Music pumps blood through my days, and if there was no such thing... well that’s silly, if there was no music, there’d be no life, because it’s an extension of that same shit, life blood, all that. And I have always wanted to rock the music, from a young ‘un wishing to rule the world with a guitar, to rock god teen years, into realizing my only real musical talent was to push words out at a rapid and clever rate, thus hip hop took control and never really let go, although my other influences have eventually steeped into the tea as well, making for a hodgepodge nonsense white trash jailhouse tattoo style that probably about nine people on the earth would appreciate.
Last year, I was set on learning the banjo, mostly because I felt I needed to learn an instrument, to make that bonfire music, and banjo was a traditional instrument that jibed well with my traditional heritage and desire for the simple things. I mean, if you wanna rock the music in real life, you’re not always sitting around your gay assed computer set-up with Scratch Live and whatever sampling system you’ve set up allegiance to. So I figured an instrument was the way to go. This also fit in with my life of blue collar labor, born to a chainsaw mechanic (pops actually has a chainsaw graphic on his grave marker, and my uncle right beside him has a race car doing a burnout, both of which are way better than praying hands, and make me proud of my fucked up yet perfect familial tree), and it made sense to learn the traditional songs, you know Skynyrd and CDB and “Pills I Took” to bust out Raven-style.
The problem is, we don’t live in a traditional world anymore. Cyber cellphone towers of babble beam brainwaves through our bodies all day long, even out here in the rural armpit of Virginia. For one thing, this constant mental electromagnetic interference makes it almost impossible to concentrate on learning an instrument. The only way I could get anywhere was to be sitting down in a dip in my field underneath a red maple tree where it was low to the beams, and even then I had to be burning a trash barrel with aluminum cans in it beside me to run interference. So within the context of the stifling world I live in, it makes better sense for me to go ahead and just do some straight simple classic rock loops on my shitty $200 laptop using freeware Audacity and record through a $10 mic through a cassette 4-track recorder to alter the vocal mix with that runs into the RCA input on a USB turntable that USBs itself into said cheap ass gully laptop. Then I can write lyrics about the countryside as it is now, not as it was, because basically it’s the same. We still want to hang out by the river and we still want to ride trains and we still have broken hearts and shattered dreams and tattered futures, but we have to get down with the sound springing from the ground we walk right now. I don’t walk a banjo walk. My walk is three half-broken Frankenstein turntables and seven peach crates of slowly sedimented vinyl. Strange electronic music wins.
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