J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #1: “Methamphetamine” by Son Volt

I have wanted to be tagging shit with my bobo graffiti for a while, so I started spray paint tagging the backside of guardrails along actual gravel roads in Albemarle County, Virginia, but I didn’t like how it looked. First off, Wal-Mart cheap ass paint is pretty drippy and doesn’t have good coverage, but shit man, good spray paint is expensive. I see why graf writers steal that shit. Also, the dull grey guard rail didn’t give a good background canvas to start with. So I started a couple of different rigs of various failures, until I combined the homemade tattoo gun into a paint tagging mechanism, where I have a two foot long piece of bamboo with a toilet bowl scrubber – the multi-thing foam type – duct-taped to the end of the bamboo. Then I can dip that in paint, and pour some paint down the bamboo tube, and the paint seeps out but it’s kinda like a writing utensil. My graf lettering is pretty weak – I have lots of kick outs of letters and sharp tops, but wish I had flat tops and bouncy bottoms like cholo writing. I could just never get it. I think shit like that is born into you partially, just like for years and years I could never freestyle all fast syllabic pop style like southern rappers or Bone Thugs, then I lived with a guy and that’s just naturally how he did it. I learned, but it was hard.
Anyways, I was riding back roads one full moon evening the other month, looking to tag guardrails, with a home-mixed five-gallon bucket of earthy brown paint (only about 2 gallons of actual paint in the bucket), and saw two old rusty trucks dilapidating in the woods. One of those perfect moments that moment was, so I swung my truck over, dipped my bamboo toilet bowl brush into the paint bucket strapped tight in the back of my truck, went over and wrote in big crooked Raven font letters – RUSTED on both sides of both vehicles, right on the door. It wasn’t huge, not to be completely noticeable and take away from the perfect junkyard feng shui of having rusty ass old vehicles stored amongst the pines to go back to the earth, flake by flake, but it was nice. In fact, in the moonlight – a bright ass cold night, so the paint was drying in little crystal patterns since the metal was so chilled down – the brown RUSTED on the rusted body, truck still having signs of sky blue in there, and I guess the other car was red or orange but it was long gone for sure, shit was beautiful. I had found my tag.
The letters still don’t look cholo at all, but I like how it looks, and I came to it naturally instead of trying to mimic something else. This is why I hate most alt.country because it does not sound natural and is mimicking something else. A guy gave me a slew of songs to DL a few years back, and I didn’t like most of them, for whatever reason, most likely because I’m a hateful asshole. But over the years, each and every one of these songs became ones I loved. Especially Hayes Carll. That dude is great. This one Son Volt song I never liked because I think I thought Son Volt was asshole music or something, the kind of shit cul-de-sac dorks in college wearing straw cowboy hats and drinking PBRs would like. And it probably is. But at some point I stopped hearing this song with my prejudices against that type of person, and heard the actual song itself. And it’s a goddamned beautiful song. Not beautiful in a “put it on a mixtape for a girl” type of way, but beautiful in a “spent all weekend bingeing in a shitty hotel room that had bootholes in the wall and it’s Sunday morning and I’m on a five hour drive home to face some things I wish I didn’t have to face but man, this song really gets it all in there right now doesn’t it?” type way.
STEAL “Methamphetamine”
NEXT MONTH: More fucking music. It’s not like this thing really separates into months so much as it separates into clusters of me having time. So get off my back.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #2: “Andre’s Thang” by Andre Williams

I have to dress biz caz for my working routines, and hate that, but try to mix it up with some ugly combos of polo shirts or the type of thrift store dress shirts that were obviously worn by older black men at some point. It’s really the only way I can inject nonsense into my wardrobe at this point. Apparently I bought a magic shirt of some sort – lavender but kind of shiny yet still cotton, very very urban storefront churchy. Anyways, something has happened since I’ve started wearing this shirt in the past two months to where I can’t distinguish the difference between a lot of white people we’ve been meeting lately. They all seem to look the same to me, with the same Mike and Laurie and Todd and Anne names. Seriously, my wife will be like, “I’m going over to Mike and Anne’s,” and I’m like, “Who?” and she describes them in detail and how we met them, and I vaguely remember pot lucks with a giant slew of people who have all blurred together into the same man and woman. This has also helped me understand why black families were more creative with their naming of children, perhaps adding a consonant and apostrophe in front of a name, or combining the parents names, or just making up some bullshit. It is an easy way to distinguish the faces. I am thankful that the rest of society seems to be catching up to this trend, though white people who do this are still using up wacky words that aren’t usually names like Indian tribes or trees, and have yet to get to the whole completely making up new things phase of naming their children. This type of labeling of humans makes it much easier to distinguish them from each other, instead of them all being named Laurie and Paul.
Also, Andre Williams is fucking awesome. I like to imagine my magic shirt was originally his.
STEAL “Andre’s Thang”
NEXT UP: A modern drug lament sad country-ish song!

g r f a f

first monday sky full of stars;

new moon tomorrow – plant your

intentions for the new year

r o d a a

directionless meander –

every second one less

breath ‘til death; think I’ll turn right

x m a s b

made in mexico glitter

cats play silent siren songs

on untuned four-string guitars

g r f a h

feeling no future, no hope,

just endless suffering like

the buddha taught; fuck this world

p i g z r

pork barbecue restaurants

are always overrated

and run by stupid white dudes

j c k z z

celestial halftime show

signifying my outward

spiral’s about to kick off

r i v z r

the blessings of both parents’

presence – little faces watch

four fists get more done than two

x m a s a

neighbor lady across the

street said that she took her tree

down on christmas afternoon

x m a s c

town lights on horizon no

match for cold solstice ice fire moon

reflecting ancient heavens

g y p a c

distant dogs lay waste to the

silence; an unmuffled truck

meanders slowly my way

c a r z y

die-cast dreams delivered, three

dollars a shot – amassing

more small-sized rides than leno

g o o s b

neighbor’s horse getting wild-voiced

before sunrise; my chicken

coop starts to squawk with action

r i n g e

my animal nature springs

forth in chaotic outbursts,

leaping at my leash’s end

c a r z z

warped by the pain, driven by

the lows; I’m mucked ‘til dirty

but don’t you know – I am still

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #3: “Desperados Waiting for a Train” by David Allan Coe

I am very thankful to have discovered this DAC version of this song, because before this I had mostly just heard the Jerry Jeff Walker version, which is a slow and plodding painful execution of what seems like it might be a good song. I don’t know, Jerry Jeff Walker is one of those things that I’m not sure is actually any good, but enough people will tell each other it’s good that everyone tricks themself into believing it. “But up against the wall, redneck fucker! That shit’s awesome!” Except it’s not. I mean, I’m not from Texas or nothing, and to me barbecue is made with pig not cow and it should have some vinegar taste to it, so maybe I’m just not culturally sensitive to Jerry Jeff Walker’s greatness. But from where I sit, it’s painful to listen to.
David Allan Coe takes the same slow and plodding style, but gives it some rasp and peaks and makes it seem like something you’d be stoked to drink Jim Beam to at your crazy uncle’s funeral, it blaring out loud across the back yard where everyone is partying in his memory after he died in a motorcycle accident. If there’s a Heaven, I hope that crazy uncle went there, and instead of pearly gates they’ve got cinderblock walls, and David Mann did murals down the whole fucking thing, and all the women wear tank tops and no bra.
Oddly enough, in my mind, this version of this song matches up really well conceptually with that “Straight Gangstaism” song off that one Geto Boys album when Big Mike joined the group, which was basically a song from The Convicts (Big Mike & 3-2) that was put on the Geto Boys album, probably because it was so goddamned awesome. Not to mention that might’ve been the best John Bido Rap-a-Lot house production beat ever made this side of “Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me”. But both “Straight Gangstaism” and this David Allan Coe “Desperadoes…” song have the “I’m a wild little fucker because of tagging along with my wild ass grandpa” to them, and even though you could easily get all gentrified neighborhood about it and shake your head and feel sad for the endless cycles of poverty and violence and unfulfilled dreams, you could also just be stoked for the simple scene of a wild ass little kid with wide eyes watching the grown men gamble and drink and talk their crazy ass grown man bullshit at each other for a few hours in some beautifully sad little corner of this non-shining world. It ain’t all gonna be neon and pastels, no matter how hard the developing the world types engineer and design things. Wherever they put their focus to fix up perfectly, that takes their focus away from whatever it was they already tried. And that’s when we move in, tear down the value of it all, muck it up with our wonderful grimy souls, and live beautiful fucked up lives, until we die and go get to look at all the David Mann murals in Heaven.
STEAL “Desperados Waiting for a Train”
NEXT UP: We gonna let an old crazy ass dude do his thang!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #4: “Redlights” by Salem

I think Salem is some sort of hipster hit, which would make sense since I came across them first on the Fader blog, which is a great source for things that I will maybe like and then quickly mood out and hate all of a sudden for no reason. I am not a big fan of most house, club, techno, electronic whatever you’d call the overall parent genre this music would fall under. Shit man, I ain’t gonna lie… I have no fucking clue what either dubstep or footwork is. None. I imagine that both are popular with the gays though, or the Germans, or maybe both. And I am not against gays or Germans, but I have this belief that culturally… not small slice of cultural but in the overall grand scheme of the culture of mankind, it has to be a very urban and grimy yet spit-shined cluster of rebar-reinforced concrete crystals for gays or Germans to thrive. It’s very old ordered world. I mean the real old world is living in a hole in a mountain with three women and nine kids and a couple wild dogs that help you kill deer in the fall. You burn pallets for warmth at night that you take from behind the Mohawk carpet factory, using an old engine-less Escort that you’ve turned into a wagon, and during the day you carve more of your Master Work into the walls of your “home”, the deeper you dig into the story, the further into the depths of the caverns you have to crawl to continue with the human etchings that will cause words to form into sensible patterns by future eyeballs.
And that is what I love about this particular Salem song… it fits well with the cultural metropolises that gays and Germans thrive in, and I’m sure it gets bumped in clubs where you can buy $40 drinks. But it’s a sound of the beaten and wretched that is inside this song. It sounds to me like doing crack, which I’ve only done for one stretch of about five months, so I’m probably not the best expert on it. I never got to where I was in abandoned factories shitting in 5-gallon buckets in the corner. But this sounds like good music for that. And when I say for that, I don’t mean like playing on a boombox sitting in the middle of the cold ass room with one broken window that has shredded plastic over it that flaps in the cold and you can peek outside. I mean permeates the darkness of the building, you can’t see nobody’s face unless the lighter in front of their face flickers up for five seconds. The sounds just emanating from the framework, behind the pockmarked drywall, deep from within the abandoned structures of that old world civilization. In fact that’s what’s awesome about this song. It doesn’t sound as if it was made for people so much as abandoned buildings to groove out to, while people smoke crack inside of them.
Me personally, it sounds good reverberating off the walls deep in a hole in the mountain, carving letters one by one into the rock with a flathead screwdriver whose head has been chipped and rounded off on the edges and serrated in the middle through sheer abuse. I hear this song and carve, and know up towards the open womb looking out on the rest of this world, my women will be there throwing pallets on the fire, keeping an eye on our collective litter of children cuddled together along the safest edge of our home sweet home, and they will be there all together when I come back out their way. We won’t leave and rejoin this so-called civilized world, a world where gays and Germans establish cultural trends. Not because we disagree with them, but the whole process, it’s just not our world anymore. We will die in here, maybe of old age, maybe of carbon monoxide asphyxiation, maybe I’ll just slit everybody open with the flathead one night. But none of that will happen until I’m finished putting these words into the sides of the gap in the mountainside.
I guess the “Redlights” are probably something to do with a city, but I pretend it’s about that hour when I’m the only one acknowledging they are awake, the women sleeping around the children now, me poking at what’s left of the last couple pallets, waiting for the flames to safely quiet down to embers only, bright glowing red pieces of white pine that once sturdily shipped riding mowers or rolls of fabric or shrink-wrapped boxes of crackers or something. Redlights glowing in our fire pit, dying like the darkness will when the sun comes back up and I get some sleep finally, before pulling the Escort wagon back down the hill through a couple of strategic alleys, and then back up to our hole, looking forward to that quiet hour with those fading redlights and everyone else quiet and the world dark and me at perfect peace.
STEAL “Redlights”
NEXT UP: We gonna rob a freight train music!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #5: “2000 & Beyond (screwed & chopped” by Big K.R.I.T.

I think probably every song from the Big K.R.I.T. Wuz Here mixtape will eventually be on the J.J. Krupert lists, because I played the fuck out of that thing, and still do. Oddly enough, I still have never listened to the regular speed one. Even sober, my life is screwed and chopped. I was gonna at some point be all like, “This is my hip hop album of the year, blah blah blah,” but then that’s kinda what I strive not to do with music on my blog is be all current and know-it-all and shit. Why do people feel the need to be experts on the new shit, like they are the filter through which others purchase their new music? And the funny thing is it’s a whole culture of pirating music, yet you want to be recognized as an authority of what’s good, a tastemaker. Why do we feel we need to be so fresh and so new new with music? Has capitalism fucked us that much that we feel inferior if we are talking about something old?
That’s the fucking thing about the Big K.R.I.T. debut offering… I will be talking about it in two years, and four years and eight years. Hopefully the record deal he got off the back of this mixtape will lead to something else worthwhile and not just an endless barrage of hype that peters out into a dribble of a release, leaving a crushed and half broken MC who has had his soul and spirit squeezed from his body by the vicious clutch of the record industry. (See The Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, and eventually Yelawolf and Jay Electronica. Shit, everybody really.)
The one thing I wish I had gotten to do last year but did not was going to the K.R.I.T. show at a local club. He was playing with either Wiz Khalifa or Currensy… I think Khalifa, but both of those dudes, albeit okay, I would not go out of my way for. Flavors of the month, but the year. K.R.I.T. was something that spoke to me, that I could listen to and be like, “Yeah, I think we’ve driven some of the same roads before.”
I will say that 2010 was pretty awesome for music, even though I didn’t keep up with shit. But the following things all were released for public purchase in 2010: K.R.I.T. Wuz Here (of course that was a free mixtape), that fucking awesome Black Mountain CD, “Thank Yuh Jah” by Vybz Kartel (which of course goes hand-in-hand with “Hold Yuh” by Gyptian), and “Box Chevy – Pt. 3” by Yelawolf & Rittz. But don’t take my word too heavily because I didn’t listen to 19,000 things to try and prove to myself how awesome these things were. I just know they were awesome.
STEAL “2000 & Beyond”
NEXT UP: Music to do crack in an abandoned warehouse to!

Friday Love/Hate

I hate fighting upstream all the damned time. Hate it, but it’s what I’m driven to do. If I don’t, I could go with the flow and end up in the poison underneath the acid rain of the coal-fired power plant, growing my third eye shut, swollen from sties, and just raggedly swim around in circles with everybody else, waiting for that big fishhook in the sky to swing down and snatch me. I hate fighting upstream, but that’s what I do. Hell, I’m sitting in a cold ass camper with speakers pointed at my brain blaring music loud as fuck, making my inherited Macbook laptop struggle to handle the hobo weather. The trackpad doesn’t work right in the cold, to where I have to put one of the two stocking hats I’m wearing on it when I’m typing so that it’ll feel my fingers when I need to. Then the computer just froze up on me with a screen that said in four different languages that I had to power it off because it malfunctioned. On one hand that could be just the fact I’m typing in the freezing cold, but on the other hand it could be electronic cyberlords conspiring against me. The satellite internet reaches out here, so they know I’m here, and trying to write free of the confusion and deliberate chaos of the inside the house. So BLAM! malfunction, and I only don’t lose whatever it decides to autorecover. How do I know they don’t change what they recover rather than just pick an arbitrary stopping point? Are they going to take all my bad words out like that Huck Finn book the cybertalks are babbling about? Are they going to change my meanings?
This is a fucking war, and you have to fight upstream. My apologies to the seven kids out there who hopefully are still reading this blog, looking for the Rojonekku triggers. I got off track boys, realized I was fighting upstream and missed the proper tributary. I am currently hacking my way as quickly as possible through the brush to get back in the right water, but I’m still with you. I’m still your headwaters, so to speak. The triggers are gonna start coming this year. The flags of Alabama, New Hampshire, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Illinois, they are still planted out in the field on the bamboo poles. Our goals have not changed. If our latest benefactor comes through (or we get some enabling donations on the button on the site here, or sell some more t-shirts), all seven of you should be getting kindles, and we’ll start transmitting lessons for your seven branches. (Also, there is the very real possibility of two to three more branches sprouting this spring, now that I can focus properly again.)
So yeah. I hate fighting upstream, but it’s all we can do, isn’t it?

I love the ultimate purpose of this site/blog/background chatter. Sometimes my ego gets the best of me and I wish I could let everybody know what the deal is, but that wouldn’t serve anybody but those who are already well-served beyond their needs. But for those that know what’s going on, it’s going on. I love you all. May we all one day sit around the same fire together, laughing as it burns.

j e s a b

word prophecies frozen in

fundamentalism lack

soul fire’s furious spirit

h m m a b

fist dna inside of

me learning to feel deep breaths,

starting to unclench itself

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #6: “Home Sweet Home” by Motley Crue

Somehow Motley Crue went from red and black leather and pentagrams and evil face paint to lavender and pink lycra outfits and lace doilies on their arms, and crazy Norwegians did not murder them. Very different times then. This song is both completely stupid in retrospect, and yet still the best fucking thing ever. I am a huge fan of any songs ever made since guitars became electrified that runaway teenagers may have had bouncing around in their head as they rode a Greyhound through alien states, not headed nowhere so much as getting away from whatever. I am not entirely sure our current world even has the conditions for a song like this to be made anymore, at least not in America. We fly now, or smartphone our way around our days, and there’s really no room for something like this. I guess maybe in Mexico or certain South American countries it could happen again, but not here.
I feel like I need a few weekend excursions in the coming months to shake up my life’s monotony. I’d like to ride a Greyhound to Alabama, down near the Florida border, for no real reason or to no particular place, and just vibe. That’s my biggest complaint with my current world – the vibes are all electronic and warped, although I guess to a kid running away from whatever today, it’s like electrified guitars were fifty years ago. You can’t fight progress, or regress, or the both of them just shaking shit all the fuck up all the goddamned time. And then you get old and none of it makes sense, and you write inside a goddamned robot breeding colony motherboard about a stupid fucking Motley Crue song. Fucking poseur.
Motley Crue, up to this third album of their’s, conjures up cellular memories inside my physical realm of those first strong desires to have sex. My male dog is not fixed, and he often runs away for like three hours at night. Instead of being mad at him all the time about it, I should probably figure out how to strap our extra Ipod shuffle to his big head, and when he runs off into the night, he can just listen to “Home Sweet Home” on constant repeat, maybe throw in “Patience” as well, and let him slip off into the night to do his unfixed thing.
I guess I should probably care that my dog is not fixed and he might be knocking up other dogs out there in this stupid fucking civilized world, but I don’t. I just want him to be within earshot of my whistling for him when I go out on the porch in the cold, goofily and clumsily dashing through the woods and blackberry thickets and tall grasses in the field, thinking in his deep stupid hound dog voice, “I’m on my way, I’m on my way, I’m on my way, home sweet home, home sweet home,” and then he gets there and I’m like “good boy” and he’s all stoked and shit. Man, that would be the best commercial ever for Greyhound.
STEAL “Home Sweet Home”
NEXT UP: Wow, I really loved that Big K.R.I.T. CD, didn’t I!

d a s h d

six four-cornered rooms and two

a-frames barely contain my

sweet immediate madness