J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - August '09

Here is the top 13 plus-minus most played not skipped tracks on my stupid little gaypod silver shuffle which I never take out my truck and hardly lock the doors but I tuck it into my gearshifter cover thing that's all baggy and can easily hide things like this. That's what I does.
#1: "Uncle Sam Goddamn" by The Brother Ali - I don't know, after that one CD and seeing him live, I was all like, "Man, this guy is gonna be the greatest thing ever." Then he did a tour with Rakim and Ghostface Killah, and it could only mean bigger and better things. But then he put out that crappy assed CD that I can't even remember the name of but it sounded like a smart dude knowing he was smart and being really uninspired by it all. At this point, I'd say Brother Ali is more hype than delivery, though the potential is still there. I still like this song a lot, and my 10-year-old kid is all about it, but honestly his last CD had nothing even close to this. And if you want to be the Truth, you've got to do more than rap intelligently while making 50 Cent style hooks but with religious references instead of champagne ones and expect me to give a fuck. What color is this dude anyways? He better not go to Tanzania though with his albino ass.
#2: "Contrabando y Traicion" by The Los Tigres Del Norte - I am all about some norteno music, probably because being a shitty housepainter by trade, I have spent time cramped up into dilapidated vans and trucks owned by other whiter people than myself with assorted Mexicans. I'm not sure why, but this is probably my favorite norteno song, although to be honest, most norteno I actually possess was when I stole a bunch of Los Tigres Del Norte from inside the internets.
#3: "C.R.E.A.M." by El Michel's Affair - I'm an ol' Wu-head, through and through. And persnickety too, to the point I’m all like, “Man, they started falling the fuck off with Wu-Tang Forever,” and “Bobby Digital sucks a dick.” But that’s how I roll... passionate and hateful. Anyways, there’s been a slew of things to tinkle the memory machine of ol’ Wu-heads lately, including the super-dupe Memory Man DITC/Wu mash-up mixtape (which isn’t a mixtape at all but a digital file you can steal from inside the internet’s womb), and some of this shit right here by El Michel’s Affair, an old school style funk/soul band, most likely full of whiteboys I’d guess, probably from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Babylon, USA. But regardless of that, this is some good, laid back shit, some funk ass band recreating Wu Tang instrumentals. It’s so good in fact the one song they have where Raekwon actually raps with them is their worst song. Of course, Raekwon sounds bored as fuck half the time anyways. If Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 ever really comes out, it’ll be sponsored by Ambien (which is some fucked up shit that’ll make you see packs of dead people standing around your bed and shit).
#4: "Happy Hour" by Corntooth - Not only is Matt Conner my old roommate, he’s my favorite country singer of the past twenty years. That’s one tormented motherfucker half the time, to where I seen him want to kill a dude over a slice of bread and like pictures of ugly chicks scatting (not like Ella Fitzgerald either), and I’d like to hear more tormented workingman angry kill kill soothing country sounds. The band Corntooth is some Richmond music all-stars bullshit, which I guess half of them don’t kick it with the other half of them anymore, or some such bullshit like happens when big egos from small ponds hang out too much during their free time blocks.
#5: "Cold Rain and Snow (instrumental" by The Grateful Dead - My brother-in-law had given us an external hard drive chock full of music a while back, but I only hit it up every now and then, usually in searching mode just to see what’s on there, since there’s a lot of shit I’d deem of questionable sexuality. But I found some Dead thing that’s like alternate takes and instrumentals. This has come up on my gaypod a couple times and I hit repeat and freestyle wacky white workingman knocking off of work early to go sit by the river and wait for death to free me from this slavemaster world type freestyles.
#6: "I've Got Dreams To Remember (Bitch)" by Otis Redding - Otis Redding is my favorite mainstream non-pervert soul singer and this is my favorite Otis Redding song. Much like millions of redneck men before me, who grow old but still drink and end up at parties where you pitch a tent to pass out in but wake up Sunday morning to start drinking beer again around the smoky coals of the bonfire pit and you request a soul singer to come on and the person in charge of music plays them but then your favorite song comes on and you do weird scoot wobble dances across the slick with dew grass, I’m gonna eventually be a greybeard and kick it like that to this song.
#7: "Something Went Wrong Again" by Thee Headcoats - When I hit the lottery, I’m gonna waste part of my money by hiring Billy Gibbons and Billy Childish to sit around and make music with me while we get drunk as fuck in my basement. I’m not exactly sure where Billy Childish is from, I’m thinking maybe Scotland but I know those non-British subjects to the Queen get all weird about their personal ethnic heritage even though to me, as an American, fuck them, so I’ll just say that whatever Billy Childish is, he’s a national treasure, and they should build statues of him, except not concrete ones but give stacks of old bicycles and scrap metal to mental patients and let them make giant whirligigs that are inspired by Billy Childish. If it looks like him, all the better.
#8: "Trap Door" by Jake One featuring MF Doom - I played the hell out of the MF Doom from this year, but for some reason this track where he’s just a featured guest catches my earball regularly. I’m not even being consciously contrarian where I’m like, “Haha, y’all be listening to his regular shit but I’m rocking the obscure stylings!” I just like the song a lot. I don’t even know who Jake One is, but if he’s a dude who just hooks up beats, I bet he’s got a fragile ego and really overblows all the work he does as this masterful musical masterpiece because he took the nerdlab time to learn how to push buttons and manipulate really great music that someone else found for him, or he happened to catch when listening to the first ten seconds of every song on every album he bought at some dank record store in a city 45 minutes from his home.
#9: "Castles Made of Sand" by Jimi Hendrix - My daughters really got into The Beatles for a while so I put some Hendrix on my gaypod to school them on something far less annoying and old people-like than the stupid Beatles. In actuality, in high school, I first started to discover my contrarian personality when out of a group of four tight ass homeboys, three of them were all into Jimi Hendrix, to the point that was all they played. I was the fourth and I’d kick shit, with a serious look and attitude, like, “I don’t know man, Santana was probably better, he had that whole crazy rhythm thing going on.” Oh man, such bullshit. I hate me some Santana now, but the Santana that’s still alive suffered the same soul-sucking cybertronic surgery that Cheech Marin got. You know, that’s how Oscar Zeta Acosta died, when the CIA abducted him and tried to steal his soul, but he just concentrated real hard until his heart exploded instead. In case you don’t know, Oscar Zeta Acosta was Hunter S. Thompson’s lawyer, the character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a big influence on that gonzo style. Whenever people give me Barnes & Nobles gift cards, I just order more copies of Revolt of the Cockroach People and leave them in hotel room drawers. It be my bible. Man, when I hit the lottery, I gotta remember to put Zeta Acosta books in dank ass hotels, like the whole Gideon bible thing, but in reverse, for delinquents and loungers.
#10: "Purple Stuff" by Big Moe featuring D-Gotti - I should mention that I only bump the screwed version, so if you go to the youtubes and search “Purple Stuff” and see the video with the 300 pound black dude in the shiny purple suit and that little crazy leprechaun running around and the music’s all normal speed, understand it doesn’t sound right unless you slow it down like DJ Screw would’ve done. It doesn’t hurt to see how a hydrocodone pill tastes either.
#11: "Straight Gangstaism" by The Geto Boys but actually The Convicts - 3-2 was Big Mike’s rapping podna in The Convicts, and they got a Rap-a-Lot deal to get Big Mike into the Geto Boys to replace yelling ass Willie D (who I think I read is selling real estate in like Kurdistan or some shit nowadays) because Dre was trying to get The Convicts to be on Death Row since they were Snoop Dogg’s roommates... all of this is gleamed from smoked out memories of reading Rap Pages, so don’t hold me to it, although if I just wrote it on the internet then it must be true, so go tell your friends. Anyways, 3-2 has a remarkably unworthy career for a dude who was featured on two banging ass tracks from that era - this song and “Pocket Full of Stones” by UGK off the Menace II Society soundtrack. This song is just some gangsta ass memories of childhood and how good it feels to grow up and be a successful street thug nonsense, but man, the Rap-a-Lot crew of anonymous, barely credited producers who made their tracks back then were on it on this song. I can’t even explain how the piano or whatever the fuck it is throbs at your brain when you’re high. And Big Mike’s crazy style (highly underrated in the world of the rapping music) that gets all hyper like Outkast but’ll slide into the drawliest drawl all of a sudden, it sounds perfect. 3-2 does that shit too, but with about nine cotton balls of Puerto Rican blood stuffed into his mouth. It’s a great fucking song, and easily one of the best five Geto Boys songs ever, and it don’t even got Face, Bushwick, or yelling ass Willie D on it.
#12: "Higher Field Marshall" by Prince Far-I & Peter Broggs - An internet dude inside the Secret Clubhouse who is into the dub music shared this at one point, and it has survived a long life inside my gaypod, and rarely gets skipped, which is impressive considering I stole a bunch of those Trojan boxsets a while back and threw them in the mix and it totally burned me on all sorts of dub/reggae/ska all that for a while. Man, that shit gets repetitive as fuck. Maybe I don’t get high enough. (That could mean to get high more often or it could mean to get even more fucked up on a daily basis. I won’t tell, just don’t make me take drug tests for my food stamps.)
#13: "African People" by The Jay Boys but kinda Madlib - “Indian Reservation (Lament of the Cherokee People)” song by Paul Revere and the Raiders is one of those old ass corny AM radio songs that I actually liked. It’s got some weird things going in in there, and plus it’s some straight up white guilt poor indian people lyrics to top that off with. So to hear a weird dub version about Africa, man, that really taps deep into my white guilt. Haha, not really, but that made me think of how much I hate those shirts that say COLO(RED) or whatever, to bring awareness to Africa’s plight as pit of the world, at like $20 a pop. Why don’t I just buy some cheap ass t-shirts and send them the change? Fucking white people. We ruined Africa by thinking we knew what was best for it, and now it’s all fucked up with child soldiers and people killing albinos for their bones and eating the brains of your enemy to prove a point, so we, as white people, think we can fix it and make it better because we know what’s best for it. Sometimes it’s best to just get the fuck out of the way. If you’re drunk driving and you run over some lady, don’t go trying to put a splint on her broken leg with a 2x4. Just let it be and let everybody figure out how to move on on their own.