J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – November ’10 #4: “Redlights” by Salem

I think Salem is some sort of hipster hit, which would make sense since I came across them first on the Fader blog, which is a great source for things that I will maybe like and then quickly mood out and hate all of a sudden for no reason. I am not a big fan of most house, club, techno, electronic whatever you’d call the overall parent genre this music would fall under. Shit man, I ain’t gonna lie… I have no fucking clue what either dubstep or footwork is. None. I imagine that both are popular with the gays though, or the Germans, or maybe both. And I am not against gays or Germans, but I have this belief that culturally… not small slice of cultural but in the overall grand scheme of the culture of mankind, it has to be a very urban and grimy yet spit-shined cluster of rebar-reinforced concrete crystals for gays or Germans to thrive. It’s very old ordered world. I mean the real old world is living in a hole in a mountain with three women and nine kids and a couple wild dogs that help you kill deer in the fall. You burn pallets for warmth at night that you take from behind the Mohawk carpet factory, using an old engine-less Escort that you’ve turned into a wagon, and during the day you carve more of your Master Work into the walls of your “home”, the deeper you dig into the story, the further into the depths of the caverns you have to crawl to continue with the human etchings that will cause words to form into sensible patterns by future eyeballs.
And that is what I love about this particular Salem song… it fits well with the cultural metropolises that gays and Germans thrive in, and I’m sure it gets bumped in clubs where you can buy $40 drinks. But it’s a sound of the beaten and wretched that is inside this song. It sounds to me like doing crack, which I’ve only done for one stretch of about five months, so I’m probably not the best expert on it. I never got to where I was in abandoned factories shitting in 5-gallon buckets in the corner. But this sounds like good music for that. And when I say for that, I don’t mean like playing on a boombox sitting in the middle of the cold ass room with one broken window that has shredded plastic over it that flaps in the cold and you can peek outside. I mean permeates the darkness of the building, you can’t see nobody’s face unless the lighter in front of their face flickers up for five seconds. The sounds just emanating from the framework, behind the pockmarked drywall, deep from within the abandoned structures of that old world civilization. In fact that’s what’s awesome about this song. It doesn’t sound as if it was made for people so much as abandoned buildings to groove out to, while people smoke crack inside of them.
Me personally, it sounds good reverberating off the walls deep in a hole in the mountain, carving letters one by one into the rock with a flathead screwdriver whose head has been chipped and rounded off on the edges and serrated in the middle through sheer abuse. I hear this song and carve, and know up towards the open womb looking out on the rest of this world, my women will be there throwing pallets on the fire, keeping an eye on our collective litter of children cuddled together along the safest edge of our home sweet home, and they will be there all together when I come back out their way. We won’t leave and rejoin this so-called civilized world, a world where gays and Germans establish cultural trends. Not because we disagree with them, but the whole process, it’s just not our world anymore. We will die in here, maybe of old age, maybe of carbon monoxide asphyxiation, maybe I’ll just slit everybody open with the flathead one night. But none of that will happen until I’m finished putting these words into the sides of the gap in the mountainside.
I guess the “Redlights” are probably something to do with a city, but I pretend it’s about that hour when I’m the only one acknowledging they are awake, the women sleeping around the children now, me poking at what’s left of the last couple pallets, waiting for the flames to safely quiet down to embers only, bright glowing red pieces of white pine that once sturdily shipped riding mowers or rolls of fabric or shrink-wrapped boxes of crackers or something. Redlights glowing in our fire pit, dying like the darkness will when the sun comes back up and I get some sleep finally, before pulling the Escort wagon back down the hill through a couple of strategic alleys, and then back up to our hole, looking forward to that quiet hour with those fading redlights and everyone else quiet and the world dark and me at perfect peace.
STEAL “Redlights”
NEXT UP: We gonna rob a freight train music!