$20 Record Challenge

We had some shit on the message board from forever ago (like 7 months, which is actually two or three internet forevers) where you could drop $20 at the used record store and then share upon what which you founded in the dusty dirty ass dank bins of your local dinosaur ass record store still offering up vinyl, probably in some homo ass college part of town where dudes who purposely make their hair messed up walk by dripping with calculated irony. And as much as I hate those dudes, they are a refreshing break from the internet where everything is collected, datafied, proffered, and gobbled up by others like cybertronic Pac Men trying to eat up everything they'll never listen to and hope they dodge ghostly viruses or overloaded hard drives. Fucking faggots.
Anyways, my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday (Valentine's Day, in case you fucking faggots want to pretend to be my real friend and go like "Happy B-day Raven" in the stupid cbox like the fucking social misfit robot world faggots you truly are), and I thunk it over and over, and it occurred to me I hadn't been record digging in forever. So she said take $40 and do that shit (which is a lot because up until about a week ago, we were steadily two months behind on the mortgage all winter long... lazy economy and lazy dude don't make a good tag team for financial success), so I did that shit, and have been secretly listening to them in the camper so my kids don't know I already got my present. They'll wrap them up next week and I can open them on my birthday and act surprised. Well, I broke this shit up into two $20 challenges, since I wanted to, and this the first $20 I literally spent at the record store. (Props to Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA, with the a giant selection of shit in the basement. I'm also glad that homo that prices records only knows hipster bullshit so I could get some awesome shit for cheap. Haha you eastern European looking fuckers... why is it record store nerd dudes who tell you how much you get for your records you stole and are trying to sell always look like eastern European dudes with Fader magazine subscriptions?)

Nashville Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - $1
This is some Robert Altman flick from the '70s starring Karen Black that my local shithole small town video store used to have on VHS. Basically, Karen Black is physically abused as a kid, runs away to be a country singer, gets sexually abused by a couple of Nashville heavyweight superstars, and then I don't remember what happens, but I assume since it was the '70s, she somehow succeeded beyond her wildest dreams and the abusive people all wrecked cars and died or got shot or some bullshit. I got this record looking for samples for the weird country-ish hip hop group Prolo I'm in. At first quick listen, it just sounded like generic crappy made-for-movie country songs, but I didn't give it a solid listen, much less one with the speed slowed down all the way when you really find good samples. The song titles seem promising though ("Keep A-Goin'", "I'm Easy", and "Tapedeck in His Tractor" for example), and a couple of songs were actually written by Karen Black, and if my muddled hipster fuckface mind is working right, she's some sort of awesomely tragic figure from back then, so maybe her songs are glimpses into mad brilliance.

Star Wars Soundtrack - $1
I am no Star Wars nerd by any means. I never had the toys because my folks were poor so I was actually quite resentful of other little snotnosed fuckers sporting all them Han Solos and Chewbaccas and shit when I was a kid - especially kids that had like 13 stormtroopers, just wasting money on toys, and I didn't even have a fucking R2D2 coloring book. But still, this is the straight soundtrack, it was clean as fuck, double album, and only for a buck. How can I lose? I can just slow down the shit like DJ Screw, throw and ASR10 beat behind it, and freestyle sci-fi nonsense and become one of those nerd rappers or whatever they call that stupid shit I read about one time.

Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson - $1
I'm a big Willie Nelson fan when he's not doing pop country bullshit, and the satellite radio's outlaw station has been playing that new "Gravedigger" song fairly regularly, and it's a great ass song. I really loved that shit he did with that Calexico spic group too. But I've got at least double and triple copies of most of the important Willie records (for your information if you dabble in good country music - Redheaded Stranger, Phases and Stages, Yesterday's Wine, and Shotgun Willie are your best start), but finding one with him doing all Kris Kristofferson songs was intriguing to me. This is partly because double K has become this weird counter-culture figure with me after watching too many old Sam Peckinpah movies where Kristoffersen plays outlaw Jesus to perfection (get Convoy from Netflix if you've never seen it, that shit's easily the greatest made-for-TV movie ever), but also because he writes fucked up soulful degenerate songs. So hearing Willie do "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" is gonna be worth the dollar on it's own, and everything else is gravy.

The Good Times in Country Music - Various Artists - $1
This is a shitty sampler by Columbia Records, but it's a double LP and has a bunch of Hank Thompson songs, and I don't have any Hank Thompson on vinyl. It also has, for kitschy factor, Grandpa Jones of Hee Haw doing "Mountain Dew" (which is awesome), and Jim Nabors aka Gomer Pyle aka that singing hillbilly fag dude doing "Wichita Lineman" (which is hilariouser than fuck). Worth a dollar, but it's also one of those records that I'll file in my one section of vinyl that's I call the Raven-might-be-gay section, because it's the type of stuff I imagine metrosexual homos (haha - an oxymoron, I know) would be playing while drinking weird mixed drinks that taste like Altoids yet get you drunker than hell.

The Late Great Red Sovine - Phantom 309 - $1
If you do not know who Red Sovine is, please steal from these robotnets either "Phantom 309" or more importantly "Teddy Bear", or even "Colorado Kool-Aid". Red Sovine is this weird ass old country singer who did tales of ghosts or crippled children or judgemental people being burned by God or whatever. He is one strange fucker. I have only heard about two or three songs out of the ten on this album, including the "Phantom 309" (which is about a hitchhiker who catches a ride with a ghost-driven tractor and trailer without knowing it until he gets dropped off at a diner and tells everybody about the ride he just got), but I haven't listened to the rest, because I KNOW Red Sovine will deliver... no doubt in my mind, so I'm waiting till the weekend to get crazy ionospherically baked up and sit around with headphones on listening to that shit while masturbating to old Penthouse magazines from 1978.

Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 - $1
This is purely for sampling purposes for Solaris Earth Pipeline, because PSY-OPS played me a beat where he had sampled "And When I Die" by these guys, without even knowing we had hooked up a separate beat together a few months back that was a breakbeat snippet of the b-side to the 45 for that song. I don't think we even put anything over top that sample except maybe a drum kick or two. I will listen to this when I am in a "let's listen to a bunch of potentially shitty ass records and try to find golden nuggets of samplitude within".

Sorrells Pickard - self-titled - $1
I have never heard of this guy, but he looks like a crazy fucker and the album sleeve has a glowing endorsement by Kris Kristofferson, talking about how Pickard was a major voice in the anti-commercial underground sound of Nashville at that time. A lot of times when digging, I'll find shit like this and will go to the date to know whether to go for it or not. This one is from 1972, so it's post-hippie early-outlaw era country time, so this might be an undiscovered gem. It also might be butt ass terrible. Usually with unknown country music, my cutoff date is 1976, because after the bicentennial everything got kinda hokey and country radio became too powerful due to the Jews that moved to Nashville to live in a warmer climate while still screwing musicians and songwriters out of their well-deserved royalties. There's also some great ass song titles on this LP that sound exactly like the type of rural back roads hip hop bullshit themes I'd be writing for the Prolo CD we've been fucking around with lately. It also has radio station call letters Sharpied onto the front and back covers, which always makes me happy because that means a radio station had this album at some point. Basically, I'd like to own a mountain and move this camper trailer I do my musical creative bullshit inside of to the top, get a transmission tower, and have my own AM station. So when I see shit with call letters on it, it reminds me of that. I am a romantic at heart, and a cynic online.

David Banner - Cadillac on 22s 12-inch - $1
This is one of my favorite songs ever, and the one track I always try to hype people up to, so if I had found this for $10, I might've bought it. But there it was, tucked into the dollar racks, not a blemish on the vinyl, and I actually looked up and laughed at the eastern Eurotrash crooked face fucker at the counter, mocking his pretentious ignorance. Not only do I have this on vinyl now to play for parties when I am coaxed into spinning records like a retard from my monstrous collection for cookouting ass drunk people, but the single has the instrumental. I don't think I can even explain to you how stoked that makes me. I, to this day, play certain instrumentals off vinyl on at least a bi-weekly basis. David Banner's beat for Trick Daddy's "Thug Holiday" is always in heavy rotation, and I don't think I could honestly tell you one lyric from it because all I ever spin is the instrumental. But this beat is one of my all-time favorites, and actually what I made Boogie Brown listen to with me like 17 times in a row one night, which led to him hooking up some weird ass beat that ended up being this song "South 15 Rider", which is probably my favorite song I've ever made, except unless you grew up in southside Virginia, you wouldn't understand half the references. The great thing about this record too is that both my oldest two kids love that song and know the whole thing (one is almost 9 and the other just turned 4), and they will be stoked to give it to me for my birthday. I mean fuck, I have five turntables of various import in three different parts of our compound, with records scattered throughout the house, a ton in the camper (most of my good shit is there), and even a couple of crates in the trunk of the Datsun sitting in the front yard that has pink Christmas lights strung up in outline of it. They understand me, love me, and know how amped I'll be to get that single. I'm sure they'll expect me to play it, drink my beer, and we'll play our freestyle game while dancing like hyper-ballerinas, which usually degenerates into doing the robot. I'm a white guy so about all I can do is the robot, and I can't even do that very good.

Crime Mob - Circles 12-inch - $1
This is my favorite song I never admitted to in the EWA from last year, and the beat is a major reason for it, although I have to admit when you have a soulful ass beat with those Memphis style kicks behind it, someone like Princess rhyming over it sounds pretty sweet. There's just something about that sound/voice combo, and it's why the various bitch MCs in Three Six over the years always sounded so great too. I have already played this instrumental like seven times and I just got the shit yesterday. There is a b-side called "Shine Cause I Grind" featuring Mike Jones, and as much as I love Mike Jones and as much as I love this "Circles" song, I have yet to develop the stomach to actually listen to that side, because I know rap music, and I know this will be far from a b-side wins again scenario. I'd prefer to just scratch that side out with some fabric scissors and not worry about even trying to listen to it. In fact, I will do that right now...

The O Band - Look to the Left, Look to the Right 12-inch single - $1
This is a random ass disco single from 1977, with b-side songs called "A Smile is Diamond" and "Fine White Wine", and it's on red vinyl. I have a ton of disco singles because after I got heavy into DJ Screw, and pretty much everything on earth had been sampled to death (and Madlib was taking care of any open genres at like three per year), I started buying up a ton of dollar disco singles and playing them as slow as you could make the turntable play them. It was extra perfect when they were actually 45 rpm 12-inch singles, because then you could just put it on 33 rpms, and let it play. There are tons of breaks in disco, but you have to listen all the way through to find a good part with no stupid organs or homo-sounding horns or pianos or anything. Oftentimes, I couldn't find anything good. Even with all the initial promise, I gave this O Band single a first listen tonight, and it sounds like one of those pieces of shit that will go in a milk crate for the Salvation Army. Although the red vinyl would look good hanging on my woodshed by a nail. In fact, fuck a second listen, I will do that right now...

Max Edwards - Rockers Arena 12-inch single - $1
Man, the dub version of this song was great and spooky, as was the b-side called "Still Alive", which is a case of the b-side winning again, was even better and a thousand times awesome. Then I realized it was a 45 rpm single and I was playing it at 33 rpms. At the proper speed, it was just a shitty reggae single from 1978.

Loveable & the Grippa Riddim - Various Artists - $1
The album cover has a chick in leopard skin dress and promises "THE TOP SOCA ARTISTS of the Caribbean..." I think Fader magazine might've talked about soca music a couple of times (which stands for soul calypso), and this is like the third or fourth soca record I've bought used because I'm assuming at some point it will pay off. Except this record, even stronger than the previous two times, just reinforces the fact - not belief, but straight up fact - that soca music is the absolute shittiest godawful music ever created. It's like if you took every ounce of soul from black people, but then told them they had to make music for people to try to dance to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd get at least a goofy party jam out of "100% Wine" by Screw Face at the end of the first side, except no. Even that song, by that artist, seemingly impossible to suck, sucks.

Too Short - Life is Too Short 12-inch single - $3
My first non-dollar purchase, and I would buy this every day any day. This is one of Short's classics, maybe his most classic non-sex song, and to have it on 12-inch now is one of my life's greatest accomplishments this week. The single has an 8 minute long extended clean remix (which is good, because when I spin at parties, it's usually drunk ass families with kids running around fighting with sticks and shit or messing up the horseshoe game, so I only spin clean or radio versions of the rap songs, since I don't need to teach kids to say "fuck", "bitch", and "shit"; I'll let the public schools take care of that), plus the instrumental. I used to make 60 minute tapes of instrumentals where I'd just loop one single instrumental over and over on one side of the tape, and do a second instrumental on the other side. My truck doesn't have a tape player, but I'm getting new tires on the '91 Volvo stationwagon to get that back on the road, and it has a tape player, and I'd say chances are pretty fucking high I'm gonna make a 60 minute mixtape with one side all "Life is... Too Short" instrumental, and the other side all "Cadillac on 22s" instrumental. Fuck, I might end up driving to Oklahoma drunk with a tape like that in the Volvo if it's a warm day and I open the sun roof.

Noreaga - Super Thug 12-inch single - $1
I only found out like last year that the Neptunes did this beat, because I always remembered this as that awesome song where N.O.R.E.'s dressed like a sheik in the desert, and the beat's crazy wild. I've also always assumed, from what I've known they've done when I heard it, that Neptunes beats were mad gay and mad stupid and mad unloungin'. But I like the beat, and had gotten kinda slowed down tonight from playing things on slow-mo, plus listening to Too Short (I'll never spell that shit with a dollar sign - that's some fucking stupid shit), so I just pumped this beat, but it didn't sound right until I slowed the speed down. That's a fat ass beat when you slow it down enough to be shielded from amyl nitrate hits in dance club unisex bathrooms where you are tricked into homosexual activities by the gay dude holding your fucked up ass up on the left side while you are concentrating too hard to kissing the hot slut holding you up on your right side. At regular speed, you run the risk of doing what others have done, and making a point to claim it's not gay if you don't actually physically touch a dick, so having a cute guy named Pete suck your dick isn't technically gay.

Riddim Driven 12-inch single - various artists - $1
I wrongly assumed this was gonna be dancehall instrumentals, but even knowing that such a wrong assumption was easy to make, I felt safe since there was an Elephant Man song and a Capleton song on here. Guess what? It all sucked. I was very sad listening to this. The type of sad where you are listening to something you bought at the used record store and you know you have no use for it ever again. They have turntables there for you to preview shit, but I always think that's a crazy goofy way to buy vinyl. I mean, if I was sinking $15 into a Hawkwind record, I'd probably want to do that, but I'm a dollar bin type of motherfucker, and if you can't throw a dollar away on a gamble for a good record, then you're not a music aficionado. Shit, that's the music nerd's lottery right there, hoping you drop a buck and find some crazy wild classic nobody else ever told you about.

Goodie Mob - Cell Therapy 12-inch single - $3
Damn, another song off the EWA 100 All-Time Jams I found, with an instrumental. I don't have the first Goodie Mob tape anymore, so I didn't have access to "Cell Therapy" in non-robotic format, which geeked me up to find this. Making it even better was the fact on the b-side is the album version of "Soul Food", which is one of the singles I sold last time I forgot what a pain in the ass ebay is in actuality and I decided to sell of some bullshit. I have missed my "Soul Food" single a bunch of times, because it's a great song too, and if you could just eliminate T-Mo's stupid fucking "fuck Chris Darden, fuck Marcia Clark" verse, it'd be potentially even more classic than "Cell Therapy". Oddly, also on the b-side of this single is Outkast's "Benz of Beamer" song, since both were down with each other and on the same record label. "Cell Therapy" instrumental in effect. There's also a remix by some dude named Sideeq which is crazy retarded, but not retarded meaning good but retarded meaning bad.