SONG OF THE DAY: My Walkin' Shoes

“My Walkin’ Shoes” written on 360 train cars, by this time next year. That’s the goal. And to be honest, that’s a conservative goal.

SONG OF THE DAY: Train 45

Such a weirdly beautiful song. I failed at trying to learn the banjo earlier this year, but mostly because I think I was trying too hard to "learn" and when you listen to something like this, you can hear there's a whole lot more intuitiveness to it than any formal learning will allow for. But it's starting to get cold so maybe I'll try and fail again.

SONG OF THE DAY: Fairchild

Willie West’s “Fairchild” is so damn funky, a song written by the Southern Gothicc Futurist wizard Allen Toussaint, which when combined with West’s impeccably crossroads-ish smooth vocal stylings, it was an immense force, albeit not one which reached the popular masses after Josie Records released it in 1970. In fact, the hauntingly funky beat of “Fairchild” was unfairly categorized as a threat to social stability, and used to pass draconian anti-funk laws throughout the South, from eastern Texas through northern Florida, and all the way up into Central Appalachia, as far north as Kentucky and West Virginia. The government was afraid of mystical funk. Most of this was repealed and came undone, culminating in another Toussaint song channeling of the Universal Mystics, “Southern Nights”, being re-recorded in a far less metaphysical manner, and popularizing a more vanilla funk behind Glen Campbell’s cover. Once they’d added 3 tablespoons of vanilla to the raw funk, it lost enough of its drunken universal magnetics that we could all have it again. But if you put the breakbeat of “Fairchild” on loop (as much of it as you wanna consider a breakbeat) during a new moon, and light colored candles to the four directions (purple to the south, orange to the north, green to the west, and a golden one to the east), that raw funk is opened up even more than a normal ear hears. This is a version of high fidelity involving deep metaphysics, which Toussaint was a clairvoyant for, though our consumer society makes you think “high fidelity” requires expensive stereo equipment. Willie West, too, was a clairvoyant for these deep metaphysics, which is how he recorded “The Devil Gives Me Everything (Except What I Need)” later in life.

SONG OF THE DAY: Wild Side of Life

Any time I hear a wannabe wanton women refer to her own big ass as a “dump truck” instead of a “caboose”, it makes me sad about all we’ve lost.

SONG OF THE DAY: If You Believe Your God Is Dead

This is a good jam for these trying ass times.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hold It Now, Hit It (kudzu'd)

Folks at work were thanking their God for it being a Friday, and talking about how it was the “week end” excitedly. But I don’t give calendars that type of authority over my life. They really want us all to stuff our entire existence into boxes, both physically and mentally. Ain’t nothing about me fit that shape though, and most of my life I’ve struggled with this, thinking something is wrong with me. But ain’t nothing wrong with me…this is how I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what God they believe in but ain’t no God that shares my heart and soul that would want all these damned boxes trapping every little piece of our lives. And it just gets worse, as human descent into spiritlessness continues. Used to be we had little travel boxes of roadside motels we wandered off to briefly to escape our regular box and see a little bit of the world. But now we hunker down in our regular boxes, and got it stuffed with so much shit that we can’t even keep it all inside the regular box, but are too psychically attached to the material clutter that we mistake as identity as a being, that the old travel boxes have been converted into storage boxes, so we can put all the stuff we don’t want but don’t wanna not have into storage boxes, so that stuff can see a different part of the world. We are a demented bunch, aren’t we?

SONG OF THE DAY: It Was Me (Car Chase)

Not a lot of people vibe out to Weather Report, but pretty much any group out here that says Weather Report was an inspiration is making good shit. I just ordered some percussion instruments myself, because Prolo is playing a show next week, and why not decide a week in advance that I should totally be able to play agogo bells while I’m delivering rhymes. This is how my mind works, even as I get older.

SONG OF THE DAY: Hard Times (kudzu'd)

Last night was the Vice-Presidential debate, and I suffered through about 15 minutes before I decided it was better to go to bed and read Eduardo Galeano. The pain of watching a pair of bland middle manager types try to appear as inoffensive and competent as possible, without any passion or flair, and with heavy heapings of performative realness… it was pretty frustrating. I went to bed thinking maybe it’s time we give up on American politics ever being reformed, or slowly moved anywhere. These folks are so entirely clueless, but cosplaying as authentic souls in a cesspool of elite narcissism and unaware corruption, that there’s no redeeming it. And I don’t even mean that as a revolutionary statement, because whoever succeeds in revolution seemingly just perpetuates the same damn hierarchies eventually. I know so many folks struggling right now, not just economically but psychically, and there’s no acknowledgement by the political infrastructure that these things are tied to far deeper problems with our society than which jackass is at the top of the pyramid scam. As the devastation in Southern Appalachia made wretchedly clear, most of us actual human beings who happened to be born inside these arbitrary borders are secondary to higher interests that are promised to trickle down to us as benefits, but instead rain down with the opposite effect and flood our existence with struggle and misery. These folks position themselves as binaries to each other, when in fact both of them sit on the other end of a spectrum of privilege from the majority of us. And I just can’t give even a tiny fuck about which of the two spoiled brat children gets to win the fight about who jumps on the far end of a see-saw to violently smash the rest of us standing at the other end unsuspectingly on the jaw, and expecting us to hold back our frustrated screams as we bite through our tongue again (and again… and again). These folks don't know actual Hard Times.

SONG OF THE DAY: Jbiti (Bosq Remix) (kudzu'd)

The world’s feeling a bit fucked up, so I guess you gotta dance like a fool along the thicc Earth’s edge, and know that the other side of everything being fucked up is a whole lot of sobering thoughts that give assholes a whole lot less space to run wild. That’s what I hope, even though folks are crazy drunk off their propaganda right now. But when the power source dies, reality sets in. They Live taught us that.