2009 Goals #7: Learn the Banjo

I was growed up in a little shithole town called Meherrin, Virginia, which is a nasty grocery store, a post office, an SPCA, and a mom-and-pop greasy spoon. There is a nice slate sign going into town the one way that says "Welcome to Meherrin, the home of Roy Clark," and it has a banjo on the stone. It is our claim to fame. It has been my goal to one day have my name etched on there too, but let's be serious, that shit ain't gonna happen.
Anyways, I've been doing the rapping musics with a few people the past few years, namely with my man PSY/OPS nearby, and then with my boy Boogie Brown who I've done music with off and on for a long ass time. But Brown is married now, and already lived like 3 hours away, but us both being married you might as well triple that distance. And PSY/OPS has been maladied with physical ailments, and it seems like he might be bored. I know I am. I have gotten pretty tired of writing rap lyrics, as even if you try to work a storytelling angle, it's just so fucking played out and done before. And then there's 300,000 aspiring clever MCs just with a simple myspace search, and everybody is the realest thing ever that is most amazing and cunning with the linguistics and blah blah blah... it's just so boring. I find myself listening to Jim Croce or Steve Earle or stuff like that more than any hip hop that comes out. And I find myself wanting to write retarded shit within the confines of actual instrumental music, as opposed to the blip bloops of standard hip hop. You can really hear the difference in music now that we're deep into the digital age, where everybody has a home studio. It is no coincidence that the last real wave of grimy hip hop beats came in the early '90s when people were still using hardware samplers like the Ensoniq EPS 16-plus. Now that it's all moved to inside the robot boxes, a lot of that grime is gone too, and everything's too polished to be grimy, which sucks because most everything in my life is covered with a layer of grime, including my offspring and my eyeglasses, which are scratched up to where only looking straight ahead gives me a clear view, and there's a bleached out dot on the lens of the right eye even straight ahead. So I've kind of given up on the hip hop music really being pleasurable.
Bring in the banjo. I, as much as anybody else, hate dudes that pick a guitar fireside or bang on a drum the same pseudo-African rhythm for 3 hours straight. I tried to learn guitar when I was about 12 or so, but learning chords on an acoustic guitar wasn't taking me to Cliff Burton status fast enough, so I bailed. But I am older now, and a smart enough guy that I can be taught new shit, even teach myself when halfway motivated. So I figured it was time to learn an instrument, which ultimately I hope to complement with retarded songs about back woods drunkards, crackheads on Greyhound buses, people wrecking cars for leisure, just good general rural miscreant nonsense, because I'm glad to make up rhyming stories of such things. And as I thought about what instrument to play, it came down to two things - the banjo and the lute. I thought about a lute because that's some seriously old school bullshit, and plus me and the ol' lady been watching The Tudors on DVDs, but I also quickly remembered about those renaissance fairs and the type of people they draw, drinking ale out of horns and wearing druid amulets and shit like that. I'm not ready to jump into that mix, hoping to making music, even if I never share it with the rest of the world, that the type of guy who has a long grey beard and ponytail and spends Saturday afternoon riding around on a lawn mower with no shirt on would appreciate. So it was the banjo, which, to be fair, is the most speed metal-like redneck instrument you can find.
I was talking to a dude on New Year's Eve about all this as we got drunk on Polish beers, and he's a regular musician (meaning he doesn't need computers to make music), and he was telling me about how you had to practice your finger rolls all the time and that was the key. I found this disturbing as I have enough creative clutter fighting for every spare moment of my brain while the body is in transit between obligations. I also, without really knowing, know that ultimate banjo dork guys play with both hands using all sorts of finger wackiness. I would say at this point in my life, my physical body is gimpy at best, and that's as a whole. When you get down to tiny specific parts, that might be a lot to ask of me. But if I can find a good shitty starter banjo for under $100 (and I can find $100 as well), then I'm gonna give it a shot motherfucker. What else am I gonna do? Sit around and wait for people who make beats on distraction-heavy computer screens get around to letting me do more boring assed lyrics over top of beats that aren't what I'd want ultimately but I don't know how to do that shit and can't explain what I hear in my head well enough for others to do?