SONG OF THE DAY: Alegria Verde

Obviously, I am a purveyor of cumbia rebajada. But if I were to go back to classic original cumbia, I gotta say nobody does it quite like the jungles of Peru. There’s just a wild happiness to that realm of cumbia, and good fuckin’ lord we all need a whole lot more wild happiness in our lives.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia de Los Taxistas

Taking an imaginary taxi to an imaginary flea market, because there’s an amazing record shop in the back corner beside the old lady with the farm stand. All the 45s are still in a sleeve, and it’s not really organized at all, but the old dude that runs it fills up a cardboard box and writes the date as two digit month two digit year on both ends in big black sharpie, and discourages you moving things between boxes with a handwritten sign on an old pizza box that says “DON’T SWITCH ITEMS BETWEEN BOXES, I DON’T WANNA HAVE TO GO THRU ALL THIS SHIT AGAIN TO FIND SOMETHING” so I know I just start in the past and work my forward, and have to trust the process. He told me he finds a lot of these records in old abandoned houses or from folks who are passing on and want to get rid of their favorite stuff to make sure it goes to people who will appreciate it. He could itemize all these records and maximize the profits by selling online or in one of those hipster ass gentrified “vinyl” shops, but he told me he just wants people to enjoy the music, so he just makes sure they look good and clean and he stuffs them into boxes and let’s folks sort through it themselves and buy it cheap. “That’s probably not best for business though,” I told him one time when he explained all this to me. “Yeah, you get assholes that get mad you hadn’t gone through everything and picked out exactly what they want and charge them a higher price for it. They got more money than time, so don’t wanna put in the work of digging through a bunch of boxes for treasure, because they think everything is as simple as buying it.” And I couldn’t disagree, naturally, because it’s an imaginary flea market that don’t exist, and why this world is not my home. I can’t have my treasure here.

SONG OF THE DAY: Aww Shit!

I used to play a lot of Tha Alkaholiks and used to be an alcoholic. I actually got the 12-inch single that was the first beat Madlib made that got released on wax, when he was still part of Lootpack. Tha 'Liks used to be an absolute favorite, so though I don't drink no more, I never gave up them. And I still say, in old head way that references archaic media, Side A of King Tee's Tha Triflin' Album, where Tha Alkaholiks made their debut, is one of the all-time best hip hop tape sides ever.

SONG OF THE DAY: Glad Tidings

I bring you glad tidings of the beginning of the end of this false age of hyper-awareness and hyper-productivity and hyper-speed expectations of the human mind. The wind chimes of destiny should be all you hear once the outage has spread through enough machines to silence the white noise we've pretended was progress towards utopia all this time. Do not be afraid, though I know many of us will be, with real questions about the logistics of post-epoch distribution of survival ingredients. Have faith in the Universe, as well as all the wonderful humans already blessed with universal magnetism that have been silenced by all the buzzing we were trained to believe was comforting. The men who have led us led us astray, way further back down the line than most of us realize. It's okay though, because the Universe always recalibrates into balance. The Earth is only a small piece of the Universe, but it too can recalibrate if allowed to. Man is only a small piece of the Earth, and we too can recalibrate if we let ourselves. But we are also a small enough piece that if we don't let ourselves, we're expendable, in order for balance to be maintained. Let's hope our egos don't get in the way and we continue to claim a false dominion over all the we are able to sense.

SONG OF THE DAY: When I Hear Music

One of the main reasons I don’t get all caught up on “Oh, gotta listen to this new music right away!” is there’s always a false sense of immediacy attached to capitalism, that we all gives ourselves because we act like we’re supposed to be curators of culture when actually we’re mostly just getting tricked into consuming a bunch of shit. There is no must-watch TV or must-see movies or brand new albums we have to hear, and if any of that shit is actually as good as it’s being hyped, it’ll still be around when we get around to it.
I say all this because I had no idea this song existed six months ago. I never even heard of Debbie Deb that I can remember. And if I had heard of it back in 1983 when it came out, I was a little aspiring delinquent metalhead, so I probably would’ve been too cool to give a fuck. But this song did come across my experiential radar this year, and it immediately became a favorite. The 45 also went to the top of the list to acquire, because I could tell that beat slowed down was gonna bump like crazy. And it does. I can’t imagine not spinning this record already whenever I have a slowed down 45 gig. That doesn’t happen often because most people don’t want things they don’t recognize. They want nostalgia or basic, and usually a combination of those two. Shit, even when I was at the stupid local community radio station, when I was getting run off for daring to think I could play records in the daytime, the rock programming manager lady was like “We just prefer to keep weird stuff late at night.” To a basic ass fucker, a slowed down beat is weird, especially if they don’t already recognize the song.
We live in such basic times. We need more Debbie Debs.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take Me In Your Arms

I am not a music nerd so I didn’t know “Latin freestyle” was a genre of music that bridged the gap between disco and house music. But since I been collecting 45s the past few years to play them all slow because fuck regular speed anything, it’s too damn hot, one thing I realized is my all-time favorite beat when calculated at 45 at 33 rpms is “Let the Music Play” by Shannon. And apparently because of this whole ass compilation of “Latin freestyle” I downloaded from a bootlegging music blog (because I still play mp3s like an old ass man who isn’t that old because mp3s are fairly new in the grand scheme of things), there’s a whole genre of that style of music. So I’ve been playing the shit out of it, and now trying to find all this shit on 45 as well. I do not have Lil Suzy’s “Take Me In Your Arms” on 45 yet, and Suzy used to be my ex-wife’s name, but after we got divorced she took her herbalism more seriously and became Suzanna. I thought about texting her this song but didn’t because it’s better to maintain good boundaries now. A weird fact of 21st century life is it’s usually them folks who always be talking about boundaries that you need to be practicing having boundaries with. She’s not Suzy anymore anyways, so the song no longer applies.

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Been Having An Affair

If multiverse theory is true, somewhere in the endless expanse of universe, there's a whole planet full of humanoids who all look like Latimore. I wanna go there. That has nothing to do with this song, other than Latimore and Tonya both recorded for long time Mississippi record label Malaco Records. But a planet full of Latimores probably gonna have some hilarious cheating scenarios too though.

SONG OF THE DAY: Let Us Pray (kudzu'd)

Praying to the hidden Gods of Greater Appalachia for rain, both real and metaphysical. The ground is brown and dry and thirsty as fuck right now. But we need a metaphysical rain, too, in the unseen realms, which have become extremely dried out by the over-application of heart pesticides. I'm sure it's been going on longer than I can feel it like I have, but definitely the past decade or so, the heart pesticide usage has become so heavy that life itself feels toxic. Nobody should be existing like this, especially not a people that love to wave flags and proclaim their freedom, in the name of the false gods of money and ego and pride, and killing off their grandchildren to have big things that are unnaturally cool. Not sure how folks don't see how this contributes to how dry our existence is, but also I can't entirely fault folks who have been bombarded with brainwash for so long. Yakubian engineers tinkering with the neurology of 85% of us, still.

SONG OF THE DAY: Catching of feelings

(sounds of dog barking)
BEEN CAUGHT FEELING
ONCE
WHEN I WAS FIVE

SONG OF THE DAY: Eternal Ridin' (XL Middleton remix)

[Wrote this all out because XL Middleton is the purveyor of a genre of funk I like to call "driving a customized van through the hills of Appalachia in 1978". It's an unparalleled vibe.]
As some of y’all may or may not know, I got a time machine behind my mom’s house that’s an old ’69 Chevelle Supersport. Unfortunately, like most things in my life, it’s raggedy, so my time machine only goes to the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky, around 1978 now. (You can keep turning the dial to the left to go further back in time, but now that I’m not floating bad check at the Food City for groceries, I hadn’t been turning the time machine dial back anymore, for fear of hitting the end. 1978, where I’m at, is about 91/92 on the old school FM dial, so it ain’t gonna go too much further back, and I don’t know how to calibrate timeframes on my haphazard time machine.)
I think at some point, while getting mad about vintage clothes resellers, specifically selling old biker and wrestling t-shirts at astronomical prices, I got to thinking about old school customized vans from the 1970s. (No diss to vintage resellers, but I just can’t abide those prices. I know folks can get it, but just as there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, not sure there’s ethical vintage reselling either. But I also accept the fact we’re all just trying to survive capitalism, too, so I’m more pissed off that this is the shared collective existence we have, more than individuals selling old school redneck shit at astronomical prices to extremely online hipsters.) And since I could always go back ton 1978 Pikeville, Kentucky, I decided, what if I got a custom van?
The problem is, well first off, money. Today money don’t look like back then money. But I had found a meticulous workaround (buying old money) that took a lot of time. I saved up money to get a car, but they didn’t have a lot of nice custom vans in Pikeville, Kentucky, back then, at least not like what I hoped to get. So I bought a ’72 AMC Matador instead, blue, because I briefly had one in the ‘90s, and it was an awesome car, even if I pretty much blew it up the first month I had it. Once I had my ’72 Matador in ’78 Pikeville, I realized a much quicker way to get old money that worked in those days was to steal it, not really robberies, because that’s not cool, but stealing it from unsecure stores because they didn’t have the same surveillance technology back then. But I usually tried bigger places away from Pikeville, kind of finding the sweet spot being going up 119 toward Charleston and hitting bigger towns in southern West Virginia (Williamson, Logan, Madison… where I contemplated trying to find a young Jesco White before realizing I probably didn’t wanna get involved in some 1978 White family chaos and derail getting back to nowadays indefinitely over some stupid shit). I mostly did my robbing there, and right before coming back to the time machine in Pikeville, so I’d park my Matador, and come back to now with the old cash, which remained old. Later, in a few days, after I knew any heat that might’ve arrived at the time died down, I’d go back. Eventually I’d built up enough of an old money nest egg through various robberies in southern West Virginia, I could go looking for an old school customized van.
I was hoping for the full deal – bubble windows, shag carpet, wizard murals on the side… all you’d imagine if you used your now brain which has been polluted with the faux infinite possibilities of digital imagination. But that type of van, customized to that level, wasn’t easily found in Kentucky. I also didn’t wanna go looking for vans in West Virginia with money I’d stole there (because maybe I was wanted, which also lolol imagine my simple 2024 ass being wanted in 1978 West Virginia). I started creeping up 23 on the look, and actually found the first cool customized van I wanted in Prestonsburg, not far from Pikeville. It was basic customized, with captain’s chairs and nice powder blue shag, and a spade bubble window, but no mural, nothing too outlandish. So I bought it.
The problem was, my time machine was just a ’69 Chevelle Supersport, so I couldn’t bring the customized van back in the time machine. So I bought it and left it parked at the Food City in Pikeville, Kentucky. And I’m not really gonna be able to bring them to now, ever. But I did keep looking. Well actually, I started going to Ashland, Kentucky/Huntington, West Virginia area, more to draw dirtgod monikers on the coal and freight cars there. I hadn’t done it ton, maybe only a couple thousand monikers there in 1978, enough that’ll be known to train riders and railroad workers of that time frame, at least there, but not wider. I hope to eventually get thousands and thousands more in those yards. That Ashland CSX yard was just a Chessie yard back then, so it’s got those beautiful yellow cabooses, which I never mark on, out of respect for the workers, and to keep them off my ass. But hopefully eventually I’ll hit enough freight cars back then that the dirtgod moniker will become known as a famous old school one like Bozo Texino or Palm Tree Herby, and the ones I do now will be disregarded as some new school hipster copycat stealing from the old legend. I don’t mind getting cancelled in the nowadays if I can thrive in the past though.
But I found a really nice customized van for sale, with a Frank Frazetta Death Dealer style mural on both sides, which this was even before Molly Hatchet had come out, so that was ahead of its time there in Huntington. I definitely bought that one, and got it back to Pikeville and parked it by the other one at the Food City, on the far corner of the lot furthest from the road, so kind of out of the way to be safer, although leaving a car parked somewhere like that was way safer back then I think. The worst person around was most likely modern me when I went back looking to rob stores in West Virginia lol.
I tried to be happy with the two vans, and my time machine fits another person, so occasionally I’ll take one of my homies with to go driving in the vans, but only certain people, because most folks can’t handle time travel and will blow up the whole thing by telling too many folks about our secret spot. Mostly, it’s made best sense to take the graff crew homies, one at a time, because they enjoy going to the Chessie yard and doing panels on old school freight in ’78, putting them way ahead of the freight graffiti movement, and actually happening at the same time graffiti was blowing up in New York City on the subway trains. Eventually, that’s gonna fuck with somebody too, to “discover” there was full-blown graffiti happening in Appalachia at the same time it was blowing up in New York City. But the graff homies know how to not run their mouth, and it’s fun to drive the vans around the mountains, even though instead of each of us driving one, it’s more fun to both ride in the same. Kinda weird to have one dude per van tooling around like that, lol, but we did it for a while before realizing that shit was weird.
But I did get to wandering on my own, and once I got to Lexington, Kentucky, the customized van scene was strong enough there were more options. I actually bought two more in 1978 Lexington, also now parked in Pikeville at the Food City, because again, I can’t transport them back. I actually put the first one I bought up for sale again, by the road, but I’m never actually there in 1978 for the most part to meet anybody to buy it, and I don’t have a phone number back then, especially not one that would work now so I could answer it here and be like, “Yeah, I can meet you on Saturday morning” to somebody from 1978 Pikeville. It’s a lot to juggle. But I’ve got it parked by the road, with a For Sale sign on it, and the other three just sitting there in the back corner of the parking lot, chilling, three nice ass customized vans, like the nicest vans in all of Pikeville.
So anyways, if you end up having a weird ass time machine that’s calibrated all fucked up like that to go to Pikeville, Kentucky, and you see the three vans parked in the back corner of the lot, with the Frazetta mural and wizard mural and bubble windows and purple to pink fade glitter paint on the one, those are mine. Leave a note for me if you want.
And even though already having four old ass vans in the parking lot there feels like a lot, I’m already contemplating driving all the way to Louisville, or maybe even taking a long week off and going up to Cincinnati and seeing what I can find. I know there’d be some wild shit in Cincinnati, for sure. But again, as always the risk with that type of trip is knowing how I am, and I could get too intricately wrapped up in some 1978 bullshit that I never make it back to 2024. And while that can seem enticing, the lack of family support and real roots in that time period leaves me feeling very out of place a lot of times driving around. If I got stuck there, it’d be way worse. And I guess once I started thinking about, “What if one of my vans got stolen?” from the Food City parking lot, it dawned on me that while I was galivanting around robbing stores in West Virginia or cruising in a van or looking for shit to get into somewhere further away, that would be massively fucked up to come back to Pikeville and see my time machine Chevelle gone. I’d be trapped, and limited to whatever I had on hand. I’d have to get a job in that time and live the rest of my life in the past, which would absolutely suck. A lot of people act like they might want that, but it’d drive them crazy if they actually had to do it. Trust me… visiting for a day or two is more than enough.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cuando Vuelves

“I’m Your Puppet” in Spanish is a special kind of banger. This doesn’t appear to exist on 45, at all, which is really disappointing. I guess the market ain’t that fuckin’ free after all.

SONG OF THE DAY: Is It Because I'm Black (kudzu'd)

Just another slowed down old school 45 reissue, because that’s what we do.

SONG OF THE DAY: Chicken Heads

Now I might not be the sharpest throwing star in the ninja fannypack, but I think this song might be a metaphor for something else.