RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Friday, August 7

100 VINYLZ: #68 - Rowdy LP by Hank Williams Jr.


(1981, Curb Records)
Another of my folks' albums that I've got now. The cover of this LP has Bocephus kicking it with a pair of trashy yet what up womenfolks in the booth of some place that allows him to have a bottle of Jim Beam and a personal jukebox. On the back side, someone's spilt a beer and everyone's laughing instead of canoodling, but I remember being a young buck and looking at all that and thinking, “I’m not sure what’s going on here but it looks cool as fuck,” like you think back before you know what’s going on completely but you’ve looked at some magazines hidden under the bed and you get that uncontrollable tingle to your brain and body.

August O.C.D. #4: Atlas Fantasies

I have been half-assedly working on sketching together a non-fiction book proposal about riding Greyhounds, which I've done far too many times in my life. The sample part of the proposal was fairly easy, though I could probably tighten it up, or maybe rewrite it from a different segment of bus travel in Oklahoma City that's just as notable and interesting to read. It's all that proposing part that I stumble with.
So what I've invariably been doing is pulling out the atlas, and plotting all sorts of strange paths. Sometimes off-the-beaten paths through the south, sometimes following long former U.S. highways that have been replaced by sterile interstates and clogged up with suburban sprawl and stoplight cluster crawl. Other times I draw out giant shapes across the country with itineraries that take about 5 hours of ride time a day (ideally, which is rarely how a bus rolls), and imagine all the bullshit I'll experience. Plus plotting out shapes makes me think of that kid in Iowa that was trying to blow up mailboxes and leave a smiley face pattern as if Detective Freamon and McNulty were gonna use thumb tacks to chart the crime scenes on a bulletin board.
But I've been spending a lot of time looking at atlases. I briefly entertained the notion of making "collages" over state road maps, using an exacto and my shoebox full of clipped pictures from magazines to cut out perfect shapes of little triangles or squares of tiny sections of states separated out by roads, but looking it over, it seemed like the final product wasn't gonna be how I wanted it to be. I need to get one of those in-depth state road atlases for a couple states and do a few pages together to make giant retard things using that motif. My early choices to do such a thing would be Vermont, Alabama, and North Carolina. Probably Carolina because the likelihood of me going down there and being able to actually buy a state road atlas are probably better than most. Then again if I go to North Carolina, I'd probably just try to find Vollis Simpson's compound of homemade whirligigs, go to a strange town's dirt track, get drunk, and try to figure out where one of my handful of old school homies who live down there actually live and if I could make it there without getting busted for DUI, or if I should just find a logging trail and sleep in the passenger seat of my truck.

100 VINYLZ: #69 - For the Record: The First 10 Years 2xLP by David Allan Coe


(1984, Columbia Records)
This really was my first taste of David Allan Coe, as my dad used to play the fuck out of this after the folks got it one time ripping off Columbia House for a new set of LPs. I mean, I remember when "The Ride" was big on country radio, and that was a weird ass song compared to other shit of the time (like Oak Ridge Boys or George Strait or whatever the fuck was big then, but it wasn't strange ass shit about riding in a Cadillac with the ghost of Hank Williams). Honestly, as a double record, it's a great collection, but you could get by with side A and then have like the five best other songs on side B. I'm not complaining or anything, because extra is good in this case, but the side A barrage is one of the best sides of an album ever. "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" me and my buddy Boomer saw get played on the jukebox at a weird small town bar in Lincolnton, North Carolina, and drunk dudes were on the bar singing out loud, Mexicans in soccer jerseys were smiling it up, and the girl working the bar kept giving me free beers while her coked up boyfriend went in and out of the bathroom relentlessly. Me and Boomer ended up jumping the fence and going swimming at our hotel next door and watching crackhead chess go on where one dude was peeking around the corner of the building like The Three Stooges to watch someone be gone from their room while his partner probably stole their stash, and you could see the two people who walked off arguing over some other sort of sketchy deal, and me and Boomer were silently tripping out on all of it, and when the two who had left turned back to go, the guy peeking around the corner wasn't paying attention so I yelled out, "THEY'RE COMING BACK!" which probably worked to his benefit because they looked at us in the pool and he could scurry back with his little cockroach redneck shuffle and get thangs straight. And that's just one memory from the first fucking song. How 'bout when I got a DUI in Richmond and had outstanding warrants and was in jail the night before the Cowboys/Steelers Super Bowl, and really the only person who could bail me out was my roommate who I had gotten in a fight with on the way out the door. But he came and bailed me out, not after splitting a bunch of Schlitzes with the bail bondsman he rounded up on a Sunday morning, and the bail bondsman gave me his card, saying, "I hear you guys got half a keg left so you might need this again tonight," and laughing. And we walked out and my roommate sang, "I was drunk the day I bailed Raven out of jail... and I went to pick him up in the rain..." but we didn't get hit by a train luckily. Beautiful delinquent fucked up memories.
Honestly, if I had a time machine, I'd just go back in time to 1973 to hire David Allan Coe and the Grateful Dead to play a concert for my birthday party. But also to be even more honestly, I tend to break things, so if I had a time machine, I'd go back and wreck it in the process, so I'd be stuck in 1973, talking my crazy futuristic jive talk, and I wouldn't ever meet David Allan Coe or the Grateful Dead (how would I abduct them anyways? I hadn't thought about that yet) and I'd just be stuck in some place somewhere, getting a shitty job that would be extra shitty because I'd get paid like $9 a day, and I'd fall in love with some slut. But then would I be cheating on my wife? I mean, I couldn't go back to the right time it would seem, but it's not our death parting our bond either. Man, that's why we'll never get time travel right. Too fucking complicated. Fucking Tesla.
Speaking of which, last Christmas I wrapped like 12 strands of Christmas lights around the tree in the front yard, like right around the trunk and the branches as they split off, because that was funny to me. I left it like that and plug it in from time to time, with my thinking it's a Tesla coil of lounge, meant to keep my compound chill when we have company. You know how people are.
(NOTE: The picture I used in this post is actually of the CD and not the album because it was the best I could find since the internet is run by wack robots who want to dilute true lounge with their cybertronic clutter.)

Friday Love/Hate

I love the unclogging process. I have been denying myself words because I haven't been working much, and I have this fucked up thing where if I'm not providing for my family, I feel I should deny myself pleasures. But writing the words that constantly clog up my brain isn't really pleasure so much as necessity. Those things get backed up to the point I get all self-destructive and reckless, except I sort of quit drinking for the most part, which usually unlocks my recklessness, so instead of self-destructive I just get all depressed and half-suicidal-by-chance reckless, meaning I'm less worried about falling off ladders 32 feet in the air or stupid thangs like that. Plus, in all that backlog, I lose so much - stories, articles, instant haiku, tons of rhymes - it just clogs up as a dam in my mind and I tell myself, "Remember to jot this down" in one of the 37 composition books I have stashed everywhere in my daily routine, but I don't take the time because I know if I start, I might not stop for a while. But letting it loose makes me a happier human being. Not so much so people can see it, because honestly that's not important to me, but it helps. Sometimes I wish I could just be locked up somewhere, writing, or etching my word devilry out onto old pieces of cardboard, or something. But I realize we don't really have mental institutions for lightweight screwballs like myself anymore in this country, and for real jail is too real for a lost in thought idealist whiteboy like myself. Plus, I got a family. My house has cluttered energy though, and I'm not sure why because it's not that cluttered. It used to be haunted, but we moved the ghost along, but I think there's some psychic cobwebs still hung up around the place. So I kick it in the camper the gypsy lady left here five years ago, and hope the skunks that live somewhere on our property aren't out as I walk back across the yard through the just past full moon light and spray my retarded ass with skunk evil.

I hate having air conditioners put in my house finally, even though we made it till the beginning of August at least. It changes the feel of a house, like a fucking space pod separate from your outside world. The freon also weakens the bones, and used in accordance with fluoridated toothpaste and HAARP beams from the angels humming nationwide through cell phone towers, leaves you susceptible to watching too much TV or goofing off on Facebook for two hours when you should be re-writing that one stupid thing to submit to the Oxford American since you are what half of those fuckers want to be. Conditioned air? I have become far too soft.

Wednesday, August 5

NFL: Preview of Impending Previews

Football season is almost upon us again, the professional variety, and I will again endeavor to over-indulge in self-importance and share my long-winded, misery-steeped opinions on the grand ol' game of the egg. Besides, I haven't been doing much else lately. I've dug long and hard through my Lindy's Pro Football magazine, making note of a bunch of stupid little fucking things that I will share with you in the coming weeks. Basically, even though I should probably be dedicating myself to making them dollars, I'm gonna shoot for the weekly update every Wednesday night, so you fools can amuse yourself at work or whatever and get geeked up for fucking football like any good American suck ass should.
I have some half-retarded, half-mathematical way I rank the teams, basically starting with their Vegas odds to win the Super Bowl, and from there, goes up or down according to whether they win or lose, and to who, and whether on the road or at home. What I'm saying is it's straight nerdery, so I wash my hands of it if there's minor ordering problems, like whoever should be #2 is #4 or whatever. Fuck all that noise. But I'm also not nerded out enough to explain it in detail, especially since it's pretty minor league when it comes to internet math nerd formulas. I didn't even have to bust out algebra or scientific calculators or nothing like that. Straight up marks on notebook paper or die is what I say.
Anyways, during preseason, I'm gonna do team previews, starting with the shit and move towards the cream, so to speak, and run you through a bunch of useless bullshit that will probably make you laugh and entertain you but really has absolutely zero value whatsoever in the grand scheme of things. So I figured in this pre-preseason week, I'd bust out an explanation of the impending team profiles, like I did last year. And basically it's the same, but different. So I'll run you through the data as it'll be datalyzed...
PERTINENT DATA: Very simple, I drop last year’s record all parenthesizered, where they finished in their division, any playofff bullshit if applicable, and the Vegas odds for them to win the Super Bowl this season.
PERSONAL PERSONIFICATION OF THE TEAM: Just what be in my head as exemplifying what the fuck the individual franchise means to me in my brain, which isn’t always a well-trimmed backyard, if you get my drift.
FRESH INJECTION: This will be a new face that will alter the course of this team’s history, I guess. I mean I know it’ll be a new dude, but the altering team history is the “I guess” because really for a lot of teams, shit don’t change.
DRUNKEN SOUL: Dude, it’s the soul of the team, the dude that makes their blood flow with a passion to score more points than the other teams in a strange game with an oblong ball made of leather that you have very arbitrary rules of how you can move it forwards and backwards and if you break them old guys throw yellow kerchiefs at you that are weighted down with beanbags.
TEAM ASS: Look, I’ll be honest as fuck... I’m a hardcore Redskins fan, so when I pick the team ass of a lot of teams, it’ll probably be because of stupid personal vendettas that make no sense. Which is fine, because this is my shit. You might not even exist as far as I know.
TRENDSETTER: The future of this franchise will be steered by this individual, again, I guess. Who really knows with this shit? Basically, I know as much as them dumbasses on the talk radio squawkbox or on the TV sports barrages, but I’m here to tell you no one really knows shit. Last year, the Patriots were gonna win it all. First game, Tom Brady knee snap, they’re fucked. Next thing you know, Matt Cassell is Undercover Jesus and it’s all good and they look respectable but don’t make the playoffs. Now Brady is back and... wait, what the fuck is this, the NFL or WWF?
TEAM ELDER: This shall be the player on the roster who has been on that roster for the longest time. Not necessarily the oldest dude on the team, but the dude with the longest term of continous service at the team he is at. It’s amazing how short it is a lot of times, in this era of free agency.
THE RUDY: I will attempt to make this an undrafted college free agent who has stayed on the team he first tried out for, earning a spot, probably from special teams play, and perhaps parlaying that into an eventual starting role a few years down the line. Really, with basketball having such limited rosters and baseball being a clusterfuck of minor league dues paying, the pro football Rudy is the one place where a guy could be driving a UPS truck one month and then playing on Sunday Night Football in a prominent role the next. And to be honest, I’ve never seen that Rudy flick, mostly because I hate Notre Dame, and plus I hate white people that feel good about everything. If like Rudy made the team and celebrated with a sorority slut but then ended up giving genital warts to his childhood sweetheart who I bet was in the movie helping him have confidence and they had a baby that was jaundiced because of all this somehow, so Rudy had to quit the team to work in a paper mill to get health insurance (they used to do that back then at jobs), then I might’ve watched the flick, but probably not even then, mostly because Rudy sounds stupid.
FORMER TROJAN: Previous years, I’ve always done the former Hurricane from the U (of Miami, in Florida), but they’ve fallen on hard times and don’t get the NFL draft dominance like they used to. Pete Carroll’s USC Trojans do that now, in the ugliest ass uniforms ever, so I’m switching gears this year. Roll with it.
VIRGINIA BOY: I am very proud to be from Virginia. You know why? Because I was born here. Home pride is some funny shit because the thinking is, “Well, I was born here so it must be awesome, right?” So I’ll highlight the dude best repping my home state’s college football mediocrity in the NFL.
THE WILD SAMOAN: The Polynesian islands are the future of football because they’re not confined by our pathetic high school football rules where you can only play and practice a tiny part of the year. Samoans motherfuckers play year round, on fields pockmarked with lava rocks, and college football is their ticket off the island and out of the sugar cane factory. Plus them dudes are big as fuck, naturally, from all the pineapples and Spam in their diet. They are the new wave of football burliness, and I look forward to Lofa Tutupu committing a hostile takeover of some west coast team, declaring himself the GM, and making it an all-Samoan team that does that crazy war dance like the rugby team before kickoffs.
THE ICKY: Named after Icky Woods (who might’ve been Ickey for all I care), and given to the guy on a team with the wackiest name, by my very simple-minded standards.
THE INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: A variation on the Icky, but about a dude whose name sounds like he would’ve kicked it with Rockefeller and Hearst drinking the blood of poor at ultra-secret Illuminati meetings, smoking rare hash through the skull of Crazy Horse.
CRYSTAL METH BALL: I will pretend I know what I’m talking about, and that you care, and predict what spot in their division they’ll finish and any postseason possibilities. All of this will be completely wrong by the end of the season, but it’ll give you something to read and me something to think about.

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, July 17

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.

Thursday, July 16

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.

Wednesday, July 15

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, July 3

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.

Tuesday, June 30

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.

Friday, June 19

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.

Thursday, June 18

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.

Wednesday, June 17

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, May 29

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.