t u r n a

yesterday's state-of-the-art
equipment, behind the shed,
waiting for a weathered death

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #3: "Virginia Back Roads" by Prolo

This is a Prolo song that would be on a new collection of songs if we ever did a new collection of song, that is nothing but the instrumental to “Cadillac on 22s” slowed down with me and Mike Gee freestyling about family life on it. Boogie Brown laced it with the bluegrass two-part harmonics on the chorus, and oddly enough, I heard of some country ass dudes somewhere or another in rural Virginia who were like, “This is how this beat was meant to be done.” I love shit like that. I’ve heard of dudes who play horseshoes in the Shenandoah mountains or hillbilly ass redneck hippie types down around West Virginia or the hopeless but loveable lifetime stoners of my hometown rocking the Prolo. I don’t know why I’m all wrapped up in this cyber-bullshit. I should just be drinking beer with anybody and everybody from Amelia County to Buggs Island, from where I-85 near Emporia slices the right end of southside of Virginia from the soulless flypaper of Tidewater all the way down to the southwest jut of the Old Dominion spooning up against wild and wonderful West Virginia, from 15 south of Charlottesville to 5 miles north of Danville, and just freestyling my whole fucking life away. I was getting ready to type, “wouldn’t nobody know me,” thinking in the larger sense of the whole wide world, but actually a whole lot more people would know me. In real life is underrated.
STEAL "Virginia Back Roads"
NEXT UP: My daughter’s ipod makes a power move!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #4: "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues" by Jim Croce

My folks played Jim Croce. I pretended to read a book that didn't exist for an autobiography book report in high school about Jim Croce. He is played regularly in my house as a grown folk to this day. That is one chill ass dude who made some real ass music, even if it was folksy and AM radio-ey. I sometimes wonder what went wrong with us as a people to where kids don't have blonde hair like used to did in the '70s, and guys can't grow bushy mustaches like back then either. It is said that humans have a lot of the immunity inside their hair follicles, thus the story of Samson (as well as that bitch Delilah) is not so far-fetched. We wear strange hair nowadays, with dudes purposely rocking cybertronic close cut beard designs and women shaving their cooches bare. Hell, even dudes shave themselves. Seems we are reverting to our childhood, like any lost ass adult with mental issues. Right now, we have ebay to buy all the dumb shit from our childhood and fill those empty gaps, but our kids, they won’t grow up with the same shit to look back on. What are they gonna buy? Obsolete smartphones? Old gaming systems? Lolcat emails?
Whenever I ride by the car wash, whatever car wash, I see those dudes working and I real that there’s some real dudes. They are not fucking around online and they ain’t checking their emails twice an hour much less having them zapped directly at them through their robot phones to where they are playing space invaders all the goddamned time, putting callouses on their thumbs from rubbing across their tiny button pads too furiously. At times, I feel like, “fuck it, I’m getting ahead in life,” and other times I feel like life is getting ahead of me. But it’s like a long distance trip where you’re four states from home on the way back in your daily car, and maybe you can sense you’re low on oil or something. Something’s not quite right, you can feel it, even though there’s no obvious light saying, “Yo, shit ain’t right, homeslice.” And you know something’s not right; but you don’t know what. So you just try to make it home. That’s where I’m at, waiting to figure out what the problem might be, riding along on cruise control, thinking I might’ve took the wrong exit 60 miles back, but I don’t have a map. How the fuck does everybody get to where they’re going? Seems like everybody else got given a map but I didn’t.
Eventually, I figure, something will either get completely fucked in my ride, like I’ll get skin cancer or shot in the shoulder or something, and it’s like the car breaking down on the side of the road. You know everything’s screwed for sure at that point so there’s nothing left to do but call AAA and hope your alzheimer’s ridden mother-in-law accidentally renewed your membership. Or you limp home, and it still doesn’t feel right in the car, it’s just not going the way you feel it should, and nothing happens but then it breaks down on the side of the road on like a Tuesday afternoon. You figure out the problem and hitchhike home and fix it on Wednesday morning, or at least get it running again, and life goes on.
I don’t really know what the fuck my point is other than I feel like about 200,000 miles without an oil change for the last 15,000. Sometimes I can sit there and understand how people flip out and stab motherfuckers in batches or dive off the top of buildings with a half-gainer into concrete wasteland ten stories below. Jim Croce is like a goddamned tincture that eases my chronic internal struggle. He’s working at the car wash, and it sucks, because he wants an office with a desk and a secretary, but he’s just working at the goddamned piece of shit car wash. But hey, fuck it you know. Everybody’s got a struggle in they brain of one variety or another.
That’s the goddamned beauty of music - you can be sure emotionally of whatever it is that is overriding your every waking thought, but then just the right song will come on and twist it all - the whole wide earth and everything that happened to you, today and forever - into a completely different angle, and it’s okay. You drink a beer and figure tomorrow’s gonna be another day, and you can get up and catch a ride to where the car is broken down on the side of the road, and you’ll figure out with the help of your Haynes manual how the fuck to replace the starter solenoid, which for some reason is behind the engine block. And then you’ll be moving along again, maybe looking like more of a piece of shit than everything else moving along, with your busted grill and dented passenger side and one fender a different color than the rest. But you’re still moving, and though you probably won’t ever get to where you thought you were gonna go when young and smooth-skinned and with big wide eyes full of trust and optimism, you’re still moving. You piece of shit.
STEAL "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues"
NEXT UP: Me and Mike Gee getting down in the camper!

Weekly Recap

So I contribute to a couple of other blogs sporadically, and kinda realize I'm a piece of shit who doesn't have the focus or mind freedom to contribute anything better to this world than half-retarded well-worded ridiculous opinions, most likely featuring some sort of libel or conjecture or outright lie, and I figured a good thing to do, rather than copy all those posts here, would be to - on Friday mornings - bust a post with links to all that other dumb shit. This would be the first one, and perhaps the last knowing my moody ass.

From the new TV Makes You Retarded blog - a recap/mind meander of The Corner miniseries' first episode
and the second episode
From Armchair Linebacker pro football blog (where I write about the Washington Redskins) - A New Season Dawns

Plus, there is the Florida Heat Wave anthology of short stories I am in that will be coming out this month. You can get that inside the internets or even win an unedited preview copy in this thing.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #5: "It's Alright In The City" by Sonny Charles

A dude I was in second grade with who played second base on my first ever little league team where I played centerfield (and rocked the pure blonde shaggy hair like a Bad News Bear, because kids still had blonde hair back then since there wasn’t so much fluoride in the public drinking water), he moved away, and we both grew up and did our things, but his thing ended up being some wacky world music with electronic influence DJ living in Brooklyn like three billion other hipster people ended up congregating upon. He made a mix of songs, including a couple of his own, and his worldwide megamix was good shit, yes indeed, like anything I’d find inside the internets where there’s some stuff I love and some stuff I could care less about and it’s all mixed together but it’s all MP3s that get cobbled together into a disorderly fashion on my desktop Itunes into a complete fucking mess because that’s the only way I can handle moving through life, with chaos and clutter and debt. Yets, my old world chaos, wanting a simpler bullshit life, hopefully pockmarked with as much idle time to imbibe my mind’s obsessions as it is with smallpox and plague, is better than new world order. My clutter is a creative junkman feng shui, and when done right gives me power. The trick is to burn the house down or move every 8 years or so, to keep it from taking over. And fuck it, mired in debt means I’m still not starving and still not dead and still not living in a trash heap (well, that one could depend on perspective) and not starving to fucking death, not even to dying. My slow death is a mental torture, and god blessed are those who have enough leisure in their life to pretend their complete mental happiness is the top order of the day.
Well, old school second grade second baseman DJ Brad Loving hooked up this megamix, and one song in particular became the greatest song I had ever heard in my whole cursed yet blessed life, and it was this song. I played in five thousand times over a month, annoyed my wife, got my oldest child to like it then hate it and made my youngest children dance to it when all they wanted to hear was “Jump Around” by House of Pain fourteen times in a row with a couple Taylor Swift songs mixed in the middle somewhere. So now I share with you. And DJ Brad Loving’s site is some wacky name, like elephantsandbeer or flightandmorningtime or something, but you could probably google him and find it. Actually it’s birdandwhale.com I think, and normally I would make a little bracketed part here to remind myself to insert the hypalink, and then forget to pay attention to the bracket, so the post would look all stupid. Or stupider. If you want to find it, you can. This is the internet; you know how shit works by now.
STEAL "It's Alright In The City"
NEXT UP: Oh man, me and Jim Croce!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #6: "Danny's Song (live)" by Loggins & Messina

Loggins & Messina’s double live LP On Stage (double LP that was recorded live, not they cloned themselves into two Kenny Logginses and two Jim Messinas) is the stupidest, gayest, most easy listening AM radio bullshit that I swear is awesome as fuck. This is a good example of why people born before 1980 should not have the internets. Or maybe they should make separate internets for different aged people, kinda like how different countries have different shit. I work with a China lady now and I have her look things up for me in her China internet because sometimes it’s there. I mean, you’re not gonna find the soundtrack to The Warriors movie in China internet, but you can find Mexican murder magazines there that are non-existent in American internet. You’d be surprised how much stuff they don’t allow in America internets, as would I, because I don’t see it either. Makes you wonder about all the conspiracies that are allowed, as well as all the porn that’s everywhere.
By the way, I have suspected they’ve actually fired up the HAARP beam the past few months, but perhaps I will save that for tomorrow’s ramble, as I don’t want to ruin the perfect feel good groove that Jimmy Messina and Kenworth Loggins put together with their band of friends and this lovely little song for you to live with a woman and cook potatoes and eggs and bacon on a Sunday morning and go to the paper box in your boxer shorts to get the Sunday paper and you read about football and she does the crossword and you come together at the style section and goddamn it they don’t even make newspapers in this country anymore. No wonder we are all fucked.
STEAL "Danny's Song"
NEXT UP: Even obscure black people have a great sense of rhythm!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #7: "Thunderstorms And Neon Signs" by Hank Williams III

It is already August and I’m still working my way through the second half of my June list. This stupid fucking blog has started to emulate how I pay my bills. Note the donation paypal bullshit in the right sidebar, if not now then never. I do not pretend I am the brokest, because I have things. They are broken and pieced back together on a regular basis, but newer than nothing, that is for sure. All in all, I know I have it good, but I also am an American so I’m not even floating water anymore financially. Ultimately, that’s probably a good thing. We’ve all been cattle, munching the fuck out of grass, and they kept giving us bigger pastures to chew on, but then all of a sudden they ran out of fertilizer so the grass is all brown and fucked up, but they’re like, “COME ON YOU STUPID FUCKING COWS! EAT! EAT!” And I just kinda stumble through my days, making minimum payments, hoping it all works out before I am dead, which it won’t, but that don’t matter because I’ll be gone. Y’all have a bonfire and throw me in the middle and tap a keg and let the backyard speaker play until Sunday morning.
Much like Tricephus, I share a name with the two previous paternal branches of the family tree. In my fam, at least up to my grandfather (who I never knew before he was dead), we shared the same first and last name and had different middle names, which is why I’ve been called Raven my whole life, because that was my middle and my dad already pissed all over the Charles to mark his territory. Both grandpa and my dad were chronic alcoholics who died before the age of 50. I am different, because I am of a generation where when someone says “chronic alcoholic” I use a cartooney stoner voice to go “ah ha ha... tha chronic,” and make light of the situation. If all you know is the stupid fucking dark, and it scares you, usually the best way to deal is to make light. Make light all the fucking time. Nothing can ever be serious, because life is too short. Literally for many of us.
STEAL "Thunderstorms And Neon Signs"
NEXT UP: Mellow AM radio sounds, because music was meant to be mono!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #8: "It'll Shine When It Shines" by Ozark Mountain Daredevils

This may be the most loungin’ ass album ever, and this song fucking rules. For those of you who dabbled in listening to Solaris Earth Pipeline, you will recognize an unslowed down vocal sample from this song. Funny this song comes up the day after “Wildwood Flower” because it is the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ most famous song “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” that Jesco busts out 42 of his 47 flat footing moves to in that drunken hills of West Virginia documentary. Oddly enough, being a dude who has stole every fucking album the Ozark Mountain Daredevils has ever made from inside the internet’s vast vagina wasteland of pilfered products and porn viruses, I can say without a doubt, don’t fucking bother with anything else they ever did. You can get that one “If You Wanna Get To Heaven” song if you’re some sort of ironic retro PBR fuckface who needs a psych-up song to look in the mirror to while you get ready to go hang out at a co-worker’s instrumental metal for college graduates who own their own fringe construction-oriented specialty companies band’s show later tonight. But if you’re a real dude who lives in a rural place who likes to fight chickens and watch junk cars rust and fuck the ol’ lady on the picnic table under a new moon, then this song is the title song off the only album you’ll ever need, really, for the rest of your life. I’d say in a perfect world you could buy it on tape off ebay and then play it on a boombox with like 12 D batteries until they start to slow down and it warbles to about the speed that sounds right, but maybe not, so you take out the batteries and put them back in in a different order and that makes it play right for another four minutes.
STEAL "It'll Shine When It Shines"
NEXT UP: Born to get dizzy, baby; born to get dizzy!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #9: "Wildwood Flower 11" by David Grisman & Tony Rice

My chicken flock has changed drastically recently, after the new dogs ate up a few of them. I had an americauna rooster, australorp hen, buff orpington hen, and simple assed RIR hen left, so found a lady on craigslist that sold me alleged hens at $5 a pop, that were a few weeks away from laying. I got 3 white leghorns, 3 RIRs, and a buff orp for good measure, and rode to my mom's house from scenic shitty Cumberland County, Virginia, to chat up my mom, commiserate on our miserable mentality in this crooked ass world, and then ride home, putting the crate with the new hens on the freezer for the night with a dropcloth on top to keep the dogs from attacking them. Next day, mixed them in the flock, and new flock and old flock did not mix, as usual. Not even three days later though, one of the white leghorns got dragged out the coop at night, dead, trail of feathers into the woods. I patched up any noticeable holes in the fence, and went about my life. Next morning, again, another of the brand new motherfuckin’ five dollar white leghorns was dragged out, in the smallest of possible openings, making me suspect a weasel.
So I did weasel research online (which is how I ended up suspecting a weasel in the first place) and MacGyver-rigged the most ridiculous weasel trap ever, which consisted of an old vegetable box from dumpster diving with the two open handle parts, flipped over, with a tent tie-down rigged to have like three raw chicken livers hanging down, with two set rat traps (the big motherfuckin’ mouse trap things that will break your finger if you are not careful) that had chicken livers on them fuckers too, all held down with cinderblocks, figuring a weasel could only get in there, and I shut up the coop as well.
Next morning nothing, so I dismantled the weasel trap in a pair of cut-off pajama bottoms that look like a pair of desert island jamz shorts or some shit, before I took a shower to go to work, so fresh and so clean clean. That night, I realized it much easier to just CLOSE THE FUCKING COOP UP than to rig this nonsense contraption back together. So I started that method, even though it meant walking outside after dark and then as early as possible the next morning.
A few days later, my australorp was dead in the corner of the coop when I opened it up. No wounds, but in retrospect I suspect she was pecked to death. My retrospection was helped by the fact the elder buff orp was dead in the pen like two days later in the same way. I blamed my rooster, who had become sort of an asshole, and once the dogs attacked him and tore off his tail feathers, he wasn’t as cool looking, so fuck him. I found some buff orpington and cochin mixes on craigslist, in Buckingham County, for $5 a piece (everything in C-ville is like $10 a piece, because C-ville is bullshit, basically a giant country club for liberal people who can afford to feel righteous about they selves), and went to the lady’s house and dug birds out of trees, and drove them home, and then caught the rooster and put him in a crate. Next day, I gave him water, but he must have kicked it over because when I came home, he was dead. So I threw him to the pigs. Except he made a sound when he landed. I couldn’t handle the possibility of him being alive, so I bolted the fuck out of there and let what happened happen. When I went back, it was feathers strewn about and two smiling pigs rolling in mud, which reads like a metaphor for something but I’m too uninterested to figure it out.
You see, now I have ten birds, one of which is adult and laying one egg every other day, if we are lucky. The other nine are supposed to all be hens, and five of them should start laying soon, although one of the RIRs shows rooster aggression and has questionable tail feathers, and another one also has questionable tail feathers. So we will see. The buff orp/cochin gang of four usually hides out in the house because they seem to be oppressed for having feathers on their feet. Lately though they made themselves a nice dirt bath in the far corner of the pen. There are tons of cherry tomato plants around their pen from the last two runs I had their fencing up for and they spat out old cherry tomato seeds I guess, or shat them out or something, and tons of those little things rot on the vine because I’m the only one who eats them, so I toss them back in the run for the little fuckers, and they all freak out, and sometimes my lone leghorn flies out the corner of the bird netting roof and I have to spend twenty minutes herding his little dumb ass back into the coop/run.
But anyways, my whole point is I found some chicken nerd magazine at the library’s free bin, and most of it was dumb shit that had nothing to do with fighting roosters or how Sweater McGuinness first bred his gamecock sweater breeds while working on a farm in North Carolina in the 1930s, and that’s the same breed that wins a majority of cockfights in both the Philippines and Mexico to this day. But there was an aside about putting a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into the water buckets of your birds, to keep it from getting all filthy, and to be healthy for they ass too. So I started doing that. Guess what? No more scrubbing pesticide run-off scum from the sides of their waterer when I have to refill it. Plus, they drink twice as much water because the apple cider touch is dope to them. I feel my flock, although not yet laying eggs, will be better than ever by the end of the month, and I fully expect seven or eight eggs a day.
Also, from researching Sweater McGuinness, I think I will utilize his breeding method with some chickens this winter with our two thousand pound chicken tractor that never gets moved. I’m gonna let some hens get broody and we’ll see what happens.
All of this has nothing to do with a song at all, of course, because my blog is all about nothing, except whatever. But this song is a different version of the one that Jesco White tells Wally to play, “With flair!” as he tap dances on plywood beside railroad tracks in that documentary you should already know about. It is a conflict in my life because I write words for plywood tapdancers alongside railroad tracks, but those people don’t read. So instead I write my dumb shit for computer people or the educated types who come from twisted angles, and it’s enjoyable enough I guess. But that ain’t my bloodstream. This is the conflict of my life. I could write 20,000 words a night, with flair, but I get caught up in the fact that who I’d be writing wouldn’t be who would read it, and ultimately I’d turn into a paperback version of those hillbilly teeth you get in gumball machines at the grocery store.
Oh well.
STEAL "Wildwood Flower 11"
NEXT UP: It’s like my mama said, you only live ‘til you’re dead!

g r f l m

race car’s roller cage and clear
coated custom flame paint scheme -
a lifetime of after work

u s a g r

it’s a big country full of
fool people still thinking god
done blessed this developed mess

g r f p o

organic urban clutter,
spray cans and paint markers blurred
into a beautiful blight

b i l l b

vegas shines from a thousand
crooked angles, electric
bill covered by overhead

f r a m e

datsun gone to dust and rust,
cushion foam exposed, christmas
lights and hieroglyphic mold

s h i n e

modern mandala kept clean
by saturday afternoon's
fresh white rags, ready to spin

b o o t b

hard to find the time to shine
when chasing punched clock minute
hands across a cement wall

c o r v a

plastic don't polish nor rust,
building false idols to fake
gods out of our eternal

c o r d s

dust-heavy rear view mirror
never getting enough looks
backwards to clean up what's past

r i c o n

teaching my young to respect
the tall grasses of left field,
far from the umpire's eyeballs

a Rojonekku contest

Florida Heat Wave is a book put together by this dude Michael Lister, and I was lucky enough to be included in the collection, with a story called Escambia Counties. I have an extra review copy that the publisher sent me like two months ago to give one away inside the interwebs, and I never have yet, mostly because one copy got buried beneath old issues of Sports Illustrated, Harper's, Juxtapoz, and the weekly free newspaper they put in our mailbox that has the Food Lion circular tucked in the middle. I anxiously look to see what's on sale that week that might afford me to cook giant amounts of foods in the back yard for hours and hours and hours while drinking beer, which hopefully will be on sale as well, though they rarely advertise that, probably because of god and shit.
Anyways, there are two ways this will probably go. One way is the path I've felt destined to follow from a young age, where fame shines its ugly light on me, no matter how hard I try to avoid it or how many times I fuck it up. The second path is I have the life sucked from me like the liver cancer rats at my work, and all I do for the rest of my life is work, come home, watch TV shows, drink beer, have the weekend to piddle around the yard, and then go back to work.
For the sake of argument, and to remain hopeful for the future like Whitney Houston before cocaine, let's hope for the former, which means a pre-print copy of my first published short story will eventually be worth like half the cost of the paper it's printed on. But honestly, if you are still here, after all my flame outs and freak outs and nonsense, you are either somebody who knows me or someone who enjoys my bullshit or maybe both, though those people seem to be few and far between, which is probably best for this stupid world.
Nonetheless, I have a copy to give away. Here is the deal. Let's pretend for the sake of pretending that the eventual winner has me show up in their town on the Greyhound around 10 am on a Saturday morning, and you shall host me, probably after not sleeping and making friends with some kid from east Tennessee who had traveler's flask of Jim Beam to share, through the Saturday, and I’d catch a bus back home the next morning around 9:30. Feel free to make me sleep wherever and do whatever, judging my personality from what you expect of me, and pretty much plan on me having $23 to blow during this visit. But I will leave you a copy of my stupid first short story, a pre-print review copy in fact, where they throw in extra “l” in my last name because I don’t smoke blunts, I smoke els. Tell me what we might do that day, what you’d expect to happen, whatever. Email it to my shit over in the sidebar, which is ravenmack at gmail.com in case you are lazy as fuck, which means you probably wouldn’t enter anyways.
I’ll give it a couple weeks roughly, let’s say like middle of August, whittle it down to three, let the publisher dude knock one off the list, and my wife knock one off the list, and then we’ll see what kind of balance is left on my credit card at that point, and maybe I’ll bring this shit straight to you, via the glorious Greyhound bus system.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #10: "Tumbling Dice" by The Rolling Stones

The pentathlon of loungerism goes like this.
Number one, horseshoes, to 13, with 3-point ringers, two-point leaners, and one-point points, seven is a skunk. Perfect pentathlon of loungerism has four folks, probably dudes but maybe ol’ ladies too because some ol’ ladies still know how to get down, and you can do a double elimination of games. Best method is to have old 5-gallon buckets over the stobs that you can slide to the side for end tables by each pit, and then cover back up to keep people from busting they selves up in the dark.
Number two, and you need the four, is Spades, with partners. I used to be all about big and little joker style, fuck the two of spades ghetto version, but it’s hard to argue with a perfect deck of 52, and jokers convolute that perfection. Three games where every partnership is explored, and you learn who the good players are and who the gravy trainers are.
Number three conversational. You can’t really score this aspect, because it happens the whole time, and also because it just don’t work that way. But you can always tell the person sitting in the circle of thought streams who is biting his ears, holding onto the MOST AWESOME STORY he wants to share, and when he finally finds a spot to break into the conversation, his tale relates to something that happened three tales ago, not now. Conversation is freestyling in the sense it has to connect with what just happened, not what had happened a while ago. Anybody who says, “Going back to what you said about...” is speed bumping the now with his goddamned desires to be the shiniest star of the past, even if that past is just ten minutes ago. I have friends for years that I wrote off forever because of this personal disease. Ego is a too much thing. Go with the flow.
Number four, I don’t know, just fill in your own game. I’m down to play. I called it “pentathlon of loungerism” and at this point am just trying to get to number five. Good thing I didn’t call it a decathlon.
Number five is the dice. I learned it from my ex-girlfriend’s brother, and brought it to Richmond, and the Black Label drinking punk rockers called it Eyeballs even though the dude I learned it from called it Huvna, which I have no idea what the fuck that means. Some make it a gamble and others just do it to occupy the night. Nowadays in my life, me and the ol’ lady just call it playing dice. And it’s a perfect fucking game, and my laptop is resting in the dark on the same pick-a-nick table we play upon right now, screen drawing in bugs that got me paranoid they are termites because they look like flying ants and flying ants are termites usually. Fuck it, eat my house down to dust. I’m gonna sit right here until I die.
STEAL "Tumbling Dice"
NEXT UP: Wally, with flair.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #11: "Love's Gonna Get You (screwed & chopped)" by Boogie Down Productions

I will say, this is one of my all-time favorite Screw tapes, for multiple reasons, but this song is a big part of it. Boom bap screwed is like what I wish he had always dabbled in more, and less of the fucking gangsta shit. This song is the ultimate Screw song to check out if you never have: the repeating lines, usually three times then move on but occasionally he tweaks the standard method; the druggy pre-echoes of drum kicks; the assaultive repetition of gun shots; and just the general thick humidity southern goodness of something that should’ve took five minutes to get through taking twelve minutes. Multiply that by real life, and how a five hour drive takes twelve, or a job you was gonna have for five months, you end up at for a year, or the car that’s got to last you five years ends up rolling the odometer twice and is still in the yard twelve years later. That’s Screw, and that’s my life, and that’s those that I know that I respect, and that’s how I wish the fucking world spun but it don’t because it wants five minute songs to go down to three, and it lives by the desire for money that ends up killing off KRS’s main character in this song. Misplaced priorities and loving upon that which lacks true value, it’s gonna get you. Speed it up and youtube it and tweetbook thumbs up it, but it’s still running the wrong way.
Lately I’ve been burdened internally by this belief that American humanity is diseased, and not in a weird faggot hippie dude, “Kill your TV braddah!” type of way, but like for-real diseased. Like all these things we are encouraging, cybertronically in our lives, what does it do to our internal organs. No one has ever been able to scientifically explain a gut feeling, much less where your soul (if one exists) could be, which in most metaphysical religious traditions tends to be nearby where your umbilical cord would go when you was a rice flake sized organism in your mama’s belly. What does all this radiation do to that? Science don’t know and the product people don’t want to upset their product parade, and most folks are all too excited to have little electronic things that could conceivably do big worldwide things, except mostly they just play Space Invaders with their texts and emails, trying to fight it all down to nothing in the inbox.
There’s got to be more to all this than that clusterfuck of technology at my fingertips. I’m not saying I know what it is, and I’m no luddite that thinks we should sit fireside and pick the lice from our offsprings’ dreadlocks, but shit man, something ain’t right. I know that much. When I drive up and down the same goddamned roads every day and bust my soul to turn fake dollars into food stuffs and talking phones and bright lights in the middle of the sunless night, that’s about the only thing I’m sure of I know... something ain’t fucking right.
STEAL "Love's Gonna Get You"
NEXT UP: Grimy famous rock, thus not so grimy since punk ass fratboys love it too.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #12: "The Watcher" by Hawkwind

The ability to think is overrated because when you contemplate the entire universe and how there has to be other forms of life and how they not only do exist but have probably already interacted with us, and then you see people like Al Gore or that Elana Kagan Supreme Court bitch and how they look like reptiles in human form, and you sort of realize you are no better than the cows down the road behind the barbed wire, except at least the cows are like, "Fuck it man, I'm gonna chew some grass the fuck up all day long. And if everybody else walks that way, I'm gonna walk that way too. Hell yeah." But we are all self-important and righteous and like to pretend our life has some sort of higher purpose or that we need to do this or that or acquire a thing or leave things for our offspring or an endless myriad of confusing tangents running through the fucking brain that is so blessed to have the power to do so.
I sit in a room with four computer monitors aimed at my head, and a $100,000 microscope lumbering over my right shoulder, and I can feel the effects of these things inside my brain. My once sharpened billowing puffs of brain matter are dulled down and lacking focus and lacking just lacking all the way around overall. So because of this I have taken to going to the railroad tracks and just sitting there, looking at nothing, for at least four hours. I keep a 5-gallon bucket in the back of my truck for this very purpose, to flip over and sit on at the end of a walk, and look around, and whatever wonderful things I saw on my trip in, I keep in my brain to try and remember to fill the bucket with on my walk back, to try and sharpen the mind's edges again. But mostly I just sit there and look at things. That is the important part of this self-meditation. Smart phones and wi-fi beams and everything else you already know about, it does things. Pendulums don't just swing one way.
Also, I was somewhere lame recently, perhaps the tire store getting a new set of shoes put on the family Subaru (from 1997, in case you think I be rolling fat, which I am, but not the way you think), and I read an entire Rolling Stone article about Lemmy, who is really about as fucking great as you would think he is. And at the same time, I’d never want to be Lemmy, because I’d hate that life. But good goddamn, am I ever thankful there is a Lemmy in this crummy ass world.
STEAL "The Watcher"
NEXT UP: Perhaps my most favoritest example of DJ Screw's awesomeness ever.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #13: "Mind Playin' Tricks On Me (screwed & chopped)" by The Geto Boys

I'm not sure if this year Halloween falls on a weekend or not, which doesn't matter much because the weeks don't end so much as blend in together with seven straight days of obligations across a latitudinal line of the calendar, back to the left like a typewriter from 1973, and back at it, no pause, few spaces, bad grammar, whiteout never touching the onion skin of my life, hoping there is a god with a big book so I can have someone else proofread my actions and distractions once the lungs stop filling up with hazy air and the heart stops pumping the corn syrup thinned out blood, and tell me how it all reads. From where I sit, it's an ugly story, and inherently a tragedy, though there's plenty of one-liners mixed into to spray paint some silver lining. Thing about one-liners is there's a long psychology of preamble and meandering experiences to get there, and lay the foundation for those one-liners.
You know the only person who really has done screwed music as good as Screw? OG Ron C. He did the best of Rap-a-Lot mix, and that's what this is from. Sometimes when I hate the world but love myself yet hate myself and love the world, I like to lock up in a small place, like the camper trailer, which is stacked with boxes now that I'm trying to renovate my goddamned 1907 house into something more accommodating for my growing brood of pullet children, and light candles and get my mind all twisted around some substance or another, which has lately been mostly what is left of the gruit ale homebrew I made with a few droppers full of wild lettuce tincture from the ol' lady's apothecary mixed in, and just blast some fucking tweaked out Rap-a-Lot. Finding the OG Ron C screwed Rap-a-Lot's Greatest Hits to steal inside the internets (thanks Sicknote the #1 Limey and MP3 MVP) was a godsend, because it fits well into the dusty dark corners of my 2010 brain.
STEAL "Mind Playin' Tricks On Me"
NEXT UP: Space is the place in the place to be.