J.J. Krupert's September Gaypod Mix

With the American economy hopefully about to collapse upon itself in the coming weeks, I figured I might as well tap out that last fifty bucks on my Best Buy card and get one of those stupid iPod Shuffles (from here on referred to as my gaypod). Actually, I bought it a month or so ago after my stupid satellite radio lighter plug charger burned up the second lighter socket in my stupid truck, and I didn't feel like ordering more bullshit being the set-up, since I got a new satellite receiver less than a year ago, had burned up both sockets, fucked up my factory receiver, plus something else I can't remember... Oh yeah, I tore a bunch of shit up trying to put the new receiver in, out of frustration, because I'm the type of dude who tears shit up when he gets mad. So now I have regular radio and the gaypod. The gaypod holds very little music, considering I have far too much music - couple thousand records, stacks of CDs, plus two external hard drives chock full of bullshit, so basically all I can do is stuff a few things on there, and it's survival of the fittest. So to help justify my financial indiscretions, and just because my brain is retarded and can only think about things and ultimately accept them if there's some alterior word-based result from it, I decided at the end of each month, I would pontificate upon the ten most played songs from it, and dump them from my gaypod forever, but make a mix out of them to have for my truck CD player, and share this dumb unimportant shit all with you.
I named my gaypod J.J. Krupert, because my 4-year-old daughter at the time I had gotten it was really into playing a DJ Z-Trip CD (Uneasy Listening, I think maybe volume 2... it makes a really important deal on the cover about how cutting edge it is and how rare the CD is and how blah blah fucking blah), and she'd be wearing like retarded play clothes outfits of ballet skirts, Mexican wrestling masks and shiny silver chemises, doing crazy dances to DJ Z-Trip's early mash-up stylings. She asked me who it was and I told her, "DJ Z-Trip," but it translated into her insane mind as "J.J. Krupert". So DJ Z-Trip is now just called J.J. Krupert, and that's the title of my gaypod. And here were the top ten most played songs off it in August, though not necessarily in one through ten order, as I re-ordered the bullshit to try and make a sensible mix.
#1: "Angel of Sin" by Hank Williams III - Man, the Straight to Hell double CD that Tricephus dropped in I guess 2006 is one of my favorite shits ever, and probably the last actual CD that I actually bought at an actual store and didn't get pissed that I didn't just steal from inside the internets. He's got a new jambo supposedly coming out next month, recorded entirely in his house, which is good news too because I think the half-screwed and chopped second disc of Straight to Hell is better than the first. "Angel of Sin" is off the first disc, and is some real genetic deficiencient alcoholic ass heartbreak country. Radio country is so sterile and soundalike, and alt.country is so fucking stupid and college faggified most of the time, it's good to know Hank III is out there. Actually, that parallel shittiness is a lot like hip hop too, with mainstream crap being predictable and underground shit being just as predictable just in a different boring ass way. I guess music is just fucked. Thanks a lot greedy record industry Jews. Keep pushing shit ass Shooter Jennings as some sort of outlaw at everybody; I'm sure that'll turn it all around.
#2: "Happy Hour" by Corntooth - Corntooth is a Richmond country group featuring my homeboy and old roommate Matt on vox (who normally plays in a killer ass rock-n-roll band called RPG, who have a new CD out now), and other Richmond music all-stars like the guitarist from Lamb of God and some dude from Gwar too I think. But Matt and his wife Janey do the sanging in Corntooth, and it's a fucking tag team punch of perfect sad country greatness. My biggest problem, as hinted above, with alt.country labelled music is it usually comes across as suburban college kids attempting to act country. I have hated many musics people who know me and know my self-destructive rural roots have tried to convince me properly represents the proud crappiness of past experiences you get growing up in dirtbag places with lawless god-fearers as most role models. Most of those musics miss the fucking point, and are more a Hee Haw skit at a liberal art college than actual experience. "Happy Hour", and Corntooth in general, is some real ass shit, even if it is from trendy ass hipster doofus Richmond town. You can hear it in Matt and Janey's voices. (Janey's is like Janis Joplin if there were no hippies and Janis ended up working as a waitress in a diner for the first fifteen years of her money-earning life.)
#3: "Paycheck to Paycheck" by Corntooth - This is probably my favorite fucking love song ever. My family is broke as fuck (again), using credit card that should've sensibly been cut up when we slipped out the noose earlier this year to buy bacon for Sunday breakfast, but fuck it man. I got beer, I got a sexy ass wife, three good kids, a ragged house in the country, and I'm not dead yet.
#4: "The Mountain" by Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band - My interest in hearing Steve Earle comes and goes. I think overall he's overrated, and all his stuff is not as great as it gets made out to be, probably because of his truly fucked life story of heroin addiction and shit. But when he is good and I am in the mood for his Kentucky hill williams twang, he can be right on. I guess I got fired up for him again watching the last season of The Wire when it came out on DVD. But I found this whole CD he did with the Del McCoury Band on a hard drive's of music I got from my bro-in-law. This song, the title track off the CD, is just a sad, meandering song, of course being all conscious and talking about mountaintop removal and all that shit. But it's a great fucking song.
#5: "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top - I've probably said it multiple times inside the internets, but Tejas by ZZ Top is one of the all-time great fucking albums. And this instrumental is the best song off of it. I have looped this instrumental and actually just listened to it for 9 hours straight before. Were I to ever become ridiculously wealthy, I would make sure one of my first wastes of money, after the platinum penis sheath with red diamond eyeballs, would be to hire Billy Gibbons to be in charge of keeping my gaypod filled with original theme music. I had been trying to think of anyone alive on this earth more awesome than Lemmy from Motorhead this week (you waste your mind's time in odd ways as a housepainter) and about the only thing I could come up with was Billy Gibbons.
#6: "Country Rap Tune" by Tow Down - I stayed in a hotel room with for-real internet a month or so back, and youtubed the video for this, as it's always been one of my favorite screwed and chopped classics, and I was shocked to see a goofy looking whiteboy with those hilarious-to-everyone-else style little braids, riding around in a Nissan painted up like the General Lee. I guess I had just assumed he would've been black, but I guess everybody sounds black when screwed and chopped with some slurring ass DJ Screw overdubs talking about having DVD screens in your car's headrest. I wonder whatever happened to Tow Down? Is he still doing shit? Or more likely in jail? Or did he cut the braids off and works at his dad's car lot now? Endless questions. Also, it always freaks me out when I listen to that DJ Shadow Essential mix and I hear the regular speed version of this song, as it sounds alien and hyper-speed. Once you go slack, you don't go back.
#7: "Straight Gangstaism" by the Geto Boys - Not so much a Geto Boys song as it was Big Mike and his partner 3-2, who were a group on Rap-a-Lot called The Convicts. They, according to a snippet I think I read in The Source over a decade ago, were roommates with Snoop Dogg the same time Dre was putting together Death Row, and after Willie D left the Geto Boys, part of the way James Prince kept The Convicts from signing with Death Row was making Big Mike the new Geto Boy. Worked for me, as I've always liked Big Mike's style, and honestly, Till Death Do Us Part is, in my opinion, the best Geto Boys CD from start-to-end there ever was. It doesn't have the radio hits like We Can't Be Stopped, but there are no weak segments. "Straight Gangstaism" starts being awesome with that catchy ass funk beat, and then once Big Mike and 3-2 stylishly slur all over the track about the carefree lifestyle of the urban outlaw, it's over. My compliments to the chef.
#8: "Uncle Sam Goddamn" by Brother Ali - I saw Brother Ali on tour last year in a small club (R.I.P. Starr Hill) and it was the best rap performance I ever did done see. I actually buoght his CD (used) afterwards, and for once the CD was lesser than the live performance. It sounded flatter from the studio, whereas most studio shit gets beefed up with overdubs and multi-tracks and protools trickery. Still though, in election season, I enjoy this song a lot. It's standard "the government sucks/can't trust those mother fucks" indy rapper content, but Brother Ali delivers it with such punch. At one point, the esteemed Expert Whiteboy panel of four had been working on a summertime Hip Hop 100 List of the 100 great living forces in the hips hop, and I was pushing for Ali to be high, based purely on potential. After years of indy rapper Rhymesayers Entertainment heavy touring, he did a tour last year where it was just him, Rakim, and Ghostface Killah. It got me excited to see what he cooks up next CD, having the elder example of those two to hang around for a couple months.
#9: "Uncommon Valor" by Jedi Mind Tricks - If this song stopped after the first verse, it would be just another stupid fucking indy rap song, because Vinnie Paz's rhyme, even if he is putting himself into the mind of a Vietnam vet, is very pedestrian. It's what you'd expect if someone was a rapper, distrustful of government, and wanted to do a song about Vietnam thirty years after the fact. But then R.A. the Rugged Man comes in with what I would say is the best rap song verse ever done by a white rapper. Linguistically, he fucks it up more so than I think I've ever heard him do. And the content of what he's saying is ridiculous, especially if you know that it comes from the personal experience of his own father. R.A. has those bighead downs syndrome siblings and shit like that, and is probably pretty lucky he wasn't born half-mutant from the agent orange his pops got showered with.
#10: "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd - I love and respect greatly dead Lynyrd Skynyrd, even think of Ronnie Van Zant as a prophetic drunkard voice not given his propers for his redneck taoism. But still alive Lynyrd Skynyrd, playing at those outside ten dollar corporate enclave Wednesday after work shows, is a sad sad thing, kinda like I imagine that Samuel L. Jackson as former boxing champ movie was probably trying to be. I know a lot of people think Skynyrd is just racist fuckery, and others probably don't even hear this song, tuning it out as classic rock radio station overexposed tripe. But this is still one of my favorite songs. I put it at the end of the list, and thus the mix, to make it easier for you judgemental faggots who actually download the mix to skip it though.