$20 Record Challenge

So yeah, I got them records a couple months back for my birthday, and had planned to write the second half of two $20 Record Challenges (where you buy $20 worth of records at a record shop, which tests your skill to uncover gems as well as the record store's ability to not suck a fat dick), and never did, mostly because poverty seems to be embedded in my DNA and I am living in constant fear I will come home to find a bank sitting inside my house with all my shit piled up in the ditch. But hey, welcome to America in 2008. Motherfuckers are arguing over whether or not we're in a recession and I'm wondering if I'm gonna be standing in line for an eighth parcel of rotten apples by the end of the summer. Our credit card had $50 on it, so I bought $48 worth of seeds though, so we can have a fat ass garden. Of course, if the place is no longer our's, I guess we'll have to sneak into the garden to get our shit we grew back, but at the same time, I feel more valuable as a life insurance policy than an actual working member of society a lot of times, so if worse came to worse, I'd probably go out on some outlaw retard tip, holed up in my house shooting through windows which are conveniently already busted up in a couple of spots. Anyways, enough of that talk; here's another $20 worth of records I got in the basement at Plan 9 in Carytown, Richmond, Virginia, which is a hipster hellhole to be sure, where all the workers look like eastern Europeans in Chuck Taylors, but you have to be ahead of their hipster curve and you can still find mad awesome shit because they have crazy amounts of dollar records, of a far greater quality (set to record store standard, not Salvation Army standard) than most dollar bins.

ICE-T - SOMEBODY GOTTA DO IT/OUR MOST REQUESTED RECORD 12-INCH SINGLE - $3
My boy Paul-Ski in high school had co-opted the 7-inch version of "Somebody Gotta Do It" (aka Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!) from his older brother, and we used to play that shit constantly. Somebody Gotta Do It was a classic old school shit-talking to the nth degree, about wealth in this case, and no lying, I used to be a hardcore ass Ice-T fan, all the way up until O.G. Original Gangster sort of alienated me because I was in college and mad dorks were loving on that shit. And yes, I see the obvious observation, that I was probably a mad dork in college too, and I probably was, but there is a feeling of entitlement you get when you are down with an artist from his first record, then second, and on, and then he has something that blows up more mainstream, and when you're a contrarian fuckface like myself, it makes you think less of it. But also, O.G. wasn't nearly as good as Rhyme Pays or Power, though it's probably better than the Iceberg.
The B-side to this I'd never heard and it's an interesting old school "let's rhyme over a breakbeat and the DJ busting up a Led Zeppelin snippet on the tables. It's like listening to Ice-T do a Schoolly D-style song, just it has that west coast flavor of extra roller skating rink-sounding bells in the beat. And both songs have bonus beats extras, which makes this a smart $3.

SLIM THUG - WOOD GRAIN WHEEL 12-INCH SINGLE - $1
I am a big fan of Houston rappers, even the second-wave of DJ Screw-influenced guys that blew up a couple years back (I have been wishing my man Kingmob would make a H-Town's greatest hits mix with the best Paul Wall/Mike Jones/Lil Flip/Lil Keke/Chamillionaire/Slim Thug/Bun B shit from that two year window where it was going crazy), but Slim Thug is not one of my favorites, mostly because he's always talking about being "the boss". Dude, jobs suck, and most every black person knows this as well as most lower-level white people like myself, so I do not understand why you'd want to advertise yourself as a boss. This is standard second wave Screw-influenced, with the standard Fat Pat slowed down lyric doubling as a hook. I had been excited to see this because I thought it was a track I had heard on the satellite radio with a weird bass kick pattern I wanted to share with the PSY/OPSogist for example purposes upon future beatmaking endeavors, except I was mistaken (it was actually a Chamillionaire song), so this isn't the best dollar I wasted that day. Still, you slow the pitch down on an instrumental track with a Fat Pat hook and motherfuckers (even whiteboys) can freestyle for hours.
Also, added dick in the mouth to whoever decided it made sense to just have Radio/LP/instrumental on both sides of a fucking record (which is even worse when the producer is full of himself and only puts the radio/street versions on both sides with no instrumentals). Not only was the early '90s a much greater heyday for rap peoples putting out better music, musically and conceptually, but shit, they had extra tracks that they put as B-sides or bonus cuts. And all these shitty free "mixtapes" you can get inside these internets don't make up for it.

TAKA BOOM - NIGHT DANCIN'/CLOUD DANCER 12-INCH SINGLE - $1
I got this because at one point I was buying up 12-inch disco singles and just playing them as slow as the turntable would go, and you could find some great loops that way (and who the fuck who is into regular music listens to shitty disco music from the '70s, so it's an untapped genre of samplitude). I eventually stopped doing this because I ended up with so many shitty disco singles that didn't even have a good horn-heavy loopable section that I was afraid I would turn gay. Unfortunately, this single pushes me further towards gaydom. The fact it's on Ariola Records, which is what tricked me into giving it a shot, doesn't make it less gay; I think it's a hairy beer-bellied bear dude's areola they're talking about, although I'm not sure if areola only refers to bitch nipples or all nipples. I never took anatomy, though I play one on dvd.
Wait, "Cloud Dancer" does have a nice acoustic intro with some "oooooh oooooh ooooooooh"s, but it's not really sample material as it sounds more like somebody doing an electronica remix to an L.A. Guns or Skid Row power ballad.

VARIOUS ARTISTS - ORIGINAL EXPERIENCE LP - $4
This is a collection of people I never heard of produced by a guy called Jah Screw on 1-Time Records out of Jamaica, but with no date. It might be good dub music, or it might be early ragga music, or it might be really shitty shit from somewhere in the middle '90s.
Actually, it is even worse than any of those... it is the same shitty synth-pulse beat but with like ten different set of vocals over the same beat. By the third one, it wouldn't matter if you had ODB freestyling while Louie Armstrong scatted in the background, it would drive you crazy. This shit is some Son of Sam's neighbor's dog barking to me.

LITTLE MEEKY - SWEAR PT. 2 7-INCH - $1
Sounds like late '80s raggamuffin (meaning the dude rhymes like the "Pass the Duchie" kids), but it's catchy enough and unsynthesized enough to make it into my never-get-fixed jukebox. Some old dude who does that thing has promised me three times he'd call me regularly to get it in his shop, but fucker always flails. He sounds on the phone like he smells like mothballs and hates black people though. I saw a truck for some other amusement company that actually had "jukeboxes" on the side in letters, but mostly they deal with dollar-operated digital jukeboxes nowadays. Nobody's got that old school actual fan slotted 45 jukebox knowledge. World's gone to hell, in a bootleg Louie Vutton handbag.

THE JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH - KING KONG PT. I/PT. II 7-INCH - $1
I often buy stupid worthless Jimmy Castor singles, based on the ridiculously unquestionable awesomeness of "Troglogyte (Cave Man Song)". There is some serious funk here, and the story of King Kong is Jimmy Castor at his mid-level - not too over-the-top stupid, but not great. The fake King Kong groans during the break are probably more than worth the one dollar though, except I bet like 7000 fag nerd Aesop Rock-loving DJs have sampled it already. It kinda bums me out that the music I do is probably gonna end up falling into that stupid Sage Francis/Aesop Rock college dork kids love it genre. Oh well, I guess I can work for years to get popular, fight mood swings and depression, and then go nuts and blow up like 38 college kids along with myself on some hole-in-the-wall stage in some university town where the PBRs are in full motherfucking effect at the bar.

JOE SIMON - ALL MY HARD TIMES/GEORGIA BLUE 7-INCH - $1
Hey, I know this "All My Hard Times" song, and it's great. Life's got my man Joe Simon pushed around and pissed, but he keeps on trucking along. A great thing to remember, except he should be glad he wasn't around now because diesel's over four dollars a gallon and you can't just keep on trucking no more.
B-side ain't bad either, although I wore my needle down letting it skip over the ending for eight minutes because I was in the middle of masturbating to Penthouse Forum book from 1978. I like old porn letters better because dudes are more about fucking more women back then as opposed to watching more dudes fuck their woman like nowadays porn letters be tripping over.

LITTLE JOE BLUE - DON'T START ME TO TALKING/DIRTY WORK GOING ON 7-INCH - $1
It is blues music, meaning there is chicken scratch guitar solos and the lyrics are about the pain and struggle of everyday situations, usually nasty cheating bitches or dirty britches with no dollar bills in them pockets.
B-side is more of the same, except the 7-inch was sitting slightly underneath that plastic spacer thing for the turntable, so the song had a slow down/speed up rhythm to it since it was spinning off kilter. I need to remember to tell PSY/OPS about that because with a most proper sounding song, you could find some weird ass changing rhythm yet still on rhythm samples in such an accidental mannerism.

BOBBY GREGG AND HIS FRIENDS - THE JAM PART 1/PART 2 7-INCH - $1
This song is upbeat as a motherfucker. In fact, I'm not depressed anymore. Who cares if I'm broke? Man, I'm able-bodied, and the rain will stop, and I've got work out the ass to do once the sun comes out and it's warm. I just work, and by Monday, I could probably clock $1200. Except, let's be reasonable, and stay home on Sunday to put the garden in the ground and settle for just making $1000 by next Monday. That gets me one month closer on being caught up on the crib, plus stocks the house full of groceries that ain't corn flakes, rice, and frozen squash from the freezer from last year. Thanks Bobby Gregg and whoever your motherfucking friends are. I'm gonna go out in the rain and do some high-speed yoga.
Seriously, this song is awesome as fuck. It makes me happy, although with the wife having had our third kid two months ago, it's been almost three months since I've had sex, much less one that involved a serious amount of foreplayriffic fellatio beforehand, so my idea of happy is probably all sorts of out of wack right now. When they give you a vasectomy, the semen is absorbed inside your body, which freaks me out, but I'm also of the belief is you do not have sex enough, the same thing happens to a regular unfixed dude, and it makes you crazy. Were I a scientist, I'd do research on such manners with semen absorption into the body and sexual predatory actions, but I'm not a scientist, just a housepainter, so I try to explain to the Mexicans who work for me when I need someone to work for me what I'm talking about, using the 300 Mexican words I know.

MILLIE JACKSON - IF YOU LOVING YOU IS WRONG I DON'T WANT TO BE RIGHT/THE RAP 7-INCH - $1
Oh, you know that A-side song as it's well-known, but the B-side is a play off that first song and B-side is the motherfucking shit. It is a definite jukebox stuffer, guaranteed to hold a solid spot in one of my 100 slots, without a fucking doubt. Millie Jackson is akin to Jimmy Castor in that she has some top-notch songs that give her a reputation, except she also has a bunch of dumb shit. I'd like someone to just send me a link to a Millie Jackson megamix of all her awesomest stuff, so I could get excited, but then never download it because I never do. I have a real disconnect between real music and the internets, that borders on mental problem. But then again, that's the beauty of the internets as it allows us all a great spot to develop our mental problems way more fully than our parents ever could, at least not in a safe environment.

OTIS REDDING - (SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY/SWEET LORENE 7-INCH - $1
Basically bought this specifically for the jukebox since Otis is one of the all-time bestest and this was the only stupid dollar single stupid Plan 9 was offering, slapping $3 price tags on all his other 7-inches. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is played out of course, and "Sweet Lorene" is a standard R&B slammer from that time period, talking shit to some hot skank to try and get inside her pussy tissues, but still, it's Otis Redding. It's funny, you get all hung up on modern standards where Amy Winehouse is throaty and bluesy as fuck, but then you listen to one Otis Redding song and realize she's just a stupid ugly bitch hooked on crack with a nice marketing gimmick that tricked a bunch of magazine reviewers.

REVEREND THOMAS L. WALKER - I'LL MAKE IT SOMEHOW/I DON'T DESERVE A MANSION 7-INCH - $1
This dude Ace I used to know was a way better music nerd than me (he used to do album reviews for Spin I think), and he had all these wonderfully crazy black gospel records he'd play. It tricks me into thinking you can just start buying the shit and find gems, which led to me having a ton of shitty ass gospel LPs at one point, but I learned, you can't try too hard. Still, on $20 missions, I usually like to get one 7-inch to give it a shot, based mostly on the title of the songs, kind of like an NFL team's 7th round draft pick as a possible project that pays off. This was that choice for me this time. Way too much choir in the A-side, which killed off a great Hammond organ-heavy start. Basically, all great gospel music should have a Hammond organ plus somebody playing electric guitar who idolizes Wes Montgomery. And "I'll Make It Somehow" is that, just clusterfucked up with too much goddamned choir. B-side was even worse, so thanks a fucking lot Reverend Johnny Walker, now I'm one step closer to the devil. Thrash bands from 1987 never muck up their intrinsic awesomeness with too much goddamned choir.

JONNY OSBOURNE - ONE RUB-A-DUB FOR THE ROAD/DUB FOR THE ROAD 7-INCH - $3
On Top Rank Records, and it delivers fairly well enough. It's no Madlib compilation-worthy ass single, but it's good enough to make it into the imaginary broken jukebox rotation. Man, if I ever get that thing fixed, I could probably write a book figuring out what 100 singles to put into it out of the stupid boxes and milk crates full of stupid vinyl I have.
Of course, the dub side is most enjoyable, as usual for middling quality Jamaican singles of this sort. I'd love to do a $20 record challenge in Kingston. Actually, I am in the process of attempting to set aside enough money to take two weeks towards the end of fall and travel a loop through the southeast, hitting up record stores for a $20 record challenge each day. Except, thus far, my saving up for it has involved me thinking of it and realizing I'm a couple grand behind on regular bills already. But yeah.