SONG OF THE DAY: Diamond in the Back (chopped and screwed)

It’s pretty simple… be thankful for what you got, and then slow it down even further. About to take a four hour ride 15 minutes away, window down, and the screwed slow jams blasting.
I considered putting the actual song title up on the heading there, but one thing I love about the chaos that has come from digitally archiving old Screw tapes is all the data ain't right. This one's been labelled the wrong thing for decades now, which might make it the right thing by now. Who am I to judge (or jury)?

SONG OF THE DAY: Time of the Preacher

Some “tugging at the roots of family” energy swirled in today, blurring the lines of spirituality and random chance of the Universe, which isn’t really blurred at all but the exact same thing, except Earthly people have perverted spirit into dogma and ruined the power of it for folks like me. Someone in Minnesota benched an old dirtgod moniker from 4 years ago which said “Dot & Tuna’s Firstborn”, and at the same time, I’m discussing the tendrils of alcoholism with my own offspring, while also receiving a poem submission for my zine from an amazing young person in West Virginia who wrote about the “synthetic exhilaration” that certain families chase, and when this young poet read her poem in West Virginia a few weeks ago, I was sitting at a table nearby, sort of MCing the affairs at that point, and she read, “And the children? Doomed from conception,” and I wanted to cry on the spot, and then wanted to cry again when I read it today in my inbox, and it’s one of those lines of poetry that is a shovel that struck the septic tank everybody forgot where it was located, and now the shit is leaking into the yard, but it had to happen. It’s been a time of the preacher since most all our stories began, but the words have been hollowed out by blank-eyed sermonizers more worried about the weight of the collection plate than helping sinners to love themselves. When one scans the environment and sees all these people who appear doomed, and feel doomed themselves, a compassionate response would never be one of condemnation (or deportation, or denial of humanity). I hate to see the patterns repeat, and the ripples of time still rippling all around me, tossing about those I love, even if I have figured out how to halfway shimmy my own ass up on this rock and feel less susceptible to them. And from your own struggles, you know how slippery and slimy the rock is trying to crawl up out the muck, and how good the momentary exhilaration of embracing the shit show can pretend to be. And you can share the possibility of climbing up on the rocks into the sunshine, but you can’t do it for nobody else. Shit, they might get up on your rock and be mad at you because it ain’t how they hoped anyways, and then they slide back down into it all, and start bouncing around inside the chaotic ripples of the doomed, and you love them, and you want to make it all better, but you can’t. You’re just a person, not a god. “Now the preachin’ is over, and the lesson’s begun.” Hopefully.

SONG OF THE DAY:

I shall always appreciate people gyrating sexually who don’t look like HBO Max prestige TV ready characters visually. Ugly people are immensely beautiful, and not the true uglies. We all only have one body we are imprisoned inside of upon our Earthly existence, thus it is a good idea to maximize your serotonin induction. Fuck the haters (but not literally).

SONG OF THE DAY: So Real (slowed and throwed)

Been listening to a lot of DJ Screw lately. That’s just how it is sometimes.

SONG OF THE DAY: Enough Rope

I am one of those contrary ass types that thinks neither country music or Americana has a solid claim on actual rural country art. The country music industry has been so hyperpop for decades now, not to mention heavily politically reactionary. And Americana is simultaneously an opposite type of reactionary while also that weird classist “gentrified bakery in a formerly abandoned industrial part of town where brown people used to live” that I can’t stand with that all that confidently either. However, even while not feeling like either of those binaries represents a good country story, I can say without doubt, that this fuckin’ song gets it, and get to it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Overnight Scenario

I am older now, so when I hear the timetable for “Overnight Scenario”, it’s absolutely exhausting. Like, I’m gonna have to be in a crazy fired up mood just to make it til 3 at the pancake house. But we can eat quick and get to the house before 4. And a whole ‘other hour before the lights go out? What the fuck are we doing? And sure, six in the morning, hearing her start to shout is a great notion, but to be honest, can’t we just come home early, fuck, then go out to breakfast, have a couple café con leches and think about doing it again some other time? There ain’t enough energy drinks my chicken grease constrained heart can stand to be pulling this schedule off anymore.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ghetto Red Hot

There are certain sounds that perfectly encapsulate early ‘90s era hip hop and its influence on other genres, and this was also a time I lived in Richmond and tended to walk downtown with Boogie Brown on Friday afternoons to buy records at Willie’s, and downtown Richmond back then was WAY DIFFERENT. You’d have tons of people hanging out, waiting on the bus, or just kicking it downtown on Broad Street, and cars would be cruising, just BLASTING music, like ungodly levels of blast, but which still sounded crispy clear with immense thump. There’s like 3 or 4 beats that specifically just fire up those memories in my mind, to where I can smell the heaty stank of the city again, and this is one of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Five Minutes of Funk (screwed & chopped)

I always look forward to the redbud blossoms in the spring, even though I love all the daffodils and tulips and forsythia and blackberry blossoms and phlox spreading further as well. But there’s something about the redbuds once they pop, the days are getting warmer, I can sleep with the windows open at night, and I know I survived another year. Yesterday, I went back in the woods and got a handful to eat, and need to go back out and get more today, too. Such a satisfying crispy flavor full of life and raw energy.
And inevitably, once redbuds season hit, I always think in my mind that it’s proof that Allah loved DJ Screw, because the redbuds are such a lovely purple pink shade, and since my windows are down on the car because it’s warm again, and the roads have all these redbuds showing themselves like a magical mist this time of year, brightening the sides of the human paths and edges of the woods, mystical corpus callosum bridges between nature and man, I end up also starting to bump DJ Screw mixes again. His body of work was immense in his lifetime, having made far more redbud blossoms worth of mixtapes than having lived for less than three decades would suggest. And since my ancient iMac died, killing with it over a decade of musical data, which can’t be reimported because I’ve got too much shit for an internal hard drive, and it has to travel between eras as external vagabond of audio, I’ve been revisiting them Screw tapes afresh, finding myself drawn to some stuff I’d always loved for a while now, and discovering new segments of tapes I never bumped all that much as well. One of my favorites, both old and new exploration, is the tinkering with “Five Minutes of Funk”, originally by Whodini.
One of the great things about Screw becoming so famous is all he did was make mixtapes constantly, for immediate sale, to people who bumped his shit. He did it prolifically and as regular as the sunrise. Eventually he got a shop, to avoid cops harassing him at home for the long lines, and they put out tapes as they could. When you go online, they’re laid out in “chapters” with three-digit numbers, but those aren’t in any chronological order. It’s just how they got reissued or released at the Screwed Up Records Shop, or who the fuck knows. They still keep finding some. The track data for this song on my hard drive claims it’s Leanin’ n The Leans, but that doesn’t match what shows up online now, for Chapter 219 by that name. And it’s a pretty amazing example of DJ Screw’s actual DJ skills, juggling the song, mixing and scratching, working from instrumental and vocal versions, and just generally fucking it up like only he could. Screw was an outsider artist in hip hop, just doing what he did without thinking it needed to be cataloged or categorized. So now, decades later, when the University of Houston has a DJ Screw archive, and is trying to do just that, it’s impossible work. It’s like when Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, the T’ang era poet, was discovered by a bureaucrat, so they sent folks out into the woods to gather what poems of his they could find written on stones and inside caves, and that became what we know now as Cold Mountain’s poetry. I actually emailed the archivist in charge of the Screw collection at Houston, asking her about the chronology of all the tapes, because I was thinking about trying to do that, and she said as far she knew, it hadn’t been done. Folks had rough year ideas for many of the Screw tapes, but no hard dates whatsoever, not even months.
I didn’t follow through with it, because it was more work than I cared to do. I’d rather just be riding down a back road, soaking up another spring’s redbud ambiance, and blasting Screw myself, rather than trying to dissect and analyze and categorize and pin it down further like poking a butterfly to a piece of cardboard to prove how beautiful the wings were, killing the creature in the process. Just ride with it.
And the great lesson of Screw, the great Saint of Southern Gothicc Futurism, is that by slowing it down, you extend the beauty. Five minutes of funk becomes almost nine minutes, thus we extend the goodness of our life, but slowing the fuck down, and letting the good parts ride a little extra, and letting the regular parts, and even the occasional mistakes, just pass on by without calling attention to it. Goddamn, I love me some Screw.

SONG OF THE DAY: My Thing

Just another simple old jam resurrected from the dustbins by a reissue label. I love both sides of this 45, both sound good slowed, but in the ol’ ancient mp3 phone I play in the car, “My Thing” got the heavier rotation, at regular speed.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cry My Tears Away

This is such a great song. There’s so much good modern souldies music happening nowadays, that it makes me wonder why the fuck I don’t have a ’63 Bel Air painted purple that I’m saving up for nice rims for that I just ride around in blasting shit like this, driving nowhere in particular and everywhere at once, one finger waving at strangers and doing the solemn head nod sideways arm to those I know. Wherever Raven is doing that in the multiverse, I’d like to venmo money for a tank of gas.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia Pa Morirme (kudzu'd)

I was thinking back on the first older folks I encountered who had been brainwashed by too much Rush Limbaugh radio or Fox News tv, and how they were seemingly normal people who just got worse and worse as the diminished cognitive ability and disinformation seepage into their stream of consciousness made them unbearable to even casually talk to. I was thinking on this because there’s a pretty large abundance of people like this, who you can’t even discuss anything with, because if you disagree, they immediately flip on some reactionary defensive counter accusation based on the binaries they’ve been programmed with, which generally speaking have nothing to do with what I’m saying. And in all the fear and loathing about how quickly the illusion of American democracy is being destroyed, very little is being said about how many people are brainwashed by digital media sources, much less how we can ever get beyond that. And there were people pointing this out in 2016, but instead of doing anything, it’s just been left unchecked to get worse over the past decade.

A woman who used to watch my oldest when she was younger has been lost. She even took my kid to Great Britain with her daughter… that’s how much we trusted her. But she got lost to the rabbitholes and is now a Make America Healthy Again wingnut who has lost all real friends and mostly just posts to an adoring bot community on X. I saw her last fall at an opening of a play, but didn’t say hello because she had that mentally ill thousand yard star in her eyeballs, that I knew I wouldn’t be talking to the person I used to know, because that person has been altered into something else, a hollow shell of a human that still walks and talks and shits and eats and thinks it’s thinking when it’s actually just regurgitating the programming they’ve willing consumed.

I was thinking about this the other day talking with my girlfriend, too, and how bluesky can feel so demoralizing because there’s such a sense of doom, with little joy. And also how Palestinian activists, during the height of online protests, were demanding we all watch the atrocities seen in video clips, as if it was our duty to witness those horrors. There is no gauge on these things that tell us when we’ve reached our limit, that we’ve had enough. There’s no bar at the top of our screen letting us know, “Okay, you’ve consumed enough horror for the day… log off for the night.” We just keep sucking from the demoralizing tit of social media, feeling worse and worse about it all.

Today’s horror of the day is the dimwitted devils are threatening to cut the VA staff by a large chunk. Anybody who’s ever gone to a VA hospital knows it’s already a slow and tedious process, but depended upon by a lot of people. Bob was my step-grandfather, and I have fond memories of riding with him in his truck to the VA hospital off Hull Street in Richmond – over an hour drive each way, which he had to do in order to get the care he needed. He’d take me to an all you can eat cafeteria style buffet afterwards, and it was such a treat. He was a good dude, and for all intents and purposes all of our grandfather. But we just called him Bob, and he had throat cancer but the trach never healed so he had the voice box you stuck under the tongue, and he’d click it at us.

Bob and my grandmother lived in a trailer most of my life, after the first few years. The trailer was in a segregated trailer park in Farmville, Virginia, through the woods from the projects. I spent a lot of time there, and it was exciting on weekends because they had cable and I could watch World Championship Wrestling on Saturdays. Wasn’t no cable at my country house, not even possible. It didn’t exist. Even when they moved their trailer to down below my mom’s house, they got a satellite, which was much cheaper by that time, and Bob and Gramma would watch baseball. My grandma loved the Braves, but they’d watch the Cubs too… basically if baseball was on, it was in the background.

A lot of what we’re filling our time with is just that – filling our time as background. I wonder if old people could’ve just had free access to baseball all these years, would we have less brainwashed folks? They could be mad about free agent signings instead of tricked into thinking Venezuelan gangs were taking over cities.

I actually watched like 5 minutes of Fox News a few weeks back, just to see what it was bantering about. I found it shockingly hateful. It was some sort of pseudo-talk show trying to be funny, but all the jokes were cruel, and it all was just sugar coating for driving home talking points for the bullshit going on right now by the dimwitted devils. It was well produced bullshit, basically, but I imagine if I left that on in the background every night, thinking it was useful, I’d start to think like that. That’s how propaganda works. None of us are impervious to it. It’s not a free will thing the entire way, as it eventually turns into neurological manipulation. And with long covid and how much digital consumption we all have now, who knows what early dementia rates are going to look like in a decade. And of course, the act of scientific study itself is being dismantled at the same time. It’s all pretty crazy to be living through, and wondering how violent the summer is going to be, whether there’s going to be elections in 4 years, or 2 years, and if so, how many among us will still be allowed to attend the theater of voting.

I guess I say all this as a reminder that you don’t have to absorb all the seepage from the poisonous political swamp that is the United States right now. It may not do you any good to do so anyways. And I also remind you that America, the land and place, had people here and existed before the United States. And using history as a guide, it’s more likely than not going to still exist after the United States is gone. That’s likely hard for some folks to accept, because we’ve so deeply internalized this notion that the United States is a uniquely special snowflake amidst human history, that shall never be melted by the political hells known to all other people throughout time. I find myself still untangling some of those meritocracy myths lately, expecting checks and balance might still check and balance, when in actuality, like every other government or empire or nation-state throughout time, all it takes is one small group to aggressively put their thumbs on the scales to fuck it all up. The propaganda, the dehumanization of your actual neighbors, the steadfast denial of reality until the horrors swallow you personally… it’s all been seen before, many times over.

And people lived beyond it. They still had moments of joy amidst the worst times, for the most part. There are pretty horrible atrocities that have happened where it’s hard to imagine folks still finding joy in there. And I still tell myself these dimwitted devils aren’t competent enough to create that level of atrocity; they’ll just smash a bunch of shit thinking they can do it better, and make a few dollars off the upgrade, until they realize they can’t easily replicate a labyrinth of public service that took centuries to build.

I don’t really have nothing hopeful to end this on. I’m just sharing my thoughts today. All of what’s going on is hard for many people in many different ways, and to varying levels. I know of people who have lost jobs already. I also know folks struggling with their health right now, so the politics is background anxiety to life and death worries. Life remains life, and if you still got it, you gotta live it. I hope you are still able to practice finding joy in your life, and I hope that never stops. I hope you are able to share joy when possible. I know I hope I do. I want the world to be better, and feel better, because of my actions and how I am. Not worse. And I just can’t understand how people can think they make the world better through cruelty. I hope they have to answer for it at some point down the road, but that’s not my role in this universe.

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumbia de E.T. (kudzu'd)

I don’t know, I don’t really have anything clever to say, it’s a nice day and I’m trying to stop pretending to work so I can go sit outside… great day to blast cumbia rebajadas around a trash barrel fire. I hope wherever you are in life, your neighbors aren’t assholes.

SONG OF THE DAY: I'm A Hobo

Just a little Sunday hobo throwback track, because even if the world falls apart, you can hopefully still walk away and disappear. They can never cancel the right to disappear from civilization.

SONG OF THE DAY: Disco Dan

This is a song from South Africa, put out in 1976, so it's technically not about Cool Disco Dan, infamous DC graffiti legend. But also it is. The Legend of Cool Disco Dan documentary is available on those free streaming platforms, and doesn't seem to be on Internet Archive yet. Not sure where you can download it for safekeeping once the internet is purposefully crashed. Watch it while you can to get some inspiration for scribbling messages around town.

SONG OF THE DAY: Train Leaves Here This Morning

There is, in fact, no more trains running from here on a daily basis. You’re gonna have to drive 45 minutes away to catch a train, and it doesn’t leave there tomorrow morning. They only run every other day and not on Sundays. They don’t sell tickets there either, you have to buy them online. Good luck though!

SONG OF THE DAY: Cumberland Gap

As a kid growing up, I called them butter beans, but somewhere along the way it became lima beans. There’s a lot of weird little things about the way I talked that got shamed out of me over the years, which I’ve realized was usually class-based shit that got projected on me from others (and felt pretty heavy). But it’s also weird because if I say “butter beans” today, it feels performative; like, I’ve lost the natural inclination to call them tasty little legumes by that name. And when I look at that as one thread, and start pulling at it, unraveling the sweater of my current existence, well, it kinda fucks me up. So I am going to fry up some chicken gizzards and eat them with butter beans tonight, and some leftover rice and mustard greens I have too. And I will set a single fried chicken gizzard and butter bean out in the back yard for the ancestors. I know they’ve been lurking lately because a lot of tricksterism has been happening, which is usually a sign I need to be listening to them better. Probably they’re mad because I talk so funny now.

SONG OF THE DAY: Nobody's Clown (Payaso Version)

I have a theory that Trump surviving his assassination attempt in Pennsylvania actually was divine intervention, but reverse psychology from what his cultists believe. If he had died that day, all the idiocy underlying what is happening now as the United States is being dismantled would have made a martyr of him and it would’ve further justified the illogical foundations of what they want to do. As it stands, he survived, and now the self-important idiots are smashing through DC like the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull in an antique store, and it also turns out that all you had to do to overturn the Constitution is just decide it didn’t matter. I mean, I never would’ve argued with that, which is part I was so frustrated with folks who felt like “checks and balances” actually meant shit. So many people will get hurt unnecessarily as these idiots pretend they know what’s best, including many of the cultists and constituents who propped their congressional support up. It’ll be too late (and in fact already is in terms of checks and balances). But, the idiocy in charge is not smart enough to stay on top of everything and not have a whole bunch of gathered angry people wanting to set fire to them, and that day will come, sooner or later, and these idiots will be known as idiots for a couple generations, which wouldn’t have happened if Trump had got hit that day.
The cruelty of it all fills me with anger, and I senselessly want to fight someone today. And the reality is we have entered an era where words put in public will be held against you, not in the pretend cancel culture way they claim caused so much trouble, but the real cancel culture of fascists shitheads, who will accumulate enough marks on a person’s list of strikes against them, and folks like you and me will get an all expenses paid disappearance to the new Club Guantanamo or the one the crypto President in El Salvador said he was willing to build. Oh well. Fuck these devils, I won’t be one with them and I ain’t gonna do shit they want me to.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Get Lifted (kudzu'd)

This has been one of my favorite slowed 45s the past few months, and to be honest, I just love Latimore as an entity. That dude just has a wild aura about him. So I knew I had to find some good imagery to steal from the internet’s vast innards to put behind this one. An old Soviet cartoon did the trick, and good lord does this one line up so beautifully throughout. It’s magic, and I own none of the intellectual property… I just mash it together with slight effects and cook this shit up as my contribution to the culture that is digital mash-up of everything that ever existed before. The 45s on 33 playlist on youtube of videos I’ve made over the years is getting close to 400. That’s a lot of damn foolish ass videos like this. So get lifted.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Message (kudzu'd)

“Don’t push me, I’m close to the edge,” skipping and repeating should be the national anthem.

SONG OF THE DAY: Don't Stop Believing (kudzu'd)

The illusion of democracy is gone and we live in a technofeudal state post-coup. You may not think that’s the case, and you might still believe in the exceptionalism of America, but when it’s all said and done, the date in the history books for when this started will be from before today. So it’s not still yet to arrive… it’s already here. Adjust your plans accordingly.
And if you believe in a God that wants you to treat other human beings in cruel and heartless ways, you’re either interpreting the text in a strange way, or your God has lost their way.

SONG OF THE DAY: I've Got Bills To Pay

Hoping to go to the discount shopping store today to stock up on giant sacks of flour and rice. Kinda funny right now because the consumer identity preppers aren’t really prepping, because they feel like President Musk and his old orange puppet are the culmination of what they hoped for. But shit’s already gotten insane the past two weeks (half the country afraid they gonna lose their jobs, planes falling out the sky, cruel executive orders telling people they shouldn’t exist), and it’s only going to get worse. And there are no guardrails actually. We were always taught there were guardrails, but who knew all it took was somebody to come along and say, “Nah, that’s cool. I’m just gonna do whatever the fuck I want.”
And while, if you’re paying attention to all this stuff in real time, it’s very scary, people throughout history around the world also still just live their lives. Many other places in the world have gone through this, and the exception of America we were all taught isn’t true. People can put their head down, exist through chaos, and if necessary stand up in large crowds and yell, “This is too damn much.” I’d suggest stocking up on food, because prices are about to get crazy, and supply chains are about to be broken. And I’d also say plan on standing outside somewhere with a bunch of people, yelling, “Fuck you, make me.”

SONG OF THE DAY: Learned the Hard Way

Thought I lucked out and snagged this from the Mango Hill bandcamp a while back, but they were actually out of it. The plate tectonics of physical music trickle down into used bins means there’s a lot of stuff I love that ain’t gonna show up nearby. That’s good though. No matter how global and know-it-all we think we’ve gotten, the physical world still depends on physical movement of matter. The revolution will not be digitized.

SONG OF THE DAY: Barnyard Banjo Pickin'

Stringbean was sagging before any of y’all was sagging. To be honest, when I tried unsuccessfully to learn banjo last year, I just wanted to be the New Stringbean. I guess I’m more of a sugar snap.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take Me To The River

Sometimes you just want a slightly blander version of a great song… not necessarily bad, but Levon Helm ain’t Al Green. You can’t always go sit by the river on a Friday afternoon. Sometimes you gotta do it on Tuesday, too.