybody has mixtapes or myspaces now and gets hyped up as some real flavor. But here was Loud, actually finding acts that had something to do that was original, and doing it. Even Tha Liks, the whole concept of being drunk asses, that would be a song concept to a modern allegedly great rapper. They took it as a whole schtick, but it didn't get played out (at least not on this first record).
Secondly of note, this album contains "Turn the Party Out" featuring The Lootpack, which was the first song that came out produced by Madlib (who I think might've produced another track or two as well, maybe "Mary Jane" off this LP). It's just crazy to think how much smaller hip hop was then, with Tha Alkaholiks being brought out by King Tee - a west coast legend, on the same label as the Wu-Tang - an impending shapeshifter of hip hop, and getting production from a friend in Madlib who'd become underground rap deity. But at the same time, I doubt hip hop was all that much smaller back then, so much as it was more discriminating. Every fucking wack ass 15-year-old couldn't just pop open the laptop and set up a myspace and start throwing shit at the world until something magically sticks, often times due to its retardedness not its greatness.
But I digress. Suffice it to explain my personal hip hop preferences in that when I used to make mixtapes and would use "It's My Thang" by EPMD with that bassline, I'd follow it up with "Only When I'm Drunk" by Tha Alkaholiks and not that stupid assed Jay-Z song with the bitch singing the corny R&B hook. Which one? Exactly.

Look Up At The Stars & Analyze The Skies

Full of hate and stifling self-paralysis half the damned time, like moving through thick southern humidity except mentally. Feels like I've turned a corner, but then again feels like I've turned the same corner 38 times already and I just keep running around the same damned piece of shit plot of land while the grass grows taller around the edges of everything, making it harder to see an actual escape. We are in some trifling assed times, but not really at the same time. I'm not in a shanty. My kids don't have flies on their eyeballs. Sitting full-bellied on food stamps, which gives me a complex (but the radio noise the other day was all like, "1 in 9 Americans clocking their food stamp grip so Congress blah blah blahzay blahzay..." through another day, riding around in a truck that's three months late on payments between jobs that run too long because fuck man, how'd I get here? Someone point out like three forks in the road I took that I could swerve the other way and make it less a fucking frustration to hear the alarm clock boop at me in the goddamned morning.
But really, just keep going. Honestly, no victim talk or anything, but shit man, I'm not equipped to understand how to navigate this world. Grew up in a shit assed place with a shit assed education where it was coastable easy to be big fish in a small pond, and didn't have the foundation to respect the extras to learn how to succeed. If anything, I was taught from an early age that there's some twisted nobility in poverty, that success breeds betrayal to your true self, which of course is just someone else's bullshit that got slipped into my cerebrum. But seriously, it's hard for me to navigate this world, especially the financial aspect of it that gets so heavy lately. Not much old work out there, not much new work out there, not much switching of jobs to be doing either. That's just how it is right now, hold pat with the shitty hand, wait for the dealer to dole out a few more cards, and hope to break even by the time they kick me off the table.
And at the same time, all that's such bullshit. Full grown men should take full grown responsbility. Even if the fucking work sucks and is slow and tedious and soul-crushing and unable to make the ends meet, I should've pecked 20,000 words out today by supper, and then revised 10,000 from yesterday tonight while watching another crappy movie distract me from another wasted night before they finally figure out the date behind the dash on my inevitable grave marker. I went to where my dad and uncle are buried the other week because I was in the area. My dad's grave has a chainsaw on it, no shit, and actually has "Tuna" on it as well, which always impresses me. Nicknames don't often become so overbearing in life to make it on the grave. The chainsaw's on there because he worked small engines most of his life. (In fact, the motherfucking place he worked at, formerly a family business of my second cousin, has had my goddamned riding mower for like two months now, trying to fix some simple shit that I was afraid I was gonna just bend into place half-assedly, which apparently, I should've done, being I fixed my push mower on my own so I could push that slow ass thing around the two acres and keep from losing the baby.) My uncle has a drag car doing a burnout, and like you'd expect with such an image, he died young. I often times condemn myself wondering what'd be the token life image on mine. A 5-in-1, for all the years begrudgingly spent painting? A fucking computer box?
I don't know. A man shouldn't wrestle so hard with mortality, but that's what we do when we feel the coolness of a rock against our back and see the hard place closing in faster than we'd like. Just keep going. Things need to be done, and they occupy the body hard enough to distract the mind, and you end up feeling much better than having it distracted by another crappy movie where the body doesn't move and all the stress and frustration digs into your stomach and lungs and builds up around where your umbilical cord first tugged you out into this mess. Stick and move. Wednesday is Mr. Mom day with the kids, so we'll probably go hiking at the natural area in the morning, build another quartz statue for whatever reason, let the girls soak their feet in the creek, come home, and slug at it all a little more, hopefully a little fresher. Motherfuckers everywhere are struggling, and far worse than me or mine, but it feels like a pile-on at times. I can sit here and wish this or that about not having been equipped with the proper navigational tools to chart my way through the life storms, but fuck it man. I've got stars overhead, ground underneath that's as mine as a regular man can actually own land in this country, and I've got a solid family in this house. There's a world in my head I want to toss at the world outside like throwing knives and cold beers (or a bowl of rice), and it would rather cloud and confuse and delude me against such a notion. I need to move to embrace the perseverance of the demented wandered who, no matter how much they lock the doors and try to keep them contained, just stares at the gate, waiting for no one to pay attention. I need to sludge through the shitty days, dust down my lungs, fumes up my nose, silica through my skin, and let it all percolate up top inside, and stare at the gate, wait for everyone to go to sleep, no one paying attention, and run like a motherfucker, six or seven hours. Sleep is the cousin of death. So is sitting on the couch or in a chair staring at screens.

Friday Love/Hate

I love packing 40 hours of work into the first part of the week, taking Wednesday off as usual since my ol' lady works on that day, and then being done by Thursday night at midnight. Three long ass days don't really suck when you got ig'nant radio moments like "Simple Man" or NPR talk radio speaking upon opioids or even just working downtown Charlottesville where there was a rooftop outside the door I painted upon and you could hear a railroad WHOO-HOOOOOO and walk outside, hop the rail and stand on the rubber roof looking for graffiti on the CSX. Good shit. A long ways (like a decade-plus) from hearing Flip the Biker talk about man-pussy while we re-glazed Civil War era windows by railroad tracks while the Marshall Tucker Band was on the radio. Now those tracks are grassy and a bike path, and not the type of bike like Flip rode. But I guy dress.
I hate how that one Dr. Seuss book about The Lortabs has caused everybody to hate Snitches to this very day. I always thought Snitches were cute, with those droopy ears and long blue hair.

100 VINYLZ: #72 - Burnin' LP by The Wailers

(1973, Tuff Gong Records)
Admittedly, after having dated a few hippie girls, and marrying a wonderful buxom bulbous-personalitied woman who be loving some Marley as well, I get burned out on the Marley, to the point, yeah, I hate it. But if I were forced to pick one album by him and his cohorts, which I apparently did when making this list, Burnin' is the one I'd pick. "Small Axe" be my song y'all. It's like me, but in a reggae song made before they saw me even grow into being me. That's why Bob Marley is so great, he could see the future, which he did, and also why the CIA injected him with futuristic cancer cells before they knew how to decimate underclasses with the AIDS coots.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '09

Here is the J.J. Krupert Countdown for the month of this month in the year of this year, right now. I switched up my parameters a little, because I figured if I just do the shit that's simply played the most over the course of my little silver gaypod machine, then things that's been there forever and gets accidentally played even though I'm burned out on it would just rule the countdown, whereas new shit that I've been bumping like mad gets overlooked, at least the first couple months. So I will from here on out be employing a plus/minus hockey style deal, where I subtract how many times I skip that bitch from the played part to get a better recognition of shit in my brain the past month or two. New shit would still probably have to go go for a month or two to crack the Top 13, but whatever. This is for me anyways and it's not like anybody gives a fuck. It's really amusing because basically this blogospheric nonsense is the equivalent of a crazy dude standing on a downtown street corner, talking to hisself and waving at buses going past. Except "bloggers" is a media buzzword, so people think it actually means something. But it don't. Just like twitter. Anyways, here be this month's list...
#1: "Minimum Payments" by Solaris Earth Pipeline - Sigh... I guess the S.E.P. spaceship was destroyed during a crash landing trying to avoid a meteor shower of internal faggotry. We made some good music during our short run though. I've been wrestling with this bullshit, because I get all pissed like, "Goddammit, why was I wasting my time. I should've been doing this instead or that instead," but you know, you get where you're going by following the path you took. You can't switch that shit up. So I moved beyond that. Now I've been wondering if it's kosher or wack ass to go back and re-record anything in the camper with my new screwed up Ancient Hobo style or not. I mean, this song is basically a long ass loop from "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top that it took me some convincing of PSY/OPS that he could actually loop it. And that's basically the entire beat. He did some ambient vocal effects on the hook and here and there, but the song's a pretty simple song. And it's actually one of my favorites off the 45s on 33 CD. (You can google search "solaris earth pipeline" and the sharebee link to dl that shit is near the top. You should check it out; it's some other shit.) Obviously, because I be playing it still. The lyrics are clusterfuck brain frame hating on internet haters, who run rampant from time to time. They are out there, packs of pasty, socially retarded wolves, waiting to turn on you when you have even a sliver of notoriety. Thankfully, I am far more aware of this than I was like 7 years ago, so I don't catch feelings over the internet at all. I mean, the internet's fake anyways; that'd be like me getting sad somebody died in a Friday the 13th movie.
#2: "Georgia (remix)" by The Cunninglynguists featuring Khujo Goodie & Killer Mike - I will readily admit I'm not the biggest Cunninglynguists fan. First off, their name pisses me off, because pretty much any more-than-competent white rapper in college in the early '90s was amazed at what a clever twist of phrase "cunning linguist" was, and for one group to just jack that as their name, I don't know, it just reminds of me someone who buys all the Chuck Taylors at the Goodwill to sell on ebay even though there might be bonafide loungers out there hoping to buy bonafide Chuck Taylors at the Goodwill for themselves or their children or their sick mother who did a lot of acid in the '70s or something. Fuck cultural cherry pickers. That being said, I stole their last CD from inside the internet's guts, and it was okay. I liked that song with Inverse (which I actually had been pumping that Inverse EP a lot, so I knew that song already), and the "Broken Van" song or whatever impressed me because it not only was a song about a piece of shit vehicle, which I always mark out for, but it had a Leon Russell sample from the Carney LP. I've listened to that LP a lot in my life, and made a few samples from it, including using the beginning of "Out in the Woods" on two copies to juggle the little bit of time I was DJing and learning myself out routines. I never would've thought to sample what they sampled for that song though. So props to you The Cunninglynguists, in case you fuckers are google searching yourselves all afternoon long, waiting to blow up like you know you should. But this "Georgia" song is some shit. First, if I was to have to pick like my five favorite rappers right now, Khujo and Killer Mike would be on that list. Khujo comes across as more for-real country than any of the shiny bullshit you hear on so-called country radio stations. And this song proves it. And then Killer Mike does what he does best - swab a very visual and very real and pretty street yet pretty intelligent picture while riding the beat like a motherfucker. I know this shit was on sharebee not too long ago, so google it up and vibe. My mental mix threesome of late has been "In the Red" by Willie Isz, then this, then "Comin' Home Atlanta" by Killer Mike; I try to work that little triple nipple of conscious babble into mixes I make for people, except I never make the mixes and just be like, "Oh shit man, I'm gonna hook up a mix of some killer shit you should check out," because we talked about rap music and the other dude was like he was down with Pete Rock & CL Smooth and shit but got out of following music and has two kids including one baby and blah blah blah.
#3: "If You Want Me To Stay" by Sly & The Family Stone - I have this on a 7-inch single and it's a wonderful single. Sly Stone was on some nonsense next level shit. They did a feature on him doing There's a Riot Goin' On in Waxpoetics magazine a few months back, and it was pretty much like I expected - a lot of great music, great musicians, plenty of drugs and whores, and Sly Stone on some warped by the rain mindframe leadership agenda. I bet there's some seriously good left field shit on tape somewhere that he's made on his own since going on sabbatical from the stupid record industry. We used to know this interracial couple, an older black dude who was like 50 but had little baby dreads and carried himself much younger, and a white girl like 30 or so, and I put this on one night, and I remember the black dude being all like shaking his head and going quietly, since he was a quiet dude, "Oh shit, Sly..." and then started singing along, sitting at the kitchen table. That was a feel-good moment. They split up and shit, and I'm fairly certain the older black dude wanted to hook up with my wife, since she had dreadlocks and a big ass and older black dudes who like white chicks see that as a pair of green lights for their approach, but he didn't really try too hard, I think because he thought I was crazy. Which I am. I've got as much anger about how shitty white people are as anybody, and I'm more than willing to channel that anger into completely different areas of my life. Like fucking up dudes being too friendly with my wife when they think I ain't looking.
#4: "Wagon Wheel (live)" by The Porch Loungers - Ha, the song makes the list again. I actually had three versions of it on my gaypod at one time and my oldest kid was like, "God, why do you have this song on here so much?" The Porch Loungers are my man Boogie Brown's bluegrass band and they'll be putting on acoustic performance around a fire in my back yard next Saturday night. This live version was from Newportfest held by fellow lounger Eric every Labor Day weekend. Hopefully, I will be there this year, DJing between bands, and maybe even pulling off a little surprise performance of some shit, but I don't know. I have a wedding to go to for a marriage that I'll be shocked if it lasts three years. Fucking obligations man, they suck.
#5: "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd - I still love this song. Even though this is part of the played-out-by-classic-rock-radio portion of the Skynyrd catalog, it's a great song, and probably the best example lyrically of how Ronnie Van Zant was the redneck buddha.
#6: "Until the Lion Learns to Speak" by K'naan - When The Trouabdour came out earlier this year, I went through a pretty heavy K'naan period, playing the new shit plus the older Dusty Foot Philosopher LP. This came off that one, and is one of my fave K'naan tracks. He actually triggered in me a search for good African rap, which didn't really net that much, since most African rap tends to have the philosophy of "Fuck Africa, let's sound like American rappers, but say African cities instead of American ones." When K'naan brings his African influence, like on this song, it's a good thing. When he gets all rapid-fire more American sounding, he sounds way too much like Eminem.
#7: "New Year's Day" by Robison Charlie - This dude Big Stoner Creek who used to be in The Secret Clubhouse shared for me some songs at some point, and this one was one of them. BSC don't seem to be around anymore, so he won't even know how much I've enjoyed this song. I'm pretty afraid of alt.country type stuff because it's usually crazy stupid and made by and for Brooklyn kids who drink PBRs ironically, so I've never even contemplated searching out a single other Robison Charlie song. I'm not even sure if his name is the right way. Seems like it should go the other way around, but I vaguely remember seeing him on the satellite radio one time and it was wrongways like that there too.
#8: "Stuntastic" by Blaqstarr - I was late to the party for the Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape, but I still got there and stood by the keg until it floated. It's amazing how much better Blaqstarr got once they started not spelling their name right and rapping about nonsense.
#9: "Dying Breed" by Prolo - Another fucking song by me... man I'm an egotistical dude all up on inside the internetz sugarwalls, ain't I? This was one of the first hooks I ever wrote for Boogie Brown to sing once he got all into bluegrass harmonies and I got into writing hooks instead of just verses that were 84 lines long every time. Here, I'll type out the hook, because it'll look way stupider in type on inside the internetz that it really comes across: "We from the northern end of the dirty southside/heart wrapped up in the honeysuckle vine/from southside to southwest, back roads in effect/land of the longhaired, laid back redneck/raven mack boogie brown part of a dying breed/drinking beer at night, in the morning smoking weed/ain't got a whole lot, but it feels about right/let our souls cut loose while our pockets stay tight". Now that's what I'm talking about. Literally.
#10: "Bluegrass Boy" by Woodstock Mountains - I meant to look up who actually did this, like Happy or Artie Traum or some post-Woodstock hippie who stayed in upstate New York with a bluegrass fetish. This is off of More Music from Wood Acres or something like that, which is a great assed record, even though I am playa hating upon bluegrass fetish half-rich fuckers lately, as I just was painting a space where a dude was building a wall who plays in a prominent newgrass band and looked like a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie who wore clothes he got from a Mr. Green Jeans estate sale. (Note to regular blog readers, all four of you: I will probably co-opt that line again at some point, over some shit I be plotting out, just so you're prepared beforehand, so when you read that again, you won't be like, "Man, Raven's retarded and repeats himself without knowing" and you can go like, "Man, Raven's retarded and repeats himself, but at lest he know that shit."
#11: "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top - When I die, just play this, over and over and over and over.
#12: "Small Town" by Nappy Roots - Ever since David Banner never made another song even half as good as "Cadillac on 22s" and I gave up on him, Nappy Roots became my southern rap dudes not everybody knows about who have the largest potential. This was the best song off their Humdinger CD last year (unless you count "Good Day" as a song off that even though that came off an internet CD from before and they put it on the Humdinger too because it was so good). And really, with "Aw Naw", "Po' Folks", this song and "Good Day", they've already got a fatter catalogue of completely perfect southern rap anthems outside of everybody except maybe Outkast or Goodie Mobb, but probably not even them, unless you let me split it up in my brain to only Andre 3000 or Khujo.
#13: "The Mountain" by Steve Earle & Del McCoury - I heard a country ass lady inside the radios talking about the slurry slush and floods from mountaintop removal, destroying her house or some shit, and she stood up and protested it all and had rednecks trying to run her off the road and people trying to burn her house down. I have some friends who are into the whole Mountain Action Network Wondertivism Gang, and all that's great, but I sometimes mistrust the integrity of folks very obviously patch-on-their-sleeve on the helping the downtrodden tip. I have a problem with people who have had explaining to me how I shouldn't want to have because having is wrong. But when you slum it up and don't have with the safety net of your grown folks having your back, I don't know man, I just don't know. If you're gonna be a have and not a have-not, just go ahead and embrace it. Don't do this blank-eyed activist urban hippie pretend construction worker bullshit.

100 VINYLZ: #73 - Too Fast For Love LP by Motley Crue

(1982, Elektra Records)
This is honestly one of the greatest records ever, and it sucks that thrash metal vs. glam metal became such a divisive theme in hard rock music, because it's left shit like this in a limbo where it doesn't get it's propers from delinquent shithead dirtbags and it gets overlooked by douchebag dipshits who think "Girls, Girls, Girls" is the ultimate Crue. (Apparently, my keyboard doesn't have that satanic double dot thing. Someone should make satan wingdings, pronto.) I have very vivid memories of playing this shit in my bedroom as I would talk for hours on the phone with the girl I lost my virginity to when I was 13. "Piece of Your Action" really drives those memories home strong. Man, she was hot as fuck, and my penis wasn't hard and I hadn't seen enough Hustlers to really know where the vagina hole was, perhaps trained to into the hairy mound and not paying attention to the entryway, so I was poking my limp little dick into the wrong area with this girl, and it sucked for her and sucked for me, but it was my first time and god motherfucking bless it.
Anyways, I was at my mom's house last weekend, looking at the local paper. The girl I lost my virginity to had only had sex with one other dude, a guy like five years older than us who was her neighbor and obviously running older redneck rooster teenager game on a young budding redneck slut with fresh breast buds. Looking at the local paper, there was a picture of a girl who had gotten honors for something or some sort of scholarship and was going off to college, and it listed her parents and all. First off, her step-dad was a dude I used to run with, and I thought, "Wow, Alex's step-daughter be old." But then it listed the girl's father as the same guy who was my first's actual first. Which meant I was sexually related to this girl's dad (which you can't really let yourself start thinking about because it gets you all fucked-up in the head, especially with Facebook around nowadays to make it easier to have visuals for the freak out). That made me feel old as fuck, even though I'm only 36.
An odd aside, that girl I lost my purity too, before we ever hooked up, she was googley eyeing me at the Five County Fair while I was rolling with a friend of mine. My friend's uncle, who was like ten years older than us, was all like, "I think that girl wants you, Raven," and I was young and blowing it off, thinking that was the cool thing to do. It ended up me and her hooked up, my first ever. And even weirder, the friend's uncle ending up being that girl's first marriage, which of course ended in unmarriage. Shit, for a redneck slut who would have sex in all sorts of freaky ways, she never tolerated heavy drinking, much less using drugs. I found that sort of odd. Like I'd rather my kids smoke weed and drink beer than have sex every fucking weekend of their adolescence. I guess I could hope for them to not do either, but if you read through this blurb this far, you can probably guess I didn't exactly grow up in a place where hope runs rampant. Going on with the show though.

100 VINYLZ: #74 - Protect Ya Neck 12" by Wu-Tang Clan

(1993, Loud Records)
The following was also written for the dumpin.net Top 100 All-Time Hip Hop Jamz list, but this was never seen as it was in the top 20 songs that stupid Mike never finished writing for to post on his stupid blog, which he doesn't care about anymore because he's got some gay-assed podcast or some shit. So I will just let this PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN OPINION FOR YOU FROM LIKE TWO YEARS AGO tell the story of me and this single...
I am going to be completely honest and admit that I bought this 12-inch in the record store first time I saw it, but was not able to wrap my brain around it. I had seen a small blurb in The Source about Wu Tang, and in a music genre full of posturing and flashiness, a bunch of grimy motherfuckers in camo, wearing stockings over their head, holding torches in front of an abandoned building with barrels full of fire hanging out, that was some shit I could get behind 1000% percent. You see, I am a child of the soil, growing up in the country... more specifically, the rural south, where blacks and whites of little wealth blend together and playa hate upon each other but combine together to build muscle car hot rods, outlandish clothing styles, and mulatto babies. So the first time after seeing that blurb that I saw this single at Willie's on Broad Street in Richmond, I dropped the $4.77 on it (still has the pricetag, so I know that's what singles went for back then, which was after they raised it from $3.99, which was okay because $4.77 plus the taxes came out to like 3 cents under a five dollar bill). I didn't get into "Protect Ya Neck". In fact, it was the B-side "Method Man" I got into, and apparently the rest of the world got into as well, as that handheld video was the one that got a lot of play on Rap City back then.
But it was inevitable; Wu Tang blew the fuck up big-time, beyond belief, and I was a HUGE Wumark for a long minute (probably until Wu Tang Forever came out, which I felt was a giant step backwards into glossy hypocrisy from their grimy ass group and solo debuts), and I still have that "Protect Ya Neck" 12-inch (from the re-issue put out by Loud when they signed them, not a blank white sleeve one I bought from like Master Killa back in the day out of the trunk of his Camry), and can pretend to be old school whiteboy Wu Tang master listener #1. Shit, what do y'all motherfuckers even know about twelve inch vinyl singles, with y'alls rapidsharing and shit? Y'all probably think Wu Tang Forever was the shit and loved that RZA book and everything. Stupid fucking kids. I hope ODB's orphaned kids use pimp psychology to train Darfur refugee lost boys who have relocated into America into a ruthless terrorist cell to murder you all with an anthrax that floats through wireless internets straight into your fucking wack-ass mind.

Castles Made of White Quartz

There is a natural area nearby where we live that I don't like to tell nobody about because every time I've gone there no one else has ever been there and I'd like to keep it that way. Back home in Farmville, Va. (what you got to say?) where I was growed up has changed a lot from the Wal-Mart gutting the downtown to parasitic four-lane stretch south of town where every restaurant and store that is in every other upstart community is situated at, and that was long enough ago that the downtown section has already rebricked itself for a quaint old-timey throwback feel to hopefully trick some high end furniture stores and art galleries into filling up the spaces where it used to be a Goodwill. So my natural habitat has pretty much been destroyed, not just in the grand sense of Farmville being all fucked-up and like a commercial now, but also the 50 acres I used to roam got sold off by my grandfather, so that part of it is a black muslim trailer park, and the other part all got logged, and the main part behind my mom's house with the creeks I used to kick it are still there, but the ambiance is all different now what with it being a very separate thing as opposed to a part of a larger natural area. So this actual bonafide by legal methods "natural area" near my current five-acre compound has become a frequent stop lately, to hike/run the 3 mile loop as part of my P.A.P. training (Personal Armageddon Preparedness), from which I've dropped 30 pounds in a few months. It reminds me a lot of where I'd run when I was younger and getting high after school and wanting to disappear into the pretend wild.
At this nearby area, there's some nice tributary creeks to the Rivanna River, and down in the bottom back part of one, you can follow a creek around a rise and it's a nice little lounging spot, with tons of white quartz everywhere. We were hiking with the kids the other day, and I was getting bored waiting for the girls to get bored of soaking their barefeet in the cold creek (country girls wear no shoes, country boys wear no shirt, country folks get no service), and I just started gathering up some of the quartz to build a little tower. I worked briefly as a stonemason (like three weeks) at the last official place of employment I ever had before wandering off into self-employed nonsenseland, and I also watched like 20 minutes of whatever dude that River and Tides documentary is about. But mostly I just like white quartz and felt like building a tower, because I knew there had to be tons of arrowheads back around there, but I couldn't find them, and I figured if I offered up a tower, then I'd start finding them. I know in my mind that it's like finding four-leaf clovers and you just have to train your eye for it, because if you go looking for them (four-leaf clovers or arrowheads), you won't find shit but frustration. Nonetheless, I figured a good rock sculpture would bring me some good luck. My wife, an art major in college, seemed quite impressed by my 20-minute quartz concoction, I think because she knows how words torment me and can be surprised to see my creative anguish erect its madness in different mediums.
Today was no different than any day recently - broke, not working, not motivated to work what I could work, waking up and praying that the sun won't shine (I'm the reason it's been raining so much in case you were wondering, me and fake god), so I went to that area again, and ended up collecting 33 rocks of various sizes to build another sculpture. This one was impressive as I put a hefty rock upright into the dirty muck of what must've been a flood plain last month, and then I situated another big ass rock (a good 60 to 70 pounds I'd say) on top of it sideways. From there, I had planned to use all 33 rocks, but it kind of finished itself at around twenty-some, so I looked around. This second one was on the little plain area I said, about three feet higher from the first one I built right by the creekbed the first time. So I looked around and figured a three-pronged power point attack of quartz was perfectly appropriate, and I used the leftover rocks to make a triple chick quick brick stack on top of a dead tree sitting sideways like Paul Wall. Except there were three left when I felt like that one was done too. Instead of forcing my self-created parameters onto things and ruining my bullshit with my own bullshit (which is a long-running theme in my life, and most lives probably), I tossed the last three rocks back into the creek. The splash caused me to catch eyeballs on a little triangular-tipped rock that would've easily made a good poison arrow were I in the olden days of nomadic ninja natives who made their own weapons of minor destruction. Digging it up out the creek made me find two more, and those three I situated at odd spots on the edges of the second and third stacks, similar to like how gaudy Chinese man buffets that have those ridiculously large penny fountains at the entrance, with the weird fake rock structure climbing the entire wall, and they'll have a little Buddha statuette tucked into a crevice all secret-like that hardly anybody really notices but you do one day by accident. That's how I tucked my last little three pieces of quartz, one on a really cool ass shelf that the second structure had about a third of the way up, like I actually had known what I was doing as I was doing it.
The white quartz rock sculptures have been very therapeutic, and a great addition to my P.A.P. training regimen. I feel like I'm sort of coming out of some electronic hibernation I had been in for nearly a decade that I didn't even know was going on. Figuring out your own bullshit a lot of times is similar to an onion in that you start peeling back layers and you get to where you think you had to get yourself, but then there's more layers. So you keep going and going and eventually you realize at the center of it all is basically nothing, so get on with it. Which is what I'm doing, even if the rest of things don't get on with it with me. I feel as I'm finding my feet again, the rest of the world isn't necessarily spinning the same way I'm wandering. Which is fine. From what I read recently, the world's spinning off-kilter and Mars is going to crash into us at some point anyways. My little unseen off-path quartz stacks are built precariously where if the world really did spin off-kilter too hard, they'd fall back into the mud, which isn't really mud but just wet dirt. I am figuring personally, much like the haiku project where I wrote 1000 haiku over the course of a few years, I should probably, for my own well-being and proper regard within the way the world does actually spin, build a thousand of these things. I probably couldn't do all one thousand there at the secret natural area I don't want anybody to know about, because then someone would be like, "Hey, some crazy fucker is building all these crazy things out here in the middle of nowhere," and then a ton of dumbasses would always be walking around out there and harsh my life buzz. Life buzzes seem to get harder and harder to get what with all the electronic bzzzzzzz clouding the emotionosphere from these technologically-polluted times, and it seems whenever you are lucky enough to find one of those life buzzes, others are quick to come around and try to tag along and siphon some of that positive energy, and it seems about the only thing you can do anymore is hope to sell some oddball t-shirts your buddy screenprints in his garage before your newfound by the public life buzz is completely decimated.

100 VINYLZ: #75 - Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down 12" by Brand Nubian

(1992, Elektra Records)
At one point at dumpin.net, me and Mike Dikk pretended we were going to list and blurb out the Top 100 All-Time Greatest Hip Hop Jamz of All-Ever as decided by Expert Whiteboys who are heavily steeped into the hip hop and smarter than all other whiteboys and some black dudes too, especially ones that grew up in the suburbs. This is what I wrote about this song when we were doing that...

"When all this shit was coming out, I was dropping near a hundred bucks a week on new full-length tapes and vinyl singles, probably averaging five or six singles a week. I had both the "360" single and this single. The Puba single, and I was a big Puba fan because it was awesome that a guy with a face that looked like it got stung by a thousand bees could be a sex symbol of some sort, has long been sold off, but I still have that Brand Nubian single. And I still play it regularly. I know internet dork computer preservation fuckwad would want to put it to digitalization and save the vinyl for some far-off never-reached ebay value level, but fuck it, I bought the shit, it's mine and I'm gonna play it till it breaks. I might even go draw some shitty graffiti tag on it with a silver Sharpie right now, maybe write PARLAY in really bad 34-year-old white man cholo letters.
This song is great. I had the One For All tape, and wasn't too bummed when they broke up because like everybody mistakenly thought at the time, I thought Puba was carrying the group. This single proved that wrong completely. In fact, other than this single, I don't know what notable non-Brand Nubian albums any of these guys did (although I've been meaning to "obtain" Jamar's album from last year for a while now). And them being split up made you realize that. I think one of the last actual brand new rap tapes I bought before the form became obsolete was their reunion Foundation tape, and it's a good tape, with a grown folks vibe. More shit about community and kids growing up right and all, which jibes well with my family-oriented drunken lifestyle. However, the penultimate rap jams are not about overall concepts of community and making the world better. It's about raw emotion. And you let Diamond sample the horns from Rocky for a thick-booted beat, and then Sadat and Lord J kick a couple of fags in the face lyrically, and that's a motherfuckin' song. (The B-side of the single has a remix where Diamond gets on the track as well, which is neat if you've never heard it, but nothing compared to the original song.)"

Looking back, I would say the one thing that's changed in my opinions for you is that I really like the remix featuring Diamond a whole lot more now, probably because I made myself a screwed and chopped boom bap NYC singles from the early '90s mix through Audacity and used it. Also, I think Diamond is still the world's best kept secret, and any white person into the rap music who doesn't like Diamond and embrace Diamond and tout Diamond should not be considered a for-real rap fan. This is the curse of the white man's mind thinking about hip hop - it always has to be truer to whatever than the next white man's mind, so that we claw at each other's credibility like crab's in a barrel.
Another thing about this single, when I was in college, we used to do acid a lot, and we'd wander, which was a great way to meet homeless people in early '90s Richmond, Virginia. I remember on the billboard above the Hardee's between Grace and Broad Street, there was a credit card ad for a while, and somebody - probably an art student at the school there - climbed up and tagged a thick and drippy "PUNKS JUMP UP TO GET BEAT DOWN" across the bottom of the billboard. I always thought that was awesome. Nowadays, post-Banksy/Shepard Fairey making Obamaganda for profit, I'd find it annoying. And I wouldn't be able to do acid because all they'd have is pharmaceuticals in the dorms. Stupid world, leaving me behind. At least I still have my trusty old Brand Nubian sans-Puba's swollen face 12-inch single to play on my old-fashioned record playing machine.

Friday Love/Hate

I love a thunderstorm. Hot ass humid life cut wide open by cold ass rains, watching lightning in the distance when I'm outside the edges of the madness. If there is some sort of end times boogie and armageddon fulfillment, I hope it's just like a giant thunderstorm for about three years, sitting on the porch at times watching it happen, but also ducking in the house and hoping the hail doesn't kill off all the squash plants at times, and after it finally clears up, all the assholes on earth will be dead and gone.
I hate all this. I hate internet bullshit, hate waking up to paint stupid fucking houses where I sometimes wish my truck would blow a tire and I'd flip over and be nothing but a roadside memorial. Fucking sick and tired of a lot of the shit I'm knee deep in with no obvious branch or rope or solid ground to pull myself out of. But fuck it man. Push forward, like a retarded warrior.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May '09

J.J. Krupert is the name of my gaypod, which is what I call my tiny little 2 gig iPod Shuffler, and I find it to be the perfect size, because when it comes to squeezing analogous music down into little 1s and 0s and stuffed into a tiny piece of electronical stimulation, I don't want 7000 albums all at once. With the little bitch, I change my theme every now and then, cut shit off fairly regularly, add other things, it's like survival of the fittest. It is called J.J. Krupert because when my middle kid was like 4, she always played my DJ Z-Trip CD we got back when his retard mash-up style was new and fresh and not old and played out. And she would ask what it is and I'd tell her and she'd go, "Oh cool. Mommy, I'm listening to J.J. Krupert again." So that's what it is.
I did this once before at some point as monthly mixes of songs, but fuck it man, there's enough free music inside the internets. So I'm starting fresh and will simply write about the top 13 most played songs on my gaypod named J.J. Krupert. Of course, with me and my strange halfwitted mathematically seduced brain, there are ridiculously unnecessary parameters. I will not write about a song more than once (if I even do this more than once, as this was my May list for the beginning of the month and I'm just now feeling like doing it), and there can only be one song per list by any individual musical artist, so that if I go buckwild this summer and just get high all the time and listen to Led Zeppelin constantly, it doesn't end up being just a list of Led Zeppeling songs. So anyways, here is my list of top 13 most played songs on my ridiculously small robot machine of music as it was for the start of May 2009 the year of the psychedelic goat eating all the blackberries that greedy little fucker.
#1: "A Crippled Man Finally Rides a Train" by 1000 Feathers - Basically, this is me using my new ancient hobo style that I've been doing out the in camper, since I mostly just make the music with myself nowadays. The formula is I take funky-ish breakbeats from classic rock records, sometimes identifiable sometimes not at all, straight up just loop them using the Audacity and a USB turnstable, and then I record my vocals straight into the Audacity too, testing it's limit to process too much information at once. I got a bootleg of that Ableton Live, but that shit's got too many knobs and bullshit for me to figure out. I wouldn't be able to actually write anything anymore if I learned myself that Jap nonsense. Then I pitch shift my vocals down seven notches since DJ Screw brainwashed me into thinking that's the best way, and plus I only write lyrics about riding trains or Greyhounds or shooting pool or swimming in the river - basically outlaw country standard fodder, but in the rappitty rapping ways. This song was the first one I did, and the best one too. I used the beginning break of "Up On Cripple Creek" by The Band, which was always my favorite The Band song, but I've come to love my own song so much that when I used to have both songs on my gaypod and The Band would start singing instead of my warped vocals going "I'd like to ride the rails but I'm too far off the tracks..." I'd be bummed. I even deleted the original version because of this fact. It's the best song I've ever done in my life and makes The Band seem stupid in comparison. Basically, Robbie Robertson only existed as a springboard for me to make a retarded song in a borrowed gypsy lady's camper in my backyard about becoming a hobo out of frustration from life. Sorry bro. We all have our positions to play.
#2: "Enough Rope" by Chris Knight - I heard this on the satellite radio one Saturday morning (which I just cut that bitch off - they were offering me like 3 months free to stay on and all and I was like, "Dude, I don't listen to it. It's boring. Just cut it off.") and got some off an internet dude, and this song rules. It's the best country song ever of the past 10 years, except if he had actually sold it and like Trace Adkins did it as a follow-up to "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk", it wouldn't actually be awesome anymore because regular people would know it, and I'm an internet music nerd contrarian hipster fucker, so I can only really really really like things most people don't know about. It makes me feel special and helps me compensate for self-esteem issues I have in other facets of my life. There are other Chris Knight songs and I've heard them and tried multiple times, but honestly, I'm convinced this is the only good song this dude ever did. He is a one-hit wonder, except his one-hit is underground level hit, so he didn't even get briefly rich from Billboard charts until he realized his evil Jew manager ripped him off and actually owns the right to the song and made all the real money off the deal.
#3: "Ironhorse/Born to Lose" by Motorhead - Not the later metallic Motorhead version, but a very early, post-Hawkwind, mellow yet rugged Lemmy making the greatest biker anthem of all-time. I had this on a tape that got stolen out my car years ago when I worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in RVA, and I looked forever for it, even buying a few used Motorhead CDs that always ended up having the more metal version. Finally, this dude Sicknote who is inside the internets and can find anything you ask him for even if you make it up and it doesn't exist found me the version I had long been missing. One thing lame about gaypods is I can't just have this set to be the first thing I hear in my truck when I get in it in the morning, to motivate me to make that money and feel good working out in the sun simple man hell yeah boy. I mean, I guess I actually could figure out how to make that happen, but man, it's hard enough to get up and actually go to shitty ass work, much less plan out morning theme music to make the shitty day better.
#4: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show - This is the greatest new school bluegrass song ever. Most newgrass is a little too college town we wear overalls ironically for my taste. Even a bit of O.C.M.S. is like that for me. But there is no denying this is a great motherfuckin' song. It makes me want to get high and hitchhike to North Carolina and see if Boomer and Shannon are around and if they've had the baby or not but maybe Boomer and me can go to Georgia and find adventure for a few days. But of course none of that happens because I'm broke, have to work, and have already had three childrens of various ages, so whenever I get money, self-indulgent retarded drug-fueled road trips usually fall too far down the financial priority list underneath things like the electric bill and paying for ballet class and fuck we need to go grocery shopping again, the baby's already out of her muesli in the weird 1970s box we can only find at that grocery store in Waynesboro.
#5: "Blue Jean Blues" by ZZ Top - DJed a party at my mom's crib last fall for a bunch of older country redneck drunkards and stoners. The next morning, when I woke late after drinking like 23 Yuenglings the night before, there was slow moving, some horseshoes throwing, fire still going, and plenty of loungers having some Sunday morning coming down beers in their hands. So before I could break all the components down, one old dude was like, "Play some Otis if you got it." This led to just playing mellow ass records and plenty of quality lounger bullshitting going on. I threw on Fandango to hear "Blue Jean Blues" and this one lady, good friend of my mom and her son and me grew up together - tight families, she looks at me and goes, "Oh Raven, what a great song." I already loved this song a shit ton, but all those top-level loungers being laid back and wasted, and Mike's mom with her outlaw woman voice saying that, it made the song even more perfect. Actually, I just copped something called The Moving Sidewalks off the inside of the internets which is Billy Gibbons' first band before ZZ Top, a late '60s psychedelic deal where you can really hear how into Jimi Hendrix ol' Billy Gibbons was back then, and it's good shit too. Billy Gibbons is a national treasure and it really saddens me that most people only think of the horrendous '80s MTV electronic hit factory ZZ Top and not the real deal dirty jeans scruffy beard professional lounger soundtrack masters. When I start a college, Billy Gibbons is gonna be one of the first people I tenure.
#6: "Country Rap Tune" by Tow Down featuring DJ Screw, Hawk, & Big Pokey - This is a great song, one of my favorite ever screwed songs and probably the most unheralded underground hit by a white rapper ever. I was in a fancy hotel with speedy internet one time and actually looked up the video for this on the youtubes and it was weird hearing it at regular speed, like it sounded all freaky and odd. But the Tow Down dude was driving like a Honda Civic painted like the General Lee, which is what I always joked I'd do with my Datsun, except I was gonna paint it orange with a Japanese flag on top and paint "GENERAL TSO" along the edges of the roof, and probably keep the 01 number. Have you ever been to a demolition derby? You'd be surprised how many cars at a demolition derby are number 69. You'd also be surprised how many different ways people can purposely misspell “get ‘er done”.
#7: "Long Haired Lounger" by Prolo - Boogie Brown has a bluegrassy group called The Porch Loungers, but some of his songs are too retarded and lazy-boned for them, so he makes them Prolo songs. This is one, with no rapping at all, where he plays guitar, sang harmonies and shit like only he can, then screwed the whole thing down. I’ve heard of people listening to country music screwed and how it works at times, but music made specifically for that purpose is some next level shit. My man Brown.
#8: "Born Poor" by The Jaggerz - 7-inch single I got from some yard sale that I didn’t know shit about and got the band mixed up with The Sylvers ends up being one of my favorite 7-inches I have. Just your standard everyday olden style soulish but maybe white dudes involved song about how being poor is golden and you are not corrupted by the bullshit uppitty affairs of this twisted world, thus you are able to truly love, and also truly long dick a chick. Well, maybe that last part is not so obvious, but it is implied. Poor people love big asses and only rich people lust for the emaciated scrawny sickliness of super models. Eat some samwich bitch.
#9: "Longhaired Redneck" by David Allan Coe - Man, I’ve been listening to a lot of David Allan Coe lately, but nothing as late as this song (from the late ‘70s or so), so I’m not sure how it got played so much on my gaypod. But it is here so I talk of it now. I went to a DAC show one time by myself in Richmond and it was bikers but no cowboys and I thought I’d be the hippie standing in the corner except a couple fake redneck college buddies of mine showed up too who don’t speak redneck, which made us more likely to get smashed by someone, except I do speak redneck since it’s in my bloodline, and probably actually nothing that extraordinary even happened, I’m just babbling. That show was the worst DAC show I saw (I’ve been to like 6 or 7) because I guess he had just made up and met his daughter, who was like 23 or some shit, so one whole set was a bunch of bullshit sentimental sorry deadbeat dad but I didn’t know no better let’s go dance in an abandoned warehouse like in The Wrestler type bullshit. Really dulled my drunk.
#10: "In the Red" by Willie Isz - Khujo Goodie is a growling pork chop breathed awesome MC motherfucker, who I’ve always loved. It was his growl and Ceelo’s wacky sang-rapping style that made Goodie Mobb so goddamned awesome when they came out. (I guess Gipp was good for a little break in the action and some funny fashion accessories, and honestly to this day I have no idea why T-Mo was in the group or what he contributed. He pretty much ruined the perfection of “Soul Food” with his “Fuck Chris Darden! Fuck Marcia Clark!” dumb shit, not to mention dating the hell out of that song now in retrospect.) Jneiro Jarel is some sort of space age indy rap producer extraordinaire who probably has sketches of a “RIP J. Dilla” tattoo in some art notebooks on his bookshelf made of milk crates and cinderblocks somewhere. Even his name - Jneiro Jarel - and I may even be right on this, but I’ve assumed it was one of the bad guys from Superman that got stuffed in that cocaine mirror and shot into space. But I will say, on the strength of this “In the Red” song, I am more stoked for this impending CD (supposed to come out in like week or two I think) than anything else hip hop related in maybe a couple years. I guess the MF Doom this year was pretty good, but it was predictable. This is some retarded next level paranoia-laced multi-generation corny swaggerless audio goodness potentially, this Willie Isz is. And if Ceelo can get famous with Gnarls Barkley, I’d like to see Khujo do the same with Willie Isz, so when they make a Goodie Mobb reunion CD where T-Mo ruins it yet again and Gipp wears like ostrich feathers in his teeth or some shit, regular white people will be more apt to lump Khujo in with Ceelo as a guy held back by his lesser potnas than lump him with the aforementioned clowns.
#11: "Better Off" by Corntooth - Corntooth is a country assed band from my old roommate Matt (also check out his rock shit at RPG) and his wife and some other dudes I know or don’t know who were or are in Lamb of God or Gwar or other shit. It’s good stuff, as Matt’s from Pennsyltucky and his wife Janey is from Roanoke so the vocal stylings make you want to drink beer while watching Philo Beddo beat up Mexicans. I’ts great shit and impossible to ever find inside the internets, but it exists. I swear.
#12: "Pills I Took" by Hank Williams III - I love some Tricephus, which is extra enjoyable now because my eldest kid is 10 and hates country music (much like I did at her age) and even drew me a wacky picture of her idea of a hoedown with people wearing plaid clothes and eating fried chicken from Wal-Mart and carrying purses made of old blue jeans and playing the banjo and harmonica in annoying hoedown ways. She hates Hank III. It’s fun to have kids growing up that you can torment. I wonder if my parents took so much pride in tormenting me or it was some regular sitcom style bullshit where they didn’t realize they were tormenting. Because I know I’m bugging my kid, and I am proud of it, and because I know it it means I’m smart. So smart. That’s why I have a blog. Only smart people have blogs, so they can share how smart they are with the rest of the stupid fucking world.
#13: "Box #10" by Jim Croce - If the current economic climate causes me to either flip out or get desperate or both and do something so stupid I end up in jail for the rest of my life, I’m gonna do nothing but tattoo Jim Croce lyrics on my body. That, and try not to let anybody know how good I braid hair. In the last month, I’ve actually become pretty good at putting a bun in a young girl’s hair (that’s not a euphemism, in case you were wondering), which is a skill I’d never thought I’d acquire. Of course, instead of just doing it half-assed, I had to look it up online, ask my wife to show me, and my middle kid’s bun got better each and every week. First week, the shit fell out, bobby pins all over the ballet school floor. But last week, shit was so tight I was tempted to not even use the little crocheted bun holder thingy to give it that added tightness. I thought I could let her roll straight bun style. I am a man who conquers things.

These Boots Was Made What For Walking

I've been listening to a lot of old David Allan Coe lately, thanks to my ace boon limey Sicknote inside the Secret Clubhouse, and the greatest song ever forever and of all-time (of the last four attention spans of my brain) is "Walkin' Bum" by David Allan Coe. First off, Buckstone County Prison is a great ass record, and has the "Mississippi Woman" and "West Virginia Man" songs I have fucking loved forever, as it's old David Allan Coe, not really full-blown country yet, kind of a weird prison degenerate redneck Jerry Lee Lewis rock-n-country on speed type thing. Penitentiary Blues is another good album (in the form of cyber-codes that play on little machines inside my house) and has the "Walkin' Bum" song, which touches on some shit I've often thought about and have used in The Back Roads Ninjitsu Manual. One time, I visited this dude I knew out in Boulder, Colorado, and he was hung-up on his hang-ups, full color ohm back tattoo and shit, but sort of missing his mountain soul (sorry bro if you happenstance upon this). I went to some park like 8 miles away from his crib and said I'd walk. He was like, "I'll give you a ride man," like I was a fool for walking. But seriously, you ride by shit, you fly by, you don't see it or even begin to see all the great stupid things that great stupid people build in their little microcosms of a life. So I walked, step by step, through Boulder's sterile streets, up into the hills, and just vibed on it all. It was fine, nothing amazing, but I got a lot more out of that trip by walking than by cruising up, looking around, then cruising back in creature comfort. This led to a big part of a chapter in the rojonekku manual where there's a trailer park of seven trailers (based on Lindy Hamlet's Trailer Park in Hampden-Sydney, VA) and the student/kids/delinquents live in the trailer park, and oftentimes are moved from one trailer to the next in a process to get into the main big house on the compound, to truly know every trailer in that park, instead of just passing them by to their one. All the toilet handle jiggles and soft spots in the plywood by the leaky door and window with no screen that you can't leave open unless you want mosquitoes on your ass and moths all around the lights. Every detail becomes reality when you are more connected to something. I think this is part of the reason I've never flown, because I'm not afraid of flying at all. It just doesn't seem right to me, and I'm not of the lot in life where I have some godawful important bullshit where I have to be a thousand miles away in ten hours. I actually don't even like riding the interstates on road trips, preferring the old main roads that are clogged with stoplights and rundown hotels and strip malls and humanity. But fuck it man, I'm from all that shit too. And you run into cool ass things sometimes, so long as it's not new-fangled suburban sprawl with the same 23 stores you see everywhere. But even there, when you get to the edge where all the Mexicans live and there's a Big Lots, you can go into the Goodwill and find you a really nice authentic alternate black shamrock Boston Celtics Paul Pierce jersey with the embroidered numbers and name and all that shit for $4. Can't get that on the interstate.
Where I grew up in life is, to this day, at least an hour away from any U.S. interstate. And this is in Virginia, albeit southside VA - the home of textile mills with plywood windows and more crabgrass than cars in the parking lot. But still, an hour from the interstate makes me proud to be away from all that bullshit. Where I live now is only like 20 minutes from the interstate, which sucks, and you can tell. My neighbors think they live in the country, but they keep their lawn cut and don't like us having chickens and tall grass and freezers on the front porch and regular country folk things like that. At least I suspect they don't like it. Most of them don't hardly talk at us that often, unless pressed, which I like to do at times. Funny thing is the family that owns most things around here are country as fuck and all have nicknames like Gook or Beetle or Stump. They're good dudes too it seems most of the time. Seems like those dudes respect us having chickens and kids playing on homemade contraptions in the back yard and extra camper trailers out back with the light on all night long during the weekend.
Lately I've been wearing bandanas like Tommy Chong did because my hair's not quite long enough for a ponytail (unless I want the front sides to fall out and dangle while the rest is pulled back and look like some coffeeshop homo poet type). Dudes have been flashing me the peace sign at times, which bugs me, and one dude at the hardware store started talking about the '60s and free love and shit. Man, I was born in '73, I'm just holding my goddamned hair back. I think when I'm not so broke, I should go to the bar in town in my Tommy Chong bandana and get good and drunk and start a fight with one of those short little stocky redneck types who walk around like they were born a Marine and usually have some sort of rockin' ass tattoo they saw on a CD cover in high school. When people make me feel like too much of a hippie, I like to assert my alpha male hyperactivity. And then usually I'll realize, "Man, you were wearing a fucking Chong bandana and a pair of overalls with a Paul Pierce authentic jersey and some robot socks-looking ass new-fangled Converse sneaks... it's confusing and you do look half a fucking dirty hippie with your beard and all." And I laugh the type of laugh I laugh to myself at the world being the butt of my continuous humor.
Seriously though, I'm pretty proud of myself. So far as I know, I'm the first person in my family to graduate college (other than my cousin, who also graduated one semester before me, but we're the only two, and she failed sixth grade and I caught up to her and she got good grades from that point on, so I obviously secretly motivated her), and I'm the first person in my family - at least that I know of in my lifetime - that has chickens. I also had goats. I'm a true Renaissance man, if during the Renaissance they got useless degrees in stupid shit that didn't help them at all in life other than put them in debt that they ignore until hopefully it all blows up and goes away, and they had animals in their back yard. I never studied Renaissance studies in college, and honestly am not even sure if I spelled it right. (I cut spell check off automatic because fuck that, always telling me the words I make up aren't for real. If I thought of it, it's for real, cybertron-approval or not.)

100 VINYLZ: #76 - Abigail LP by King Diamond

(1987, Roadrunner Records)
I first had this on tape in high school, and everybody knows the King was the best because he can do death metal groans but could also sing opera if he wanted. He also could've been the European Pele but he gave up pro soccer when he sold his soul to the devil at his kitchen table one night. All King Diamond before 1990 is the greatest shit ever, the culmination of his early incubation in Mercyful Fate to where he had the Satanic theme record thing down pat. Abigail is still my favorite, and I am proud that one year in my wasting money on ebay periods, I acquired this on the vinyl. If I can't find my Death Angel LP, I will blast this through the speaker in the back yard on chicken slaughter day. They're these big ass heavy duty 1977 solid wood speakers I got from under the carport at the dump aka The Too Good To Throw Away section. I keep them in the camper, pull them out for parties, because they make big noise, but the other week I set one on a milk crate behind the shed, and my riding mower was in the shop back home where my dad worked for 30 years of his life, so the tarp that covered the riding mower was on the ground. Tarp over top speaker on milk crate, loose brick on top of tarp to hold it in place, and BAMMM! permanent back yard sound system that I didn't have to haul in and out all the time. Now, I just plug in the camper, hook my little 2 gig gaypod shufflenator into the jack by the door, and play the musics. I'm on a Los Tigres Del Norte kick lately.

Friday Love/Hate

LOVE: The latest homebrew we cracked open starting last night, called Spring Chicken Ale, which we made before we even had chickens I think. Has some coriander and lemonpeels in it and is light and good as fuck. My goal to make regular homebrews so I didn't ever buy beer again involved making light beers like this instead of most homebrews that taste like some poured a gallon of hops into a tiny bottle and swished it with some dirt. This is my new favorite beer ever and I'm glad my wife suggested we keep a recipe book because we didn't keep up with our every 2 weeks brewing plan, meaning we will need to get money to get started again, and this easily fills the light tasty awesome beer void that I tried to fill with Yuenglings. This Spring Chicken Ale gets me drunker though. I've drank one and a half tonight (22 oz. bottles) and have quite the buzz. 50 bottles ain't gonna last long though.
HATE: Having to pull a long day tomorrow, hopefully clock a check from folks, and spend half of it on fucking stupid bills right away that are due tomorrow. I hope the new credit card laws they are passing contains something about them issuing metal credit cards that I can then sharpen into ninja death tools and slit the throat of the fuckers in the credit industry. I know I know, it's all my fault, but I wasn't really trained properly for this bullshit world I seem to be stuck in. I'm old enough to know better, but I think I'd rather just have a temper tantrum, kill some motherfuckers, not have a revolution start because it won't be televised by the internets, go to jail, and get some really swank guitar string tattoos and hopefully not be, you know, raped, although I am white and from what I hear that makes for tasty ass in jail. I could be all white powered out in the name of self-preservation though. God what a shitty situation to get into. I apologize fake internet holographic world spun from my dorkblog... I won't use new-fangled metal credit cards as ninja throwing cards and kill credit industry fat cats. But I might use a fake social security number or two to solve my credit problems. If only I can maintain the sense to pay off actual credit cards with fake credit ones and not just use new fake ones for back tattoos and buying that lime green '65 Impala sitting at that body shop in Centenary on route 20. I'm sure that dude doesn't take credit cards anyways though.

Entering the World of Chickens

I have not been too stoked with this world, at least not the people part of it. Seems like a bunch of snakes and fakes and flakes and folks sucking the energy right out of me half the time. If someone's not posturing beyond their knowledge about some dumb shit I don't even care about, then some other person is getting things all twisted and retardified in their own head and forcing that drama triangle on me. (Drama triangle is this bullshit where someone always has others positioned either as friend or oppressor, and usually they switch you back and forth as necessary, like say they are trying to work things out with their wife over some long-term problems, instead of facing the issues inside of themselves, they switch you over to the oppressor and a lot of their problems with the former oppressor were because of you. Some folks be so melodramatic in abundance it's more like a drama dodecahadrangle or some bullshit.)
Anyways, I solved my socialization problems and hate for the world by building a pimp-ass chicken coop, absconding a chicken tractor from some folks in a barter deal my wife did, and getting me some chicks, who will hopefully be more hen than rooster (which is a fucking retarded dead art in itself, of which I'm no good at at all, and every person you ask has some other bullshit chick dangling foot watching mountaintop science to try and teach you in 37 words). So I think I will talk about chicken breeds, both the ones I have and the ones I'd like to get, and all the stupid things I've learned immersing myself in true retarded ass Raven fashion in the written world of chicken "knowledge". (By the way, there are crazy amounts of backyard chicken websites/blogs/and even message boards. Most of them disturb me, though I do lurk and learn, and one even has this impressive very-internet-like nerd project of documenting how chickens of all breeds look at almost any age - from days to weeks to months - of both sexes to give visual aid in sexing chicks. Of course, it's unfinished, because this is the internet after all. Also, "sexing chicks" seemed to me a very dangerous google search to do on the family computer instead of my little laptop disease machine of stolen music and questionable image searches, but not that much creepy shit came up. I may have changed google settings on that computer without remembering though, as my oldest kid always likes to be trying to go onto americangirl.com and look at shit we can't afford.)
First chicks I got were from some scowl-faced short ass redneck near where I grew up. He and his ol' lady had a trailer with like two big sheds behind the place full of chicks and chickens, and it was right down the road from where my dead grandpa's house is, of which the roof I'm supposed to paint, so it gave me an excuse to go look at that roof, miss my grandpa, see a skunk under the back porch, and think about how much I fucking hate painting, especially stupid metal roofs in the age of global warming my ass the fuck up on top of metal on top of buildings on top of the surface of the earth. Anyways, little scowl-faced dude in overalls (like me actually, which was mad funny to me, and I think what pissed him off, like that was his country style or some bullshit, or I don't know maybe we went to school together and I was all fucked up on acid or something at a party and dissed him or something, who the fuck knows with country folk; we hold bizarre grudges stubbornly hard for the stupidest of reasons) picked me out what he suspected were hens, though it's hard to know at that age. Got me three 5-week-old Rhode Island Reds and two 3-week-old Leghorns, basically on his insinuation that Leghorns outlay the Reds (known in chicken nerd world as "RIR"s). I actually started building my coop after situating all these little dudes in the chicken tractor, and when I was almost done, like one good solid day of work finishing the fencing, I went to some Jesus freak chiropractor cowboy dude's house I got off of ebay and got myself a pair of Ameracaunas about 10-weeks old. He had no idea about sexing them (probably because of his god), but he told me if one was a rooster he'd replace it, but if both were, he'd only replace one. I figure fuck it, if they end up a rooster we'll eat them, which will prepare me for doing a flock of meatbirds later this summer. I'd rather my first couple chicken slaughters be one or two at a time than jumping into doing a whole batch of 25, although maybe the speaker I have permanently set up in the back yard could be pointed toward the slaughtering area and I could just pump The Ultra-Violence by Death Angel and get my chicken slaughter on. Finally, the other day after ballet class with the kids in my truck, I swung by a lady's house and she was a Shifflett (which is a whole slew of local people who are like an army of Jesco Whites who were run off the Shenandoah Mountains by the federales when they built the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park and all, so the Shiffletts are a strange, outlaw bunch) and I picked out two 3-week-old Buff Orpingtons and two 3-week-old Australorps. So here is what I have to say about chicken breeds, first the ones I've got, and then others I hope to get into.
RHODE ISLAND REDS - These are standard red-assed chickens you always see and they lay big brown eggs pretty regularly it seems. Mine are now about 8-weeks old I think, and one I'm almost completely certain is a hen, the other two I'm not sure about, leaning hard hen on one and hard rooster on the other. Very functional animals and have a chill personality so far it seems. They remind me of the type of guys who work for themselves and like to play horseshoes while high but also lead cub scout troops or coach t-ball or something like that. I think if we keep a flock of around 12 to 20 birds, I will always have 3 or 4 of these guys, especially considering their egg-laying reputation.
WHITE LEGHORNS - These are the main commercial layers of all those white assed eggs you get at the store, which I think makes the do-it-yourself type playa hate on them. There also, for some reason, is a big deal about brown eggs being superior over white eggs, and I'm not sure if there's truth to it or it's just misplaced white guilt or retarded hippie nonsense, but I do know the Leghorns aren't supposed to get as big as the RIRs so they probably don't lay as big an egg. Still, an egg a day ain't uncommon for these dudes. And they look very normal chickeny too. I guess I am operating my flock like a game of Sim City in that I want a good amount of regular people shit going on and not just crazy fucked up birds everywhere. I also know from my brief consultations with internet nerd chicken world on some breed history site that White Leghorns were highly cherished in ancient Rome and used to foretell the future. So I like to pretend that involves them being super-mental chickens and not just something that was sliced open in a cave on a mountainside to spill it's blood and see what the gods wanted us to know.
AMERACAUNAS - They lay colored eggs, and my wife named these two some fucked up Russian names or something. One of them is most definitely a hen and the other I don't know. It looks like a hen, no real heavy comb or arrowhead ass feathers or anything, but it's aggressive and bossy to the other birds. It was also by far the biggest of the bunch until the one probably rooster RIR caught up to it in the last week, so maybe it's just got a big chicken in the coop complex going on. These are strange birds, therefore I like them. Apparently, true araucanas came from Chile and most every bird in America called araucana or ameracauna is a fake ass mutt hybrid that lays colored eggs and the true araucanas are impossible to find for real though.
BUFF ORPINGTONS - Straight pimps of the chicken world, with a tight ass cream feather color and goofy fluff to their tails. Mine are too young to sex (that's what she said), but one has the demeanor of a pimp ass rooster. Most of these, if they end up roosters, they will end up stuffed with rosemary and cooked in my oven, but I'd be tempted to keep a pimp ass straight gangsta funk looking buff orpington rooster. (I also apparently decided to stop capitalizing rooster breeds halfway through this post, as rhode island reds use of a geographical place confused me.)
AUSTRALORPS - These were bred by some mad scientist in Australia and were called Australian Laying chickens, but everyone put the -orp on the end so you knew they came from orpingtons, and they were called australorps and now you know the rest of the story. Mine are small, like 3-weeks, and they hang with the buff orps so I don't even notice them really, little ugly ass black chicks.
BLACK STARS - Basically, there are two types of chickens called red sex links and black sex links that are called so because you know what sex the chick is when it's born by the color of it's feathers. This shit was done in the mid '70s in mad science fashion, but I hate that term "sex link" for a chicken. They are also called red stars and black stars too, probably by uptight people who don't like to say "sex", which I'm fine with in this case. Mostly, this is because I have had a large west African fetish the past year or two, searching out bullshit rap and old funk and crap like that (if you want to buy me a present, get me Extreme Canvas by some dude, about Ghanaiananaan handmade movie posters for VCR movie theaters they used to have back in the day). Anyways, Ghana was the first African country to get independence, and they have the standard red yellow green (or is it black?) striped flag like a ton of African countries, but with a black star in the middle of the center yellow stripe. So since then, Ghana has had Black Star culture, where dudes who are on the come-up, or the national soccer team, or a song by English rapper Sway, is called "Black Star". Thus, I want some black stars.
BROWN LEGHORNS - They have a pretty odd wacky colorful feather patch on their front ends, kinda psychedelic, and I've been listening to a lot of Hawkwind and 13th Floor Elevators in the darkness of my backyard lately as the fireflies crank up, so I think I'm pretty down with psychedelic chickens. Maybe I'll crack open one of those glow sticks and pour it over them and watch them bug out.
There's more but the second bell rang so I've got to make it to algebra real quick.

100 VINYLZ: #77 - Soul Power '74 7" by Maceo & The Macks

(1974, People Records)
Kind of forgot about this, and had planned on finishing the list by end of 2008, to revisit and re-list every Presidential election year. Oh fucking well.
This is a jukebox single I got out of the dollar bins in the basement of Plan 9 in Richmond's gay ass Carytown, an instrumental funkdown of the James Brown song, complete with crying baby, breaks galore, horns getting the type of ill that diseases DJ Premier's mind, and a side A part 1 and side B part 2. One of the greatest 7-inch singles I own and how the fuck it only ended up #77 confuses May 2009 Raven immensely. Spring 2008 Raven was on some bullshit methinks.