J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #11: “Live Free Or Die” by Hayes Carll

I saw Hayes Carll on the Jay Leno Show the other week, and actually tuned in to see it specifically, of course waiting until the end of the house, because who can tolerate fucking Jay Leno without wanting to stab America in the fucking throat with old railroad spikes? The song he did was off his new album coming out later this year, and it was a lot of song and I couldn’t get the real total feel for it, but I have faith in holmes. The fact he’s getting pre-release buzz and his record industry insider handlers are getting him onto the Jay Leno Show means something I guess (although it could just mean he’ll be deeper in debt to the record industry after this album).
This “Live Free Or Die” song is off of the Trouble In Mind CD, which if I was to be an opinionated asshole inside the internet, I’d tell you was the best americana/roots country album that’s come out since Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams. If I wanted to go all out and be a contrarian asshole about it, I’d say something like, “Trouble In Mind is what all those neighborhood gentrifiers lining up to eat whole wheat bagels at 11 in the morning at the same retro-kitschy hole in the wall they were drinking PBRs at at 1 in the morning last night want to think Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is. But what does it matter anyways? All they’re gonna be playing on the house speakers while you wait for your whole wheat chocolate chip pancakes or avocado and sour cream free range omelet is either Johnny Cash or some sort of bluegrass version of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.” But mostly I just want to say this is an awesome song about going to jail in New Hampshire, which has always seemed to me like one of the better places to go to jail. There’s a lot of biker types up there, and my immense fear of being man-raped seems less overbearing when in a state without a large black prison population. Not sure why that is. Perhaps the tossed salad guy from that one HBO special being so goddamned scary, or maybe just the general stereotypical mandingo sexual appetite mythology perpetuated everywhere I look. Or maybe I’m just racist. I mean, white guys would probably rape me just as easily as black guys.
This is a feel-good jail song though, about stamping out license plates after stabbing a guy who was cheating with your wife. There’s no man-rape involved whatsoever. Jail songs would not be so feel-good if they were all talking about man-rape, though I read a stat one time that said for every one rape of a woman in America, there’s four rapes of a man in jail in America. Jesus, no wonder I’m so freaked out by that shit. Why would I read something like that and then hold onto it as gospel fact? Sad thing is, I probably read it in a Loompanics Unlimited catalog or something anyways, which means it was probably a freestyled fact made up on the spot by some wackjob writer. But I tend to do that myself, so I can’t fault freestyle factmakers. To be honest with you, there’s no such person as Hayes Carll. And when you download this song, it’s just going to be a virus that sends pop-up ads for Season 3 of Sons of Anarchy into your computer.
STEAL “Live Free Or Die”
NEXT UP: A song that makes my sweet little brutarian daughter smile!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #12: “Blinded By The Light” by Jackie Chain

Jackie Chain is a great thing that exists – a longhaired weedhead Asian rapper from Alabama who pretty much raps about nothing other than banging chicks, getting high, and having diamonds. He also looks like my buddy Partin from RPG.
This is a recombobulation of that stupid fucking Manfred Mann song that you can still hear on classic rock radio every third hour to this day. That song sucks, and is mostly known as the song where it sounds like the dude says “wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night.” Jackie Chain takes it, owns it, and makes it something far less annoying for truck rides back and forth to work. I imagine Jackie Chain is probably pretty good at shooting pool, but not obnoxious about it. Like he plays up or down to his competition, and could have a nice rousing game of partners where each side has one chick, but if some dude got all pool table alpha male trying to flex his gamesmanship muscles, Jackie Chain could play a serious game of 9-ball and fuck that dude up, and then go right back to shooting pool with chicks and barely winning. That is the ability to get along well with others, yet show and prove when necessary, but only when necessary. This is probably because he has magical Chinaman blood inside of him, the effects of which are further enhanced by heavy weed smoking.
Did you know most weed you buy nowadays is mad sprayed with pesticides and chemical enhancers? It’s not a common meme out there, but when possible you should really buy local and organic weed. Know your grower, which can be tough because growers are natural paranoids not wanting to get to know a lot of strange ass people. Still though, if you smoke a lot of weed, you owe it to your long-term health to do just that.
STEAL “Blinded By The Light”
NEXT UP: Another catchy ass Hayes Carll song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 #13: “Shorty The Pimp” by Don Julian & The Larks

I am currently in oxycodone zony land, so it’s hard to know where to start with things. I take my painkillers, sleep for two hours or so after they hit, wake up in excruciating pain, shift around for two hours to try and find positions that are not frustrating to be in, flip through crappy TV channels, think about writing on my wife’s laptop since my laptop is too heavy to sit on my lap, but don’t feel like logging out her accounts on her laptop to log mine in because that’s frustrating, and usually about that time, I’ve ate enough time up to go ahead and take another pair of painkillers and go back to sleep for two hours. The only real excitement is this next time-round will be one of the two times each day that I also take stool softener pills. Hooray.
This is old obscure soul song that was on one of those Crypt Records compilations of fucked up old obscure songs. Crypt mostly got famous for their Back From The Grave collections of ’60 garage rock smarminess, which are righteously good and deserve the infamy. But they put out a bunch of wacky comps, including country and soul. The one I first heard this of off was Cryptman or Shaftman or something and had a white dude dressed up in blackface on the cover with a giant fake afro and he was supposed to be a Shaft character and they had all these corny ass skits scattered throughout the album. It kinda sucked. But there was a bonus 7-inch included which had this song, so I guess the fact they wasted all those grooves with corny ass skits forced them to include an extra 7-inch, which separated the Don Julian & The Larks song from the rest of the comp, which gave it physical separation to match how it was such a supremely great song.
Also, this song is obvious to Too Short fans as the source for his intro to the Shorty The Pimp album, which is probably one of Short’s better albums, as it has the great combination of common man’s social consciousness (as opposed to college-educated consciousness, which can be pretentious at times, but I guess everybody has college degrees now or at least inside the interwebs, so that’s probably as common as it gets) and goofy yet groovy (as in “groove” not as in “Wavy Gravy”, yet it’s probably hard to avoid that type of connotation of that word) simplistic pimp rhymes. Plus, perhaps the most immense beat to ride to ever, stretching for a full 8 minutes or so at the end of the second half, creatively entitled “Something To Ride To”, which was probably the last peaceful co-existing that occurred between Too Short and MC Pooh-Man.
Finally, even though I have that Crypt Records comp, I never ripped this through my MP3 turntable into robot candy because I hate having that thing set up by my computer as the kids might bump it while I’m ripping, or it gets too much feedback from sitting on the wooden desk, and even if I set it up on a towel, it still has some hollow sound to it; plus I use the USB turntable as part of my jerry-rigged recording system of half-wittedness out in the camper. So I actually got my robot version of this that plays inside my robot translation aural device of tiny sizes from a dude named C.T. and his wonderful Wigger Mortis blog. (It should be in the sidebar to the right.) He is a dude who apparently used to go to high school in the same neighborhood where me and the ol’ lady homebirthed our firstborn, and used to get the stupid zines I did way back when. It is also of note that he is bi-racial, because that particular neighborhood, before it was sullied by gentrification, was a strange place of nothing but white people, who hated black people, yet mimicked black culture. There was one dude who had rims with spacers on his car, but he’d get flats on his tiny ass tires and couldn’t fix it for a few weeks, so you’d see him on his rims sometimes, weasel faced girlfriend in the passenger seat (all wigger white girl chicks who hated blacks from that neighborhood looked like weasels, like Sondra Locke women but with hoop earrings), or he’d have a pair of regular rims mixed in on either the front or back side. And there was one dude who looked a lot like my man Boogie Brown, but more jailhousey, who I’d see walking around the hood or coming out of Fine Foods of Oregon Hill with a couple of forties, and he was one of those dudes that put off this aura of insane chillness. I am not sure if everyone is attuned to that, but I’ve noticed a couple of people like that where I live now, and that dude was like this back then, but it’s a guy who seems like he might be the most chill and party guy ever to hang around, but there’s that trigger of chaos that lurks that you can’t really tell how it gets knocked on, but the dude is probably capable of doing mean and nasty things you don’t want to have on the inside of your brain’s memory chips, so you might give the dude a cigarette or say “what’s up” in passing, but you’d never willingly cross through thresholds of buildings together to hang out.
So yeah, C.T. used to get the old Confederate Mack zines, and now he’s a wonderful young aspiring writer, pushing short stories and trying to wrap up a first draft of a novel, and on one hand I beam with personal pride that perhaps my fucked up writings over the years could have somehow helped steer someone towards being a fucked up writer, though I would imagine he was born that way regardless. And then on the other hand, I get all “Man fuck this, he’s almost done with a novel draft. I need to stop going to work for three weeks and finish a novel draft.” And then I stay home for three weeks from work, but my brain is draped up and dripped out from pharmaceuticals, and I can’t even sit a goddamned laptop on my lap comfortably. And I also remember that between nonsense gibberish for this blog, guard rail poetry, and this project I’m working on for an April launch, I’m still finger tapping about 10 to 30 thousand words of mind devilry a week. Yet for the most part, it all seems unintelligible in book format. Perhaps I am more of a doomed obsessive compulsive soul than actual writer. Or perhaps that’s not doomed at all. Who the fuck knows?
Well, it’s time for oxycodone dosing. Talk to you later.
STEAL “Shorty The Pimp”
NEXT UP: Alabama rapper turns douchebag song into catchy ass banger!

x m a s h

extended orange cord powers

front yard tesla coil of lounge,

chasing away the haarp rays

p i g z u

pork holocaust happening –

genetic engineered food

slaves fit robot knives just right

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – January ’11 Intro

It is January. Life is life. It is never easy but it’s better than the alternative, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Much like the world around me, I feel like something major is about to bust open and a new era is gonna dawn. But it’s fucking difficult to see through the haze of the day-to-day. But that doesn’t matter because music distracts your fucking dumb ass, and that’s why it’s for sale everywhere. That’s why I help you steal it. One morning we’ll all wake up and this blog will be gone because the Cybertronic Overlords will deem it a piracy endeavor. And it’ll all be gone, like it never existed.
This month there is old soul on the list, more Alabama rap of course, country and country-ish things, blasts from the past, and a few jazz tunes believe it or not. It is the same stuff I am always listening to, and if you have been following this long enough, it may be boring as you’ve probably seen my prejudices by now, or noticed how I repeat myself. If that is the case, then I suggest you suggest to me new musical directions to go in. I am bored as fuck. Life is boring, and not fulfilling. Unfortunately I have turned myself upside down by debt so I have to maintain my wage slavery. But when I am riding over the James River near New Canton, I always ride down to where Bremo Bluff is, and take that farm road on the right to where there’s the CSX passing zone where the Buckingham Branch line connects, and a lot of times there’s a train idling there. I see the open doors and think, “Man, fuck it.” But I know I’d get cold feet in a few hours. That stretch of double track railroad goes all the way to my Power Site at the end of the road near Shores. I always want to hike the tracks all the way to Bremo Bluff, but there’s a lot of activity there, and I don’t need to get hassled by some old ass white dude who’s worked for the railroads since 1967 and thinks everyone with hair longer than two fingernails is a nigger. But I have an inflatable boat now, and I think once it gets warm a couple good recon missions through that area are in order. Just have to make sure not to touch the toxic mercury water around the Bremo Bluff landing, due to the Dominion Power Plant right there. It is true, you can’t fight progress. But you can sneak around it, mark it up with spray paint, and take pictures of it.
FIRST UP: Old schoolery!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #1: “Lucero Negro” by Chalino Sanchez

Let me tell you about Chalino Sanchez. Born to a poor Mexican family which was of course big, his sister was raped by a local mafioso type. Chalino killed the man, and fled to America to escape the Mexican authorities. Once in America, illegally of course, he got odd jobs in the fields, and wrote songs about the fucked up people he met in bars and swap meets and the like, including former drug dealers or runaway criminals hiding from their past, much like himself. His voice is all sorts of fucked up, and not what you’d expect from a famous musical type dude. Some dude who had a recording studio hooked Chalino up with a band, and the homemade cassettes that came from that sold by the thousands around L.A. Chalino became a music star, singing what would become known as narcocorridos, or norteno music celebrating the criminal underworld. But holmes really made his name during a concert in Coachella, California, at some rundown club. A would-be assassin rolled up on stage and shot Chalino in the side, only for Chalino to return fire with his own gun (perhaps his infamous gold-plated pistol he loved to show off), and a shootout erupted where five people got killed, including the would-be assassin, who was actually murdered with his own weapon, like a punk. Who knows if that’s true or not, the own weapon thing, but that’s how the story goes, and it only adds to the aura. So next time Chalino had a concert at another club, they had to stop admitting people five hours before the concert was gonna begin. He was an underground legend. This was all in the early ‘90s around the same time Death Row Records was firing up, and it’s interesting to think how Chalino was kind of the Mexican Tupac, except Tupac was a major entity in corporate America, regardless of his thug outlaw schtick. Chalino was the real deal, and the bright lights of the world hadn’t been shone upon him.
Of course, Chalino disappeared in Mexico while in a Cadillac at one point, and was found a few days later, dead as fuck. One of his sons took up the family tradition, but was also killed in 2004. This is because pretty much everybody in Mexico has either been killed or will be killed by narcoterrorists.
This song is “Lucero Negro” or Black Star, and I enjoy it, playing it loudly in my back yard as I tend to pigs and chickens and stand around like I’m up to things. I am sure it is annoying at times and perplexing at other times to my redneck neighbors, who all keep their grass cut and put out Republican voting signs every other year. Meanwhile I spray paint a giant piece of plywood that says FELONS CAN’T VOTE IN VA. WHY FOR? in drippy orange letters painted over yellow letters just like it just a little to the right and underneath, and I lean that against the cedar tree by the road. I am not a felon, strictly a misdemeanon historically, but sometimes it’s the information you offer that misleads those that think they know to believe the wrong thing. I mean fuck, that’s the whole point of the internet.
STEAL “Lucero Negro”
NEXT MONTH: Meaning later today, I will actually write about J.J. Krupert things in the month that is on the calendar!

p g s p b

old hard hat dude: “four barrel…

you know that sunvabitch moves” –

waddling towards apprentice

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #2: “The Baby Is Mine” by Swamp Dogg

I don’t know, I’ve written an awful lot about Swamp Dogg on this site in the past year, and I feel it’s unfair to August Moon of Richmond public access fame. Swamp Dogg is great and all, but I’ve not hyped up “Homeboy” by August Moon at all, or the Richmond fatback sound. Swamp Dogg bolted Virginia and made his soul name for himself in various other parts of the country. August Moon made the anthem for the Fatback sound, which was Richmond’s style of soul, as every city that had a soul music sound back in the day had to have a name for whatever it was they did. Can I make mention of how tribal black culture sometimes seems to this day, and wonder if there’s any connection to the African roots, and not come across as racist? Racism has ruined everything. My last name is Scottish, and the Scotches rolled in clans, not tribes, but it was pretty much the same thing, sort of. But a white dude can’t be like, “Yeah, I roll with this clan,” because of the whole Ku Klux Klan stigma. Speaking of which, I was looking at pictures of Klan outfits the other day, and honestly, those shiny green grand wizard outfits, those things were pimp as fuck. I mean, I’m not down with killing black people. I don’t even like raising my voice at black people to be honest with you. But you can’t deny the awesome style of the Klan higher-ups.
We didn’t keep the fatback from our previous two pigs. We cooked it down in a giant crock pot to make homemade lard, most of which my wife sold at like $10 a pint for people to make herbal tinctures with. It’s really hard to get nice healthy lard. Next pair of pigs, I’d like to keep some for cooking, because it can’t be as deathly for me as soybean oils, but most likely we’ll just sell it all again, because times is tight motherfucker. I am selling the fat of my former farm animals though, which is really funny to me, because it’s 2010 and both me and my wife have college degrees. Rise and grind, baby; rise and grind.
STEAL “The Baby Is Mine”
NEXT UP: Amo a las mujeres con culos grandes, y debemos llegar alto, asi qu puede poner a un bebe dentro de su vientre!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #3: “The Hair Song” by Black Mountain

I am not sure what to say about Black Mountain other than they are the fucking best, and their album from last year – Wilderness Heart – is perfect if you are the type who liked Queens of the Stone Age or Black Sabbath from back in the day or just really anything thick and sludgy, yet sparkled up a little bit with some clean ass modern touches. It’s good shit. The problem I’m having is I took a muscle relaxer about an hour ago and I really just want to fall out. What I should do is seize this natural opportunity, even though I want to try to whip out a few more nonsense blurbs for the website, and cut out the lights, flame up a couple tea candles, plug in the headphones and crank them loud enough to make the ringing in my ears feel even more constant than ever, and vibe to the Black Mountain.
Problem is I made a playlist earlier tonight and already have the headphones on, and this rip I found on the internet of Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All played at 33 rpm from a 45 rpm original is already on play, and I’m having a hard time thinking about not listening to this. It is a shame there is no one there to do high quality screwed and chopped mixes of stoner rock, because it’s two great tastes that would most likely taste great together. I don’t think most famous screw DJs left have an ear for shitty dirtbag rock-n-roll music. Could you imagine the crisp production of And Justice For All all slopped up and syrupped out? I mean fuck, I’ve pitch shifted some Black Sabbath and it is fucking immense. So perhaps I should use this time of wavy-headedness and bust open the Audacity and “remix” the Black Mountain CD instead, all for myself, fuck you. And I think that’s what I’m gonna do. Good night.
STEAL “The Hair Song”
NEXT UP: Yet another Swamp Dogg song!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #4: “Drunk” by Domo Genesis featuring Mike G

It is funny the various levels of rap stardom in this internet age, because Wiz Khalifa announced earlier this week that his release coming out on whatever record label thought he could make money for them is going to be called Rolling Papers. Not that unlikely a title being he’s made a name for himself as a proud weed-smoker. Problem is Domo Genesis, who is part of the OFWGTKA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) collective, put out a “CD” last year called Rolling Papers. Of course, the Domo Genesis release was not an actual CD, and I don’t know if physical copies exist, and you could get it for free from the various Odd Future sites, and it bounced all around the internet. But Domo was on his twitter feed, bitching about the Wiz Khalifa title choice.
On one hand, I see the point, because they had to have known that the Domo release pre-existed, and that’s not too hip hop to be biting some shit from last summer, even if your’s in a completely different level. You still don’t want to appear that way. At the same time, Domo Genesis, and really Odd Future as a whole, is an internet upstart that has tweeted incessantly and released a ton of music, much of it throwaway, to get itself internet attention. What does that translate into? Not shit, I’d say, although Lil B will be the true test of that. Meanwhile, Wiz’s “Black and Yellow” has become the de facto Steelers Pride song going into the Super Bowl. Wiz was on George Lopez doing the song the other night. And still, even with that, Wiz Khalifa has not done shit either. Has he had an actual release yet on a record label that pays money in return for how much you sell? Man, hip hop is all sorts of fucked.
So what we have here is a guy who has had incredible buzz and is one of the hot young flavors of hip hop that college kids love, and a record label is hoping to cash in on this, though they have not really readjusted their marketing ways to the internet age to cash in on things like this before they are overhyped and have lost their intrigue to the always fickle college-aged demographic. And underneath of that we have a guy from a clique that has generated internet buzz and has thousands of followers on twitter who is upset that someone is using the title he used last year, even though his shit probably wasn’t even copyrighted at all. I mean, I would doubt it at least.
The whole twitter ego of having followers and retweets and trending topics, it’s very much like the housing market before the bubble – all inflated nonsense that means absolutely nothing. The internet has turned marketing into such a retarded endeavor, yet it all boils down to the exact same thing it always did – if you tell people consistently enough that you are something, even if you are not, they will eventually be glad to give you money to pretend you are what you say you are, regardless of what you actually are. That’s marketing.
On the bright side, I’m glad to see dudes getting back into joints. I never was much of a blunt fan. Joints are so chill and more appropriate. It could be a white joints/brown blunts mandingo sexual stereotypes low self-esteem thing though. I still prefer joints to blunts, and bongs, and really anything other than maybe a nice stone bowl, but with some sort of wrap around the handle part so it doesn’t get all hot and burn you when you try to hold it. I also still enjoy the idea of smoking through a beer can with holes poked in it, just because you know, that’s just a perfect thing that makes perfect sense. If I had nothing better to do, I’d just start a website called smokingweedthroughbeercans.com and get people to send in pics of them doing just that. Eventually it would get trendy at some point, and I’d probably have topless skanks sending in pics, even though in real life, they’d probably never smoke through a beer can. Then you’d have hipster types pretending to smoke through beercans, and people photoshopping like Abe Lincoln and Clara Barton smoking through old beercans, and it would get ridiculous. And I’d try to sell some t-shirts there for a while, which would do okay, but at the most, I’d spend a lot of fucking time working on something that maybe cleared me a thousand bucks the best month ever, and never close to that most of the other three and a half years I did it. That’s the internet, and that’s marketing, right there. You will not get rich, and you will always be of broke pockets and broken spirits, and there is nothing but work. Life is work. So you might as well slow down and get drunk, like this Domo song featuring Mike G. I love the ending when it gets all screwy and slow and awesome.
Also, for god's sake, Free Earl Sweatshirt.
STEAL “Drunk”
NEXT UP: A song about hair, long beautiful hair (hopefully)!

Friday Love/Hate

I hate having been busted up the past couple weeks. I do not do well with idle time and being a street person, need to walk amongst street peoples to feel at ease within my own soul. My soul has been very congested, and I do not know if it is how off-kilter my skeletal shape has become in the past year, or if it is the muscle relaxers, but really I have not been in a positive mode to where I want to enjoy myself. I think a big part of it is I’ve probably watched more TV in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years, and that can be very mind-crushing. I’ve been trying to mix in some short stories from alleged masters as part of a future project on this blog, and to get me rolling on a short fiction collection I’ve been outlining (which for me means jotting things down on notecards, which get held together by rubber bands or hair ties, and shuffled and reordered and marked up or crossed out or flipped over and reused… my method for outlining really anything more than stream of conscious that I write is kind of like what they taught you to do for taking research paper notes in public schools in 1988, but all zipped out on ritalin). I hate that I’ve had two weeks out of work but have not cranked out a novel, even though I could not find a comfortable way to sit upright and type until like this past Monday, and my laptop battery has been burning my pajama-concealed dick. I hear that makes you sterile, which is fine by me because even with insurance I can’t afford a vasectomy.

I love the fact there are wild mutant boars and wolves roaming the Ukrainian countryside in the blocked zone from the Chernobyl accident. They’re apparently gonna let tourists start seeing the city of Chernobyl now, which is crazy because in certain parts the radioactivity level is still insane, and the sarcophagus they encased the cracked reactor inside of is apparently predicted to fall apart as well. There are also giant dead zones in neighboring Belarus, who bore the wind-blown effects of the radiation pretty heavily, and there’s abandoned cities and villages all throughout that area. And really that’s the ultimate effect of a so-called dirty bomb – not the immediate death, because if you set off a dirty bomb in Manhattan, it would only kill maybe a couple thousand people immediately, if you were lucky. But the entire area for like thirty miles radius would be contaminated, and you couldn’t clean it up. The radiation would have to be allowed to decay at it’s normal half-life, which means basically New York City would be rendered uninhabitable. Of course, if you vacated it completely, you’d still have people moving back – the homeless and elderly and vagrants – who would occupy this dead zone in cancerous states of communal anarchy. But the mutant boars and wolves of the Chernobyl region are very intriguing to me, because I remember the post-Chernobyl pics in Time magazine of pigs without eyes or horses with five legs and shit (seriously), and you have to figure a species that is now running wild in this location, including the dead woods where men are not allowed to go because five minutes inside would cause you to glow in the dark that evening (again, seriously), they’ve had twenty years to genetically adjust themselves. Not to mention with no men around to prey upon them or run them off, they lack the natural fear response most animals feel towards the presence of man. I kinda hope rather than dirty bombs, there are like some next level anarcho-eco-terrorists who want to unleash a pack of nuclear wolves on downtown Berlin or mutant boars into the middle of like Detroit or Cleveland. Terrorist are so fucking boring, probably because so many of them are fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are always boring as fuck, unless they are snake handlers. I ain’t much of a church-goer, but if I do feel compelled, you best believe I make the drive over to the Church of Lord Jesus with Signs Following over in Victoria, not too far from where my dad lived before he passed.

k n i f a

stabbing for blood, nothing but

scars remain – a puffed tissue

roadmap of where I’ve done gone

r i n g d

milky white cleavage beckons

from foul-mouthed womenfolk at

tavern found through time travel

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #5: “Marie” by The Family Band

I live in an older house that has less financial value than my land does, and did so even before the fake housing bubble was exposed as a fraudulent Fonzie scheme. There are holes and leaks and things that lean against other things and this or that what which should probably be fixed, but in the process of fixing this one thing ultimately this other thing should be taken care of, and what it leads to is a generally patched-together wonderful little home for me and my wife and our three daughters. The youngest still nurses at age 3, as that is how we roll, and has to come down to our bed – meaning me and my wife – at various points in the middle of the night. So we have a baby monitor still, which is on now, as it is night time. It is also freezing rain outside, and you can hear it through the baby monitor pattering on the tin roof, because the baby’s bed is by a front window that looks out over our front porch’s roof, so there’s “patter patter patter patter” going on right now, and occasionally something electronic will change somewhere in the house and there will be a little bit of feedback through the monitor as well. (We also have been hearing some sort of phantom crumpling of paper upstairs as well at night, which has been strange as fuck. Like it just sounds like somebody sitting there and constantly crumpling paper right in front of the baby monitor. But none of the kids upstairs wake up, and there’s no scatty signs of tiny critters anywhere up there either.)
I enjoy living in an old house with a strange family, and it is cold, hence the frozen rain, which is supposed to turn to snow and pile up on the roads tomorrow. Our woodpile is small so I called our wood guy, who usually doesn’t answer his cell phone, so I leave messages saying, “Bring me a load of wood” and he does and I leave the money in envelopes inside a truck parked alongside the road near his dad’s house. But he answered the phone today, being I haven’t been able to split the wood I’ve got by the pig pen due to my partially crippled nature of the past two weeks from slipping in the ice last time we had weather like this, and he was like, “Alright mane, I’ll get by there tomarra or the next day.” And I was like, “I’ll slip the money in…” and he cut me off and said, “I ain’t worried ‘bout it mane… I ain’t worried ‘bout that at all.”
My woodstove is quiet right now, no pops or crackles, which means I probably need to throw some wood on it. The two big black lab/hound dogs we have are sleeping curled up together on the living room, and usually I can tell how cold it is by how close to the woodstove they curl up. It’s probably about 42 degrees right now, because they are sleeping by the green couch.
I think it is because I live a life like this that “Marie” by The Family Band seems so great to me. I found this song on The Fader blog, which I stalk like an ex-girlfriend on Facebook, at some point when I was trying to see if anything they tagged as “psych folk” was actually worth a fuck. Turns out most of it was not. Except this. And I can say this with complete confidence because I am living a psych folk lifestyle, fully.
STEAL “Marie”
NEXT UP: It’s still an Odd Future!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #6: “Got It Bad Y’all” by King Tee featuring Tha Alkaholiks

If I had to pick one 12-inch single from my vast but dwindling hip hop 12-inch single collection from back in the days that would be the only one I could hold onto for now ‘til infinity, it would be the “Got It Bad Y’all” single by King Tee that introduced me to Tha Alkaholiks (minus Tash, who was in jail at the time of recording). Not only is this fucking song the greatest fucking ode to being drunk that came out in the early to mid 1990s, there is a funky piano remix on the single that when properly slowed down to a slurpy crawl, is just about the greatest fucking thing that ever existed. I have an old ’86 Subaru stationwagon back in the woods that I’ve sold both rear doors off of, as well as the front windshield and the driver’s side window (not to mention various other cosmetic parts), three of the four wheels, as well as a couple of engine parts that make it not crank-uppable anymore. But the radio still works, and I have put onto cassette a 20-minute slowed down repeat of the funky piano mix that I will go out there and sit in the Subaru and listen, though I have to take a good battery out and put it in the Subaru. The cassette is actually an old copy of that Black Sheep tape that I did the old scotch tape over the spot where the recording tab would be to get it to record trick. I love from time to time to sit out there and let the funky piano mix pump, and I sit in the Subaru and grab the wheel and pretend I’m driving through the streets of ancient African cities but in a modern car and they have lots of Nollywood movies for sale at tables along the cobblestone streets, but they’re not DVDs – they’re these little rods that look like the small fuses that go in Christmas lights that you plug into the bottom of an Ipod type device and the movie beams inside your head. So there’s also these little storage unit type pods you can rent so you can watch movies while out without getting pickpocketed while zoning out. I’ve never stopped to buy one of the movies because usually I’m busy pretending hard enough just to drive my beat up Subaru through imaginary ancient African cities, but futuristic, when all I can see through a non-windshield in front of me is raggedy pine trees.
I’ve been dreaming about the Anunnaki a lot lately. Not sure why, because I didn’t even know what it was when I started dreaming about them about a month after I quit drinking. (I find it odd how a blurb about an ode to drinking ended up talking about dreams I’ve been constantly visited by since quitting drinking.) I mean, I vaguely recognized it as something that looked sort of Egyptian, and honestly, it made me think of Yul Brenner in The Ten Commandments all the time at first… like I thought I was dreaming about weird animal/Yul Brenner people. But the spaceships and blending of ancient with futuristic kinda tripped me out, because I’m not a sci fi geek at all.
I used to years ago have dreams of reading books I’d written, and I would wake up and be upset I couldn’t put down all of what I read or even remember much beyond some of the major points that struck me while I was reading my own books in my dreams. But lately, as well as the Anunnaki dreams, I’ve been reading books again, and it looks like my handwriting, sort of, but it’s just scribbles that fill the pages of dollar store composition books. And I feel really proud when I’m reading them in my dreams, like it’s some next level shit that’s inside of me or I will eventually do, but I can’t read it all, like there’s no discernible meaning to it attached to normal letters and words. I don’t know. I get all hyped up that perhaps these dreams are being sent to me on purpose to try and write these things as I see them, before the alleged return of the Anunnaki that internet freaks in odd corners of the interweb suggest might happen next year, but I don’t believe in that crazy shit. Still, I think about how I really need to start trying to write those things in my real waking life, before it’s too late, and then when I think about it too much, I’ll get all “lololol you dumb ass” on myself and see if Family Guy is on TV.
STEAL “Got It Bad Y’all”
NEXT UP: A song by a band I never heard of, not even now!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #7: “Raven Rides (demo version)” by Prolo

The premise behind this song was simple – some dude loves a chick but she leaves him, and then the dude goes hobo vagrant, so he is only like a half hour away in a vehicle, but six months gone mentally. Each verse gets progressively further away, until of course he dies and gets brought home to get buried. At this point when me and Boogie Brown stopped doing Prolo for various reasons, I was trying to do old school country style stories but within the framework of rap music. This of course makes what I was doing completely obsolete, archaic, and of interest to like 19 people, none of which have any power over anything on this earth. Yet I have no problem with that – I feel like shit pops into my head that is channeled from the wretched of the earth’s stifled mouth half the time anyways.
I really burned out and lost my desire to try and do music there about two years ago, mostly because of projects I had put so much energy and time into that kind of came unraveled rather suddenly. But that’s how working relationships go, and you should never count on anyone as an enabler for your art completely, because enablers tend to become disabled since human nature is fickle and superfluous and full of seeds of hatred and confusion and just plain ass boredom that will generally fuck everything up in due time. But I cleaned a spot in the camper trailer and have a new pair of second-hand speakers there that are loud as fuck. I set up my rigged recording system that would make even the most paranoid schizophrenic homemade 90 minute audiocassette podcaster proud (in fact, I run through a cassette recorder, so could actually do cassette podcasts, which I think I might now that I thought of it). I have three planned CDs of lost Brown beats, plus a couple of other possible projects in the works, all of it lo-fi as fuck and proud of it.
Speaking of the second-hand speaker collection, the indestructible Sansui 1970s era speaker that weighs 500 pounds that I found at the dump one time that has been sitting on a milk crate in the back yard for two years is still going strong. I plugged it in the other weekend. The cheap ass tarp I had over it has shredded and been blown over a few times without me noticing too closely, so the speaker itself is water-rotted and coming apart at one exposed corner. But it still plays loud as fuck, with good clarity, and I have the second one still safe and sound inside the camper trailer to replace it when it finally gives up. There is also a turntable that has been sitting completely exposed on a broken table behind one of my sheds that I really really really have been meaning to hook up and see if that still works as well. New speakers may benefit from crazy aural technologies that make digital robot voices sound as crisp as a Christmas mornings blip bloop device from 19 years in the future, but nothing we make now can stand up to the ruggedness of what we used to make on this earth. The desire to sell new cheap things or easily outdated technologies to people has overruled the philosophy of making tough as fuck things that last forever and you could probably cobble back together a couple of times before you gave up on it as well. Nothing can be cobbled anymore. We are weak. I am weak. Why the fuck am I not recording my every waking moment on archaic cassettes to leave in envelopes outside of the main library in C-ville? Why am I attempting to make my nonsense gibberish into entertaining rambles inside the 0s and 1s, which can so easily be completely erased?
Easy. I do it because I am compelled to do so. There is no profit margin and no eventual marketing angle. My mind is pulled by lunar tides I cannot control, and this is where the waves crash… for the moment.
STEAL “Raven Rides”
NEXT UP: The ultimate 40 ounce anthem from back in the day!

f e n c a

wild darkness and creek sounds cause

feet to tap back roads asphalt

faster from adrenaline

The Learned Elders of Rojonekku

The Learned Elders of Rojonekku is a sort of Hall of Fame of living human beings that I’ve built and dabbled with for years and years, but started proper inside the internet in the fall of 2010. The criteria for inclusion is very simple: be alive and be human, at least as far as the rest of us know. The ultimate goal is to have 100 living human beings maximum in in this Hall of Learned Elders, with there being convoluted processes I force myself to go through twice a year, with each of those semi-annual processes putting five people in. If no one ever died, that would give us a hundred total after ten years. But of course, people will die, so most likely, this will be a continuous process every six months or so, for up to five inductees.
There is an actual Hall of Learned Elders of Rojonekku, because the point of this is not to flaunt upon the internet who ahs inspired or interested me, but to be a pack of guiding influences for the stray teenagers I am involved with. For me, the title “Learned Elder” is a throwback to when we ran in tribes or smaller villages, and if you had a dispute or needed advice or help with a black magic issue, you’d go to a village elder, who had additional experiences and influences in his or her extra years to hopefully help you through the trifles. It seems in our modern America, amongst many of our social perversions that make us the cancerous civilization we are, we do not respect the elderly. They are seen as weak and often times insane and usually always a hassle to deal with. And with too much health care available to overrule Darwinism, and aluminum fluoride in our drinking water, and just the general overbearing self-important nature of most Americans, that’s probably true a lot of times. But we are muting that experienced wisdom, or even if they are crazy that Universal Magnetic visions, from aiding and abetting us through our lives. I want the stray teenagers who are part of Rojonekku to have a group of living humans who have achieved something or other of note in some sort of way to look at and respect. Not idolize, because idolatry does nothing for your own self. But to respect and learn from. Maybe we can seek some of these people out in real life and sit down with them and gain some spirit from their words or presence. Maybe we never meet any of them. But they are out there, somewhere on the surface of this planet, doing their thing.
And interestingly enough, there is an actual Hall of Learned Elders of Rojonekku. I have a Unabomber-style shack built somewhere in Southside Virginia on family land (Charlotte County, if you want to know the basic location), and it has no electricity, but there’s a woodstove and a bed and a bookshelf and a desk and two windows, one of which looks straight into woodsy overgrowths, and it exists. And as members of this Learned Elders of Rojonekku list are made, I write up rough bios/essays/rants/reasons regarding these people, and along with pictures torn from magazines or copied at the library from actual physical books, and they get wallpapered into the walls. We have three separate places we regularly do Rojonekku-related activities, but this family land where this is at is a spot where a few or our more introspective lessons take place, meaning the Hall of the Learned Elders of Rojonekku is there for my kids to go and sit and think upon whatever they need to think upon. It’s certainly not the same as having an old ass medicine man, but within the confines of our 21st Century lives, it’s the best we can create.

The Learned Elders of Rojonekku (in order of induction)
GABRIEL DUENEZ (fall 2010)
LEMMY KILMISTER (fall 2010)
MIROSLAV TICHY (fall 2010)
JIMMY VALIANT (fall 2010)
CHARLES MANSON (fall 2010)
JUNIOR JOHNSON (spring 2011)
DAVID ALLAN COE (spring 2011)
OXANA MALAYA (spring 2011)
VOLLIS SIMPSON (spring 2011)
HARRY CREWS (spring 2011)

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #8: “Los 7 Pistoleros” by Los Huracanes Del Norte

I listen to far too much norteno music for a white dude who hardly knows that much Spanish any more since he hasn’t worked with Mexicans in like four years. There is something soothing yet masculine about it. Most soothing musics are impotent affairs that leave me feeling like I’m about to go into Whole Foods to try and find a 30cc homeopathic thing of one sort or another. Norteno music is soothing, yet you can hear the beer and heartache and “Fuck, I’ve got to be back at work in five hours, and I haven’t gone to bed yet,” in it. I like that.
Los Huracanes Del Norte are like the number two norteno group behind Los Tigres Del Norte. “Los 7 Pistoleros” is their biggest hit, so far as I can tell from what I like to play the most from their grandes exitos.
Barely related, I have had “mexico cartel” as a Google news search term in my google news for the past two years. That place is so fucked. La Familia, which was the most Robin Hood-esque of all the cartels (and specialized in methamphetamines) has pretty much been completely decimated in the past two months. Yet there’s all sorts of new sub-cartels coming up with Los Zetas as their business model – chop a motherfucker’s head off and hang him from a bridge. Seriously, Mexico is fucked. And it’s trickling into America soon enough. Now don’t get it twisted and think I am one to be like OMG! CLOSE THE BORDERS! because I am not. Fuck, Mexicans own a good chunk of America more than Americans do, regardless of whose name is on the deed right now. Oscar Zeta Acosta taught me that. And if we closed our borders, we wouldn’t have pupusas and lucha libre and awesome co-workers on construction sites everywhere. Mexicans are more American than America is at this point. But Mexico is fucked. And fucked like a teenage runaway who was left along and started doing porn as well as shooting speed… perhaps too far gone to ever be truly saved, because you can’t unwash from the collective mind what has been seen. Once it is in there, it is in there. So even if you could magically make the cartels all disappear tomorrow, which you can’t, Mexico would still be fucked. So sad. And needing more accordion.
STEAL “Los 7 Pistoleros”
NEXT UP: Unreleased Prolo!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #9: “(Uhuru) African Twist” by Andre Williams

There was some show on PBS the other night about Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek (as well as other stupid old sci-fi shows) and it had the Uhuru lady (who might actually be Uhura… I’m not sure, but for the sake of this tangent at least touching the source song even barely, let’s say “Uhuru”) talking about how she was gonna leave the show, but she got a letter or phone call or something from Martin Luther King Jr., who said he was a fan, and her biggest fan, and she put forth a good image for black people in the future, so she stuck with the gig and Uhuru became a sexual fantasy for millions of blossoming young men for decades to come, no pun intended. I think sometimes we get so caught up in idolizing our heroes, putting them on pedestals, that we think MLK was always silently protesting lunch counters and speaking in front of a million people on the National Mall. We forget that sometimes he was just kicking it, watching him some goddamned Star Trek, thinking to himself, “Man, why would Captain Kirk want to leave that planet with all them blue bitches?”
Did you know the African Twist theory? It’s the idea that in the era of African slavery, which was run by not only whites from the west but more dominant black tribes in Africa… of course, no one is actually white or black at all, but that’s how we’ve all been trained so let’s go with it. But in Darwinistic fashion, the weaker tribes were enslaved and sent to work with the Europeans, to make a nice golden profit for the enslaving tribes, but also to corrupt Europeans with weak tribal bloodlines. The hope was that western civilization would prosper industrially, grow too fast and large to actually support itself because it was no longer a part of a natural community of minerals, plants, and animals, and then fall in on itself. All of this was foretold in various temples to the Anunnaki in the southern part of the African continent, and passed amongst chosen tribes in a way not unlike Freemasonic secrets. We are seeing the first economic steps of this now. Also, if you google shit up, you will see a lot of Chinese investment currently going on in Africa, and there are theories that the Chinese are the next heir apparent to the title of World Financial Super Lord. Except their economic health depends entirely on the western world’s indiscriminant waste of money. We are all tied together economically, so as it crumbles, we will all struggle. Ultimately, that’s the problem with what we’ve been building the last 2000 years.
Oddly enough, it is that same interdependent co-existence that a more tribal society was forced to be. Man has altered everything so heavily, that there’s no return. We’ve taken so big a slice of pie, and progressed the landscape so far, as a man, there’s nothing I can do to live within the proper framework again. I mean, even if I was off-the-grid completely, living like a hobo, I’m still a hobo riding giant metallic trains that blasted through wilderness, and the electromagnetic cellular waves go everywhere.
Luckily, it’s all falling in on itself. Food prices are about to skyrocket, and it won’t be too long before the recession we weren’t in for 8 years under Bush and have been coming out of for 2 years under Obama will degenerate into something even worse that the suit-and-tied faces tell us is not happening. And the African twist is African kids already know how to make really awesome toy cars out of trash scraps of lead wire.
STEAL “(Uhuru) African Twist”
NEXT UP: Pinche pistoleros y los pendejos!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #10: “Paradise (screwed)” by G-Side

There are two ways to write about things here – one as Mr. Internet Talks-About-Music disreputable IRL failure, and secondly as if we were sitting at the picnic table in my backyard as friends about to play dice. And there are two things to write about in regards to this song – the group that does the song (G-Side) as well as the process of screwing it and who does that (Babe Rainbow). So I will attempt to cover all four bases, because that is what I do, namely whatever feels like it would be not entirely unenjoyable to do at the moment.
G-Side, internet-speak: The Huntsville rap scene has gradually been making more and more noise over the past couple years, and really the sheer amount of at least decent music coming from Alabama steadily is pretty amazing. But they’ve lacked that big cultural hip hop landmark album thus far, and with the odd artsy pre-release hype, it felt like G-Side’s One… The Cohesive Album might be that milestone. But it came and went and the world wasn’t turned on its collective ear. It’s a great album – Block Beataz continue to sort of meld together genres into something that oddly enough feels like the most real hip hop sound going today. But the album wasn’t the brain-crusher I think I was hoping for, maybe even expecting. Still though, G-Side has become The Thing I Think Can Be Amazing from southern rap music. Previously, I have put David Banner, Devin the Dude, and Nappy Roots in this slot – artists who at some point if the conditions are right will make the most Raven-endorsed hybrid of country ass living and hip hop music that ever was dreamed of in my most delusional drug-dazed states. But Banner never did anything even remotely close to “Cadillac on 22s”, Devin the Dude has never not gotten high long enough to put together a string of concepts that go beyond the next reload of the Vaporizer, and Nappy Roots has consistently had a few good “hits” on every offering, but never actually knocked that grand slam. Maybe I’m hoping for something that just won’t happen. I mean hip hop is not a new music so it is not made by forward-thinking people so much anymore. It’s become a derivative of a derivative, and you have to wonder if we’ve already gotten up to basically Disco 2.0 form of hip hop, which was the tired sound that hip hop originally replaced in the days of “Rapper’s Delight” that it might be caving in on itself. But I will hope against hope that G-Side will do this, and they definitely have the tools and talents. And I know the world ain’t ready for them. So the landscape is in place. They just need to whip up that creative tornado at some point. Until then, I guess the Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape will have to do as Alabama’s landmark musical offering.
G-Side, picnic table talk: There’s this crazy amount of country assed rap coming out of Alabama that’s pretty fucking good but nobody’s ever heard of none of these guys. G-Side is like the best of that, because they’re country as fuck, yet all spacey and full of Universal Magnetics. They’re fucking awesome.
(Interesting to note how internet analysis is that they’ve not yet reached their potential, thus shining a negative light on them, but picnic table talk props them up as the best from their little corner of the world. I did that by accident, but I think that sums up the difference between internet and real life. And fuck man, don’t even remind me how internet IS now real life for most people. Fuck.)
Screwed, internet-speak: Babe Rainbow is the dude who screwed this, and he’s had some pretty good SoundCloud mixes in the past year. I guess he’s some up-and-comer who also produces music, and judging by his body of remix work, I would guess he’s either a white guy from a larger college town east of the Missippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, like Louisville, KY, or Springfield, MA, or somewhere like that. Or, if not such a white guy, he’s probably a black guy from Canada. But he’s been doing things that I enjoy, though I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard one of his original compositions yet. Screwing and chopping music is something that’s so lost, even with it’s popularity. The thing that’s overlooked a lot in regards to DJ Screw is that he was a solid DJ with a DJ’s ears. Screwing music, contrary to popular belief, is not as simple as slowing shit down. And shit man, mixing in chopping, I can’t even begin to try to explain that, because it’s beyond me musically. It sucks that Michael “5000” Watts has installed himself as the heir apparent to Screw’s throne, because his style has never really gotten it done for me. I always preferred OG Ron C’s more actual chopped up (not slopped up) style. In fact, I am going to stifle myself from going too far on and on about screwed music because I’ve wanted to speak upon that (orale!) at the good news/bad dope blog (see the sidebar) that’s wheezing on life support right now.
Screwed, picnic table talk: I love screwed music. I wouldn’t eat a grape if it wasn’t screwed and chopped first. A lot of people don’t like it, but you know what? Fuck a lot of people.
STEAL “Paradise”
NEXT UP: Going back to the motherland, in our magic lavender dress shirts!

h o m e b

gemini raven – my thoughts

and memories get lost each

day, yet come home with stories

r r w a b

walked train tracks for a thousand

years – waynesboro and richmond,

back and forth through fifty soles

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #11: “Drop” by Earl Sweatshirt

Many rappers lose their chance to shine because they get sent off to jail or get murdered up, handling their business in the streets, but Earl Sweatshirt has disappeared from the rise of OFWGTKA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) because as this pack of wacky skateboarding kids making music in someone’s bedroom had itself getting some internet fame, Earl’s parents heard his music, and promptly shipped him off to boarding school or a Christian reprogramming center in Utah or something. But Earl was the hottest rapper off the 19 CDs these dudes have released on their various websites in the past two years. I mean, I saw multiple rap nerd blogsites Best Songs of 2010 lists that had Earl Sweatshirt listed right there with shiny store-bought crap like Big Boi and Kanye West and Rick Ross, as well as underground jibber jabber like whatever Alchemist is doing now and whatever is the now flavor from Project Blowed and whoever is the new El-P. They got the internet going nuts, and are starting to have people pay to have them fly around and do shows, which has to be a slice of fucking heaven to a pack of goofy assed skateboarder kids in their late teens who love to say stupid things just to say stupid things. (At one point, my twitter feed - @rojonekku if you do that mind painful crap – was pretty much a battle of too many tweets between Lil B the Based God and Tyler the Creator and the OFWGTKA camp. I eventually got rid of Lil B because you can see him taking himself slightly serious and believing his own hype enough to think he can actually do things in life, like cure AIDS or at least send plenty of shell toe Vans to the Sudan for poor kids; whereas I don’t see OFWGTKA allowing themselves to ever be serious about something. Like if they do, they’ll backlash against themselves. It’s gonna be nonsense, suicide, and drug abuse most likely, plus really fucked up white women for wives who make them crazy.)
[Oddly enough, OFWGTKA is playing somewhere in D.C. next month on my birthday - Valentine's Day - and I would go if I wasn't an old ass white dude who has a stupid job to go to every day. But still, strange timing.]
Anyways, Earl Sweatshirt is out there on parental lockdown, institutionalized like Suicidal Tendencies twenty-five years ago. And yet his music is right here for you to hear, right fucking now. Man, this is a massively distracting world, isn’t it? I’m not sure I fault the good Mr. and Mrs. Sweatshirt for putting young Earl into whatever they put him into. Hopefully it’ll just repress him even more so that when he is released back unto the world, he is a foaming, fiending mess of sexual and psychological tension, ready to rhythmically unfurl itself upon an unsuspecting world always looking for the next big thing to attach itself to before anyone else does.
STEAL “Drop”
NEXT UP: 51 virgins, although not really virgins so much as women who lack menstrual cycles completely!

Universal Prayer

Universe, hollered be your name, this world keep spinning. Give unto me as is necessary my daily frybread, and let my soul not get dried out by lack of nourishment. And try to shine on me so I ain’t so damn judgmental about others even though they live their lives in ways that seem plastic or faux organic or too much like they puttin’ on airs, whatever that means. That’s some old school hill talk, and though I’m not from the actual deep hills with shadows to dwell in and caves to crawl inside and scribble the scriptures that you shoot into my brain whether I am ready to receive it or not, that hill talk jibes with me, probably because my bloodline is foothill weekend warriors from four or five generations back, so far as we all can see up our weather-beaten family tree. We are southside Virginia – SS Va. – which no one in their right mind would consider God’s country or a shining blessing the Universe has put upon the surface of this Earth rock. But hey, who amongst us chooses where we are born, thus creating geographical loyalties purely by happenstance.
We are coming up on my 38th ride around the sun since I came outside to see its rays at Southside Community Hospital in Farmville, Virginia, and I know I am living the second spiral of the Two Spiral Lesson you shot into my head during the vision on the goat pen oak stump three years back. And I am thankful for it, because I was afflicted with the same twisted philosophy that went up that family tree I mentioned, where no one could see themselves too far beyond 50, and if they did there was no happiness – just pain and misery inside of that mind’s sight. I am thankful for the redirection of mine own sights, and now I can realize those wise old ages where my body will not be able to do what it once did, but that is the cycle. It will be time to shoot that mental energy back out into the Universe as strongly as I can. If they try to condemn me with mental illnesses like they do many of our Learned Elders, I will fight it, to whatever point necessary. If I end up on the streets, carving the scripture you shoot at me into scraps of cardboard, so be it.
Even though I have felt physical frustration this past week as I knocked myself decrepit and have been forced to fuck around lay around and do not much with my body, I appreciate the lesson of redirecting my mind, especially amidst the constant barrage of electronic distractions that man has made on his errant path towards what he thinks is Universal Knowledge. Of course we don’t know nothing much better than we ever did, and in fact probably know a whole lot less being we have our limited intellect spread so thin amongst 30 million memes, most of which have no relevance to our immediate life.
I am aware that I have my own offspring who are growing up with the shifted norms of the electronic distractions, to where apps and chats are every day affairs, and “friend” is more verb than noun at times. I understand that I have to push them into the outside, and force them to fox walk through the fields, and teach them that the fox walk skill is one that can be applied in the city as well, amongst the cinderblocks and civilization. And they can fox walk through the electronic purgatory as well.
I don’t understand why when we look out to the Universe, we only see a magnified dream or nightmare of our direction – beings who are further along with their electronic gadgets and traveling machines made of metal and coated copper wires and tesla coils. We chasing Joneses that we don’t even know are there, at least not the way we think they are there.
Give me my daily frybread, to keep me from choking out on the organic self-righteousness. Keep junk cars in my roadside travels, and chicken gizzards at the gas station, and make it warm every now and then on Fridays going into the weekend so that women wear tank tops, nice feminine tank tops that would make an Easyriders magazine from 1979 feel comfortable. I am still not drinking, but keep my mind drunk with nonsense, and don’t let the bastards and their silent weapons for quiet wars paralyze my mind completely. I feel it at times, and have been taking the yarrow tincture to try and shield myself from the effects. And feel free to crush this Earth’s technobabble from time to time, to remind everyone of what’s real. Or more likely, they will all freak out and hide until they think they are starved of things to do when it will actually just be the process of the poison leaving their body.
Give me freight train horns in the distance, and give me shining eyes in my children’s faces. I know it is a struggle for them as well, being born with the magic genetics they are born with from both sides. It is a hard thing to understand at a young age, and if it can drive me crazy in the start of my second spiral, I know it’s tough to handle early on in their first spiral of life. Let me be their daily frybread, and teach them that when it feels terrible all around like black clouds cobra clutching your body from the inside out, the best thing to do is put music on real loud and see what kind of tapdancing you can do off the top of your head on the hardwood kitchen floor. You don’t need to know how to do things to do them. There are things inside us all we don’t even try to unlock, never even think about beyond a cursory glance at a pulp catalog. Let me be the daily frybread that hopefully enables my offspring to unlock themselves further than I’ve unlocked from my own penned up parents. None of us can help where we were born – it just happens. And there’s a Universe to unlock right there where we land, regardless of wandering to farther corners. So let me get to it.

g o o s c

ghost goose chases me through dreams,

afraid to stop running that

path in long, endless circles

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #12: “Just Touched Down (screwed & chopped)” by Big K.R.I.T.

Look, by this point you should have just gone ahead and found the Big K.R.I.T. Wuz Here screwed and chopped mixtape and downloaded the whole thing already. It’s worth it. I will probably just keep listing one song off of it every month (being I limit myself to one song by any artist each month’s J.J. Krupert listings) until I’ve gone through the entire mixtape. There have been people who have put out shit with a couple good songs or a great summer banger or this or that, but I really can’t think of a single collection of songs in album or mixtape format that I’ve loved this much in a few years. I know the cyberglitter machines will tell you that Big Boi last year or Kanye West any year is the next level shit you should be jocking. But that next level is a level I’d prefer we not go, and I’m not entirely sure either one of those are not cases of emperors not having clothes on. Or maybe the whole world has gone fruity and cybertronic and this is our new disco age. But my next level involves country shit like K.R.I.T., slowed down to a warbled perfection, and served loud as fuck, making your rear view give the world behind you a Gaussian blur filter.
STEAL “Just Touched Down”
NEXT UP: Wacky west coast kids making wacky musics!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 #13: “Life In The City” by Michael Franti & Spearhead

This is a daughter creeper – or a song that she listens to and has run up on my Krupert count. When I realized it was still on my gaypod, I took it off, but decided it best to write about it anyways because I have nobody to impress here. And my daughter likes me writing about her music. Except I don’t like Michael Franti music much. It’s like Wesley Willis got on brain meds and started making happy music for tips in a tourist district somewhere in San Diego.
I know there are people who are even friends with me who think there is nothing better than Michael Franti music, and it’s so positive and chill, and that’s great. But I do not buy it was world music or even something enjoyable beyond like two songs. He has like three songs basically that he repeats over and over. I also do not think the rest of the world is like this, all chill and happy and sunshine beams everywhere except your eyeball. Shit man, I just read tonight how Jamaican chicks used to take chicken pills that they give to fatten up chickens to make themselves have rounder bottoms and wider hips. And now everybody is using cake soap to bleach their skin, like literally bleach it, and there was a picture of Vybz Kartel and he looked like he had a disease. But it was him doing it on purpose. And yet he made “Thank Yuh Jah” last year, which was The Song of 2010, and it was world music I guess, and came from reality where you rub bleach soap on your body and wear clothes that look expensive but you probably got from an outlet store and you did some nasty things but hey we all do. That’s the rest of the world. Hell, that’s here too. I don’t understand this easy-going world music vibe at all. Where is this fucking chill ass barefoot world?
I used to have the first Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy 12-inch back in the day, “Television – the Drug of the Nation” and was into them, which was Franti’s old band. Bought the vinyl in that record store that used to be on Grace Street in that building that ended up being the Red Light Inn strip club, which that place may not even be there anymore either, as they clean up that area for VCU to be a more fucking chill ass barefoot thing itself, all easy to go to college and get in debt and not be hassled by junkies and bikers and redneck strippers and sketchy black dudes and the beautiful assortment of homelesses. And Dirt Woman selling flowers. Man, that’s my fucking problem with world music and Michael Franti and chill ass barefoot utopias – not that it’s annoying or anything, but that it’s not as beautiful as the real world around us, even with all it’s flaws and imperfections and fucked up scars and crazy folks. This real world is all sorts of freaky and scary and fucked up and yet there’s still all sorts of little slivers of beauty, either as a collected landscape or a single item, and that’s what makes it perfect. Michael Franti sounds like a soundtrack for gentrifying the perfect real world we already have, and getting a new wine shop and maybe a boutique or some other high end named place selling thrift store type things but a very select inventory at a very select price. Fuck that.
Still though, if I was in a Michael Franti mood, this would be the song I played first, then another would come on and I’d be like, “ugh… Michael Franti.” But it always takes that second song at least.
STEAL “Life In The City”
NEXT UP: Big K.R.I.T. is still here!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – December ’10 Intro

December was the month that I played these songs and draped my house in tiny lead wires that lit up and used up all sorts of electricity and made my house look ridiculous when I would walk to or from it down the road at night drinking a double Earl Grey cup of tea with some creamline milk from the local-ish dairy that comes out of a glass bottle like it’s still 1942 up in this motherfucker. December was the month that I played these songs as we all ran around running up our debt and spending every last dollar that we didn’t really have on useless shit that’s probably already collecting dust or neglected or broken or outdated or forgotten or used up and thrown away. December was the month that I played these songs, these songs I will slowly countdown like I always do, in sporadic fashion, with weird little pictures thrown into each post at the top, because that has become what I do. This is a strange blog that has had what it does change eight or nine times over the course of it. But that is me. And this will be my soundtrack, from last month. Kind of.
For Christmas, I got some things, but the best was my oldest daughter crocheted me a giant stocking hat in Redskins colors, and the thing is seriously long enough I can pull it over my head down to my neck, which I do when I walk into banks, to scare everybody. Then I pull it up and go “I ain’t blind, man,” like Cheech does to Chong when he took the acid in the one good Cheech & Chong movie. You know what I mean. Of course, I actually am blind, not in a literal sense, if by literal you mean my eyeballs don’t see things. But I’m pretty fucking blind.
FIRST UP: That new type of world music that’s like muzak for Whole Foods!

Weekly Recap

I have not done much with myself, but there are some things going on. Mostly, I have been laid up in my stupid bed this week, to the point I am going mad with frustrated energy. But beyond here, I am still doing things at the Armchair Linebacker blog, which still includes bitching about the stupid Redskins. But my weekly NFL thing is located there now, and this week was about the conference championships, if you be caring. Also started contributing to a beisbol blog called Baseball Feelings, and I did a thing about baseball payrolls last year and how much teams paid for each victory they had. It's fucking ridiculous.
But more importantly to me, I started a photo blog called Cyclotron 3000. The world doesn't exactly need another picture blog, but I have been bored, I guess, or inactive, or something. Or I just want a compendium of weird pics to use for brainwashing myself. I'm not sure. I tried tumblr, but the one thing I learned was that tumblr sucks. Seriously, I do not say that from the "I don't like to do things differently" angle, but because I set a bunch of shit up, it was queued, and never did anything. Tags wouldn't show, and it was impossible to edit, so fuck tumblr.
I also want to mention and give a Big Ups to The Acid Sweat Lodge, which is my favorite picture blog of forever. I love that place, and have co-opted many images from there for using in the J.J. Krupert write-ups. I won't be using any Acid Sweat Lodge images at the Cyclotron 3000, at least not on purpose. When homeless guys drink with me by the river and talk about aliens on earth and I pull out my laptop to show them proof of alien technology on earth, it is the website I take them to as an example of how this evil technology can be used for awesome.
So yeah. What's up with you?

r i v z t

sixty percent connected

with my little golden muse

through man’s phonetic markings

Friday Love/Hate

I hate not being able to move around and do things normally. I took a heavy blow by slipping off a porch and nearly concussing myself against the edge of steps the other night. It knocked me silly and I was laying outside in the little bit of ice that was there, thinking, “I guess I can’t really lay in the yard.” The kids were in bed and the ol’ lady was in the shower. I sort of crawled back into the house and flopped on the kitchen floor, which smelled entirely of wet dog. My two dogs drove this point home by sniffing at the back of my head as I was sprawled out there, and I shooed them away, and thought, “If I am laying on the floor face down when my wife comes out the shower, she will think I have had some sort of serious injury.” So I got up on my knees, which was painful, and just kinda stayed there until she came out the shower. Of course, she was still like, “What the fuck?” but she at least knew I was not dying. Anyways, I fucked up my neck and my back, and have had to lay in the bed for the most part for the past four days. This does not jibe well with my personality. I thought I would get a bunch of writing work done, but the satellite internet I think has created a HAARP orb over my house that causes me to be stupid. I actually went out to the camper last night, not plugged in, and just sat there in the dark for like half an hour. I can see that becoming a regular occurrence.

I love, however, the fact that I can pretend I am Ezelle from Friday, with my neck and my back hurt. In fact, a couple of times people have seriously asked me if it was my back or my neck, and one time I even said something about settling for fifty cents and a pack of envelopes, and they looked at me like people often look at me when I speak out loud the things that go through my brain.