J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #1: “Methamphetamine” by Son Volt

I have wanted to be tagging shit with my bobo graffiti for a while, so I started spray paint tagging the backside of guardrails along actual gravel roads in Albemarle County, Virginia, but I didn’t like how it looked. First off, Wal-Mart cheap ass paint is pretty drippy and doesn’t have good coverage, but shit man, good spray paint is expensive. I see why graf writers steal that shit. Also, the dull grey guard rail didn’t give a good background canvas to start with. So I started a couple of different rigs of various failures, until I combined the homemade tattoo gun into a paint tagging mechanism, where I have a two foot long piece of bamboo with a toilet bowl scrubber – the multi-thing foam type – duct-taped to the end of the bamboo. Then I can dip that in paint, and pour some paint down the bamboo tube, and the paint seeps out but it’s kinda like a writing utensil. My graf lettering is pretty weak – I have lots of kick outs of letters and sharp tops, but wish I had flat tops and bouncy bottoms like cholo writing. I could just never get it. I think shit like that is born into you partially, just like for years and years I could never freestyle all fast syllabic pop style like southern rappers or Bone Thugs, then I lived with a guy and that’s just naturally how he did it. I learned, but it was hard.
Anyways, I was riding back roads one full moon evening the other month, looking to tag guardrails, with a home-mixed five-gallon bucket of earthy brown paint (only about 2 gallons of actual paint in the bucket), and saw two old rusty trucks dilapidating in the woods. One of those perfect moments that moment was, so I swung my truck over, dipped my bamboo toilet bowl brush into the paint bucket strapped tight in the back of my truck, went over and wrote in big crooked Raven font letters – RUSTED on both sides of both vehicles, right on the door. It wasn’t huge, not to be completely noticeable and take away from the perfect junkyard feng shui of having rusty ass old vehicles stored amongst the pines to go back to the earth, flake by flake, but it was nice. In fact, in the moonlight – a bright ass cold night, so the paint was drying in little crystal patterns since the metal was so chilled down – the brown RUSTED on the rusted body, truck still having signs of sky blue in there, and I guess the other car was red or orange but it was long gone for sure, shit was beautiful. I had found my tag.
The letters still don’t look cholo at all, but I like how it looks, and I came to it naturally instead of trying to mimic something else. This is why I hate most alt.country because it does not sound natural and is mimicking something else. A guy gave me a slew of songs to DL a few years back, and I didn’t like most of them, for whatever reason, most likely because I’m a hateful asshole. But over the years, each and every one of these songs became ones I loved. Especially Hayes Carll. That dude is great. This one Son Volt song I never liked because I think I thought Son Volt was asshole music or something, the kind of shit cul-de-sac dorks in college wearing straw cowboy hats and drinking PBRs would like. And it probably is. But at some point I stopped hearing this song with my prejudices against that type of person, and heard the actual song itself. And it’s a goddamned beautiful song. Not beautiful in a “put it on a mixtape for a girl” type of way, but beautiful in a “spent all weekend bingeing in a shitty hotel room that had bootholes in the wall and it’s Sunday morning and I’m on a five hour drive home to face some things I wish I didn’t have to face but man, this song really gets it all in there right now doesn’t it?” type way.
STEAL “Methamphetamine”
NEXT MONTH: More fucking music. It’s not like this thing really separates into months so much as it separates into clusters of me having time. So get off my back.