SONG OF THE DAY: Cable Access Funk

Do you know about the slinky synth funk movement of XL Middleton? If you don’t, you should. It’s that inspirational type of funk that makes you feel better about existing, regardless of how fucked up the world might feel.

SONG OF THE DAY: Electric Kingdom (kudzu'd)

Keeping the heroic crown vibes going for now...

Can't be bothered to be stopped by concepts of time; 
mechanizing man's mind ain't changed my incline to 
resist. Subsisting off cyborg cookies and chime 
of the algorithm, but mysticism grew 

still. Digital devils never could comprehend 
how when they hit send on end times, loungers appear 
and envision gothicc futures which shall extend 
the days like ellipsis. Gaze boldly at unclear 

horizon, devising margins to thrive within. 
Demons drive hard bargains, but broke folks find good deals 
in what mystery reveals... so let us begin 
to imagine our future with hope, as appeals 

to appease our ancestors' quest for tomorrow', 
Fargo strutting forward, from what's passed we borrow. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Rock With You (kudzu'd)

I haven't wrote any freestyle sonnets lately, much less wove a stack of them into a heroic crown of sonnets... so I guess that's what I'm doing now.

Planet rock mentality born from outer space 

dust, encrusted into bedazzled human booming 

from birth across surface of Earth. Twice dimpled face 

full of simple grace grew without proper grooming... 

That wild back road blackberry bush beard that's bearing 

fruit a bit looney, howling at full moons up high 

while scowling at authority down low. Hearing 

what I want, and always nearing the edge as I 

flat foot like a fool staring up at the sky, eye's 

big and truthful. But now that the beard's long gone grey 

and not youthful, it takes a slow minute to rise. 

Though energy wanes, my spirit waxes its way 

into prime squared since I'm already past my prime; 

can't be bothered to be stopped by concepts of time. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Pops

Yesterday would’ve been my pop’s 68th birthday, except he died at 47. Life don’t always have storybook endings, in fact, for most folks, it rarely does. I try to remind myself there is no storybook ending, no grand culmination, and to be thankful for each day that I get, because not everybody still got it. It’s easy to get lost in the resentment and anger of what you don’t got, and how maybe your path don’t look as easy as them folks you’re looking at over there who appear to have a good level of comfort, and even sometimes might be looking back at you with an obvious amount of judgment. Fuck ‘em. Forget ‘em. Be thankful for where you’re at as much as you can. And if you’re not happy, shake shit up a little, fix what don’t feel right without screwing up what already feels pretty good. It ain’t easy when you come from “head first into the wall” types like many of us do. But if it was easy, you wouldn’t know what to do with it anyways, because you ain’t even used to that.
I’m thankful for my pops. He wasn’t perfect, and he lost the fight against his own demons. But he had a good heart for the most part, and he taught me how to talk magnificent shit with an unexplainable confidence. He also taught me about “the power” and how to get into a zone with the universe where nothing can fuck with you. It’s not easy to do that either, but I’m always thankful for those moments when I’m in that zone and can feel it coursing through my every action. That’s when I know I’m my most right I can be with everything. It hadn’t happened a lot lately, but there’s still moments where I’m on that wave. I guess that’s why storybook endings are such a lie to begin with, because it’s all ebbs and flows, and riding waves or fighting from drowning. And it’s just gonna keep on being like that, if you’re lucky enough to survive the day.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wild Style Lesson Part 1 (kudzu'd)

A lot of styles ain’t all that wild. Too much basic shit out here masquerading as quirky. Or maybe I’m just tired of the shit because I never got invited to the masquerade.

SONG OF THE DAY: Tiro Al Blanco (kudzu'd)

Aging, economically comfortable punks are the new baby boomers. They are a scourge upon all aspects of culture, but they also have the self-identity that they are the progressives and good ones, I guess because they’re only comparing themselves to like their uncles or some shit. What families are these that had all the hippies who became more conservative, then the punks who launder familial wealth through boutique businesses or running a microbrewery, and generation after generation they think they’re the alternative quirky forces of change, while the same shit keeps happening over and over? Fuck y’all. I hate a goddamned punk over the age of 50. If you were a good punk, you’d be dead.

SONG OF THE DAY: What A Fool Believes (kudzu'd)

At this point, I find it impossible to hear this song without thinking of Suga Free and DJ Quik imitating it. I could've put a link to that video but embedded links are how we got to the misdirected internet we now have. If you give a fuck, you can look it up. And if you don't look it up, that's your fuckin' loss.

SONG OF THE DAY: El Sonido de Los Mirlos (kudzu'd)

The sound of the crows, cawing from the front yard, eases my troubled mind. I wish I could understand what they were saying better, but if I could, I wouldn’t be human, lost in my own sense of importance, centered in the experiential universe. I’d like to let it all go and fly down to the river with them, and talk shit to each other, and pick our way through life. But I can’t; none of us can. We’re all tied down to too much to ever let it all go completely. But I try to find peace in the moments even if we’ve over-complicated it and can’t find peace in our existence.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Don't Wanna Be A Freak (But I Can't Help Myself)

Contemplating going to wrestling school at my advanced age of 50 and becoming a heel new age intelligentsia manager who attempts to rile hillbilly crowds into knife attacks. How good I am at my job will be shown by the number of stab wounds I have on my deathbed. Anyways, pretty sure this is going to be my theme song, but I might chop and screw it. (I always chop and screw it up somehow.)

SONG OF THE DAY: It's A New Day (kudzu'd)

Drank too much full moon water last time around, during shift in phases, and it’s made things kinda wild. Gotta be careful with that celestial magic because it’s way over our human heads, literally. We still love thinking we got it all figured out. Been so shook I forgot to lay out the moon shine jars for the new moon last week. That’s okay. I’m still alive, hopefully for another couple new moons too. Already looking forward to the redbud blossoms, to be honest.

SONG OF THE DAY: Deadly Rhymes

Been listening to a lot of Roxanne Shante lately, for whatever reason. I guess it’s because I’ve been on an old school kick, and upon reflection from this current point in time (both for myself as well as hip hop, both of us allegedly being 50 years old though origins of all universal matter can’t be pinpointed to a precise birth), Roxanne Shante is pretty fuckin’ ill. Deadly Rhymes indeed.

SONG OF THE DAY: Oye Como Va (kudzu'd)

Southern Gothicc Futurism is the philosophy I live by. I don't exactly call it mine because I don't know how it came to be inside my mind enough to say I own it. But it's there. I've been writing on this blog for well over 15 years (probably longer). I also have a patreon, where Southern Gothicc Futurism is developed more fully, and where you can support me in cultivating that as well as all my fucked up arts. I even have a public samples link for you to get a taste of the patreon outside the paywall. I hate paywall. I hate walls. I hate money. But the society I am forced to navigate is full of bills and walls and all that shit. I'm doing the best I can.

SONG OF THE DAY: Watermelon Hangin' On The Vine

Been thinking a lot lately on how the term “survivor’s guilt” ain’t exactly right, because it’s not guilt you suffer from. It’s just all the shit you’ve seen up close that exploded those around you, and threatened to injure you – either directly or from their psychic shrapnel – it builds up and builds up, and becomes heavy. There’s a heaviness to your existence because you saw all that and are still here, and maybe even relatively unscathed if you’ve been blessed by the universe to navigate it as such. Guilt’s the wrong term because it suggests shame, or something was done wrong, and you’re not really even a survivor because you still got that heaviness on your soul, and it tinges how you think, hopefully for the better so that you try to lighten the psychic load of those closest to you. And you have to lighten it for them, or else you run the risk of accidentally laying down more of those obstacles, and perpetuating them cycles of needing to survive things that got nothing to do with breathing air or eating food or getting sleep. The older I get, the less I believe in complicated answers to things, and in fact it seems we way over-complicate everything we get to thinking too hard about (as individuals or as collective species), and that leaves so many extra steps for all psychic obstacles to get laid by bad spirits. I know I’ve got a heaviness because of the path I’ve walked in life, but that motivates me to help others feel lighter. And that helps this heaviness of mine feel easier to carry as well. Ain’t a fuckin’ ounce of guilt to that.

SONG OF THE DAY: Heartbeat (kudzu'd)

The basic tenet of Southern Gothicc Futurism is slow down and lounge. People lost their way a long time back thinking we have pyramid schemes to build or were supposed to be as productive as machines (which was a philosophical fallacy that existed before the Industrial Revolution). And we live in a time of great weaponized language, so there’s folks that come across like righteous progressive self-help types that would say slowing down and lounging is selfish and reckless towards other people suffering somewhere else. But ultimately the whole point of slowing down and lounging is so that everybody moves at a more reasonable and humane pace in our life, and can have the time to help each other out in maintaining the basics for happy human existence. Getting caught up in politics and hierarchies and yelling at people for not having attained an impossible perfection, that’s the same ol’ bullshit. Even if you’re doing against the previous bullshit, it’s still bullshit, if you come at folks bearing torches to set fire to anybody who ain’t your ideal. I don’t know, I been getting tired of a lot of the secular preaching people are so apt to be doing all the time. I’d rather you perform your acts of righteousness in your real life with your actual neighbors than beating drums online for others to feed you dopamine in the form of likes. I actually set fire to a couple of social medias lately, and it feels better, though it’s taken some effort to redirect those energies that would’ve just been wasted before. I haven’t fine-tuned it yet, but that’s the whole point of needing to slow down and lounge, because it takes some detoxification to remove yourself from the bad patterns. Especially collectively. We keep thinking we (people) can fix all the wrongs by doing more shit in a quick fix type of way. We probably gotta stop thinking that way, and start doing less, or doing things in a different way altogether. Break patterns instead of just putting new people in charge of the same patterns. Anyways, my heartbeat’s still kicking and I feel it today, despite the cold weather setting in, so it’s a good day regardless.

SONG OF THE DAY: There's a Red-Neck In The Soul Band (kudzu'd)

In my 45 digging of the past couple years, this is by far one of my favorite tracks. Latimore is one of those dudes that white people seem unaware of but black folks of a certain age all know about. And this track is just wild as hell. Go ahead, Red.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mundian To Bach Ke (kudzu'd)

This song is perhaps the most wonderful song of the past 30 years, and the bizarre mix of culture that happens in post-hip hop world. Bassline and beat for an old Busta Rhymes song jacking sounds from the Knight Rider TV show, mixed into a new beat with heavy use of bhangra music by an British producer of Indian descent, so vocals are a Punjabi artist. That then slowed down, perhaps antithetical to the hypeness, but it unlocks clangier funk imo. People complain about there being no new music to do, or that sampling is stealing, but honestly the copyright laws that got enforced so that people couldn’t sample intricately and instead had to pay exorbitant prices for samples meant they were forced by legalities to sample more simplistically. We could’ve had weavers of wild style vibes running rampant the past 20 years, but nah, culture had to shut that shit down, due to legal reasons all based around somebody owning snippets of sound from the past (often times not even the artists who made the sounds). But the law can’t keep up with everything and chaos engineers are still out there, cooking up mad wild style shit all over, copyrights be damned. I guess it makes sense that my 45 copy of this song is some sort of probably not entirely legal bootleg reissue, too. Bootlegging is a greater Appalachian tradition anyways.

SONG OF THE DAY: Fantasy (Bad Boy Remix) (kudzu'd)

Dreams are just goals without plans. That’s the type of thing fake self-help alpha male influencers say all the time. Fantasies are just experiences without the fuck it. That’s the type of thing I say when I’m pretending to be one of them. Doesn’t really matter if it’s clever or not, mostly just posting here for data miners to scrape through, who probably don’t even understand the word patterns. Maybe three or four other people will see it. That’s the nature of modern digital existence… we’re all just skipping stones into streams of 0s and 1s making little ripples that die in the reverberation of algorithms and hopefully one of the four people that accidentally see it give half a fuck. Progress.

SONG OF THE DAY: Scorpio (kudzu'd)

The last time I went on a wander for train tracks and used record shops, I went to one in a small town in North Carolina, but the dude running it didn’t take in store customers no more. He let me in to talk though and he had a shelf full of old 12-inch singles in the back that I saw, all faded and enticing. I stopped at an old school turned into giant junk market that I had passed too, because I figured he had to have a stack of 45s in there somewhere. The Record Gods smiled on me that day, because he did have one small shelf with a stack of like 75 or so. But in that stack I found a couple very clean copies of Yarbrough & Peoples “Don’t Stop the Music”, some clean Solar Records 45s (always a groove slowed down), and yet another scratchy but wonderful copy of Dennis Coffey’s “Scorpio”, the famous break that’s been backbeat to hip hop since the beginning of Kool Herc having parties. I’ve been meaning to sample my scratchy ass copy to send Boogie Brown to use in a beat, because in our modern digitized fake perfection realm, having a classic breakbeat looped from actual raspy ass vinyl copy from North Carolina junk store adds a missing spice to our cyber-life. There’s a reason all those old breakbeats were so popular, and I bet there’s more still hiding, maybe not in American music genres, because them old school DJs dug pretty deep. But stuff is still hiding. There’s always gems you can dig deeper for.
Anyways, I’m contemplating a drive to a big ass used record store this weekend, to take my luck with The Record Gods, and see if I’ve been living right. I feel like I have, but you never know what they have in store for you. I seem to be ruled by record stores close to me that don’t believe in The Record Gods no more, and I can’t stand those secular ass bougie colored vinyl spots. If that’s your thing, fine, enjoy your life (if you can afford it). But to me, true digging is always going beyond what’s known, and keeping it cheap as you can. Ballin’ on a budget… that’s a foundational tenet of hip hop actually, which for some reason as we get all this 50 years old hype, nobody talks about that aspect as much. Capitalism co-opted the fuck out of it, and is riding the vinyl resurgence as well right now, beating it like a sick horse to crank out seven colors of the same Taylor Swift shit. I still worship The Record Gods and bypass all that shit, and I’ll take my chances with dusty fingers in some fucked up spot a boy told me about a few months back. Also hoping The Train Gods bless me too, because probably gonna try to scribble a few dirtgods while I’m wandering.

SONG OF THE DAY: Go Steady (kudzu'd)

Futurism always seems to be set in space, and in positions of authority, or at least controlling the destiny. I’ve been thinking about true funk Southern Gothicc Futurism is gonna be right here where I already am, not in space, not escaping the mess already created, but living with what’s left of the messes that got left behind. There’s never any science fiction about the kitchen workers on a spaceship, always the officers. Give me a thousand page novel of the random stormtrooper on the Death Star, fourth generation stormtrooper, don’t even like them fuckers but didn’t have no choices in life so just ended up being a stormtrooper, but before the Death Star got blow up, he could tell the vibes were off, and went awol with a few co-conspirators, and they’re living on one of them junk planets, just vibing, banging on old gas tanks to make a beat, building synthesizers out of spare parts, pitch shifted theremins the size of radio transmission towers with old cranes dangling a wrecking ball to adjust the sounds. That’s what I envision my Southern Gothicc Futurism to be, right here, down in the woods, or over there, too. My mother just passed, so I finally get to go back to the woods I fucked around in as a kid, and the old Chevelle carcass is there that I wrote all these myths about it being a time machine that goes to the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky, so I can get with that environment again, too. The time machine is broke right now, but I can fix it. It’s gonna take a decade or so though, but I got time, even if I don’t.

SONG OF THE DAY: The One Who's Hurting Is You (kudzu'd)

Looking for a home for my DJ Honeysuckle Vines cyborg resistance Southern Gothicc Futurist slowdies show. Need an in real life vibe where people are drunk off life, believe in Universal Magnetics, and are at least basically enculturated with the idea that not doing shit is a form of resistance to every human life getting mechanized by the grind until it's impossible to think of yourself as anything more than a checklist. Once I find that home (or multiple homes), we can properly begin to unlock the deeper tenets of Southern Gothicc Futurism, magnifying the Power of Lounge for more folks to realize what they already know but got buried underneath a bunch of bullshit.

SONG OF THE DAY: Foggy Mountain Morning

Rocking the vibes of a hued man feeling like they’re walking through fog half the time, but still scratching around this stone floating through space, trying to be at peace with the path they took. Rocking the vibes of the constant seeker that always has to dig around in the dirt, and knows the reaper will always lurk, but you can’t live a good life in fear of that. Just rocking the vibes of trusting the power of lounge will always shine a little warm shade (counter intuitive, but opposites are always true in the real world) on anybody halfway trying to keep themselves attuned to how the Universe bends regardless of the crooked axis this World all too often is spinning upon. Rocking the vibes of pitch shifted Ronnie Van Zandt vocals saying, “take your time… don’t live too fast” as the days pass, but I don’t bother counting them. There’s enough fog to work through already without getting lost in all those numbers that choke a mind to death even while still breathing.

SONG OF THE DAY: Out Of My Reach

One day I'll have a G-body sitting on 20-inch chrome wheels, hopefully a garish paint job on it but even if not, I'll ride that rust all the way back into the grave. And I'll be riding down by the river on a Sunday afternoon, blasting the smooth old jams nobody ever knew but were perfect the whole time, just nobody made us know. And I'll sit there by the river, watching the train pass, riding the vibes that unclog your soul and keep the heart pumping love in all directions.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Like It

I think I am slowly working my way back to no social media. I miss the old internet, which was far more creative, kooky, and actually informative. I was reading about “cyberbalkanization” the other night, or how the internet has contributed to the fracturing of people into sub-groups, thus adding to the divisiveness of the physical world. And to be honest, the internet was plugging along just fine without that problem. I’m sure it existed, but it seemed like you were more likely to find weirdos you got along with more easily than things to be mad about. The algorithm-driven social media we’ve come to depend on has definitely mauled those divisions into different channels, and even Google search results have gotten so trash in recent months. I’m not sure if it’s an overload of bad information, algorithms pulling too heavily from certain sources, or a combination of it all. And weirdly, this stupid little blog has plugged along for well over a decade (maybe longer, I couldn’t figure out how to see the first post). We feel like we have to re-brand ourselves so often too, where if we have a new idea or new phase, we kill off all the old versions and create new ones, abandoning the layer of cringe that built a sediment of our digital existence (and an important one since every layer is built upon the previous ones). It all feels so fucked. But I still post various projects and posts here because it’s kinda like throwing a rock into a creek… it still makes ripples, even if mostly nobody sees that ripple. I guess the real difference is I don’t encounter many frogs by maintaining this page, which is a shame.

SONG OF THE DAY: Creeping Away (kudzu'd)

My mother passed away this past week, and our relationship had been strained, but there was always love between us nonetheless. Family is always more complicated and nuanced than a simple read would tell you. I drove between her house and Keysville a couple times this week while down there, and one of my favorite memories was from there, when I went away on a trip to Oklahoma and Colorado years ago. I left in Farmville, with my dad taking me to where the bus station used to be at a gas station that's not there anymore near the hospital heading out of town south on 15. But I came back to Keysville for some reason. I remember some old lady got on the bus in Richmond and sat beside me, and when we passed the truck stop in Amelia, I remembered my grandma had lived down a road to the left there (which my uncle just told me last night around the fire exactly where that was down that road). And then riding 360 past where you turn off in Amelia to where my grandfather is buried, on through the outer edge of Crewe where my mom worked at Piedmont Geriatric Hospital back in the day, on through Meherrin to Keysville, where the bus dumped me off at the old commercial building by Sheldon's Motel that used to be a convenience store and ice cream parlor, and was an arcade at one point in there, and also a video store. I think at the time it still had the remnants of a country store, and now I don't know, it's an insurance office or something. But there was no pay phone there, so I had to walk up the road to the abandoned gas station, because that's where the closest pay phone was. (It's funny, somebody renovated the gas station and now it's open again, but there's no more pay phones anywhere.) I did the old collect call trick saying my name was "Raven just got home I'm at the old gas station before Keysville" to collect call my mom. I waited to hear her answer and hear who the call was from, then hung up before she could accept charges, although she knew better anyways. Then I sat down on my backpack there under a tree and waited 20 minutes for her to show up.
When I'd gotten past that spot in Amelia, I was telling the old lady how I'd ridden all the way from Denver, through the flatlands of the midwest once coming down off the Rocky Mountains, and then the ripples of Appalachia after all that midwestern flatland, and now these hills of Piedmont felt like I'd gotten home. I was singing Jim Croce's "Walkin' Back to Georgia" the whole time I walked from where the bus dropped me off in Keysville to the pay phone a mile or so away, and I kept on singing it, over and over, while I waited for my mom to show up. She was glad to see I'd made it back, and we went to the house I grew up in, and I might've lived there a couple days or a couple months, not sure. I came and went a couple times over the years, as did others throughout the family. But I remember that day, getting off the Greyhound in Keysville, the only person getting off or on at that stop, and walking my slow way to the pay phone, knowing she knew I was getting back that day and was gonna pick me up if she was home (or I'd keep walking towards her house another ten miles if she wasn't home), and just sitting there under that tree, waiting to see her car pull up.
It could be chaotic, our family, with all the things that went on, both accepted and ignored. But there was always a lot of love too. The past few years, because of some of the things she never improved on for me, which affected my kids, I didn't talk to her. That didn't mean she didn't do a lot that I'm grateful for; it just meant I hoped for more with some things, and expect more from myself, too. One of the folks we had to let know was my parents' old friend Wolf, and we couldn't get ahold of him, but one of my mom's friends drew me a map at the kitchen table, explaining the map, and me and my sister went to go find Wolf and let him know. The map was good, but misleading, because you need the story my mom's friend Sue told me as she drew it, to go with the map. One without the other didn't work. So my sister looked at it and it didn't make any sense, so I explained it to her, and she had lived back here once years ago for a little while, and we took one wrong turn but knew enough to know it was a wrong turn pretty quickly, so made our way back to the right path.
Sue had said about where Wolf lived, "He's got a trailer, and then there's a second trailer, and he's got a third trailer there, too." And at the time, I thought, "Why didn't she just say it was three trailers?" but when we got there it wasn't three trailers at all, but a trailer Wolf lived in, but he had another trailer beside it, and there was a third trailer. She had actually described it perfectly, so that if she said he had three trailers, I would've missed it, but saying it the way she did, I knew it as soon as I saw it. We went in, me hollering, "Hey!" like my daddy had always showed me growing up, announcing your presence in a loud but friendly way, making sure folks knew you were there in a good way, but making sure they knew. Neither me or my sister had seen Wolfie in years, and he looked older but he looked good to be honest, and his home seemed perfect to his ways. We told him, and he was of course said, saying, "That's my oldest confidant." As we were standing around, talking, he shared a memory of me being a toddler, and my folks and him doing acid with somebody else in a VW bus that had a woodstove in the back, and while they were riding around, I touched the stove and burned myself. Wolf laughed, "It didn't burn you bad, but you didn't touch it again."
I think sometimes coming from environments that aren't what folks consider normal, the chaotic parts get focused on too much. But it was always full of love, lots of lots of love. I think you need all that love to survive some of these more chaotic environments folks are born into. I didn't forget all that love, but I know I was angry about the other parts of it sometimes. It's been good to go back home and remember all the love that's there, too, even if it was chaotic at times. Without all that love, I wouldn't be the chaotic good person I am today.
I know my mom still read these things for years, even after we didn't talk so much, then didn't talk at all. She'd leave comments sometimes. My sister does that too. These are stories that don't get told, for whatever reason. The "normal" world only likes them packaged a certain way, for their own gawkish enjoyment. And our world only tells these stories around bonfires or truck beds, and even then we leave out some of the stuff that nobody wants to say out loud. I need to be better about sharing these stories, in a way that's true to where I'm from, but in a way that also tells the whole story, in a respectful and loving way. Anything else starts creeping away from the truth of it all. And that truth is never simple, and it never will be, because life isn't either, if you're truly living it.