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!
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