SONG OF THE DAY: Memphis Soul Stew (kudzu'd)

I found my crow call this morning, so after feeding the local crows peanuts, whenever I’ve heard them outside in the trees out front, I blow the crow call from inside the house in the kitchen. They’ve been talking back, pretty frantically sometimes. I wish crow call technology could tell me what the fuck I might be saying, but that’s human tech for you – just wildly pretending to create something without really understanding the consequences. My girlfriend warned me the crows might come in the house and poke my eyeballs out, but we’ll see.
I’ve been doing this all day whenever they come around, but just now I went out on the porch and blew it. I guess one of them was hiding out on top of the porch roof and as soon as I blew it, they flew off, cawing in a completely different tone than any of them before. That’s how I learned how local crows say, “Lying motherfucker!”

SONG OF THE DAY: Weyn Ayamak Weyn

Just another stone cold jam from Habibi Funk, purveyors of fine funky thangs western civilization overlooked the first time round.

SONG OF THE DAY: Right Down the Line (kudzu'd)

Keeping it moving, slowly but surely, even as the world wants you to congeal into fear. I been trying to keep it moving literally, one foot in front of the other, couple miles down the tracks as often as possible, scattering the negative impulses by grounding my soles onto the metal tracks when ain’t nothing coming. This world we got is one built with ego as a cornerstone, so it’s easy to get lost looking at what others might seem to have got, but that just poisons your outlook with hating. People get hung up on thinking about what other folks “deserve” way too much, without ever thinking about who’s gonna serve it all. The work’s always got to be done, and there’s always someone doing it without calling attention to themselves, because that just slows down getting the work done. I been trying to remove “deserve” from my vocabulary completely, and just keep it moving. If I’m meant to get somewhere, I’ll eventually meander my way there. And if I ain’t, I won’t. I trust the Universe to know what the fuck it’s doing.

SONG OF THE DAY: Paradise

Bambu is one of the best MCs out there in my opinion. I look forward to whatever new shit he ever drops. And if he don’t drop nothing new, I can keep enjoying the body of work he already created. It’s dudes like this that I wish got paid enough to survive capitalism more easily in our fucked up poison culture. But of course you don’t get paid for telling real shit, unless your realness is fake shit that the Think They’re Reals gobble up like candy corn in the feedlot. And honestly, I truly just appreciate Bambu for being dope as fuck. I wish all of us survived capitalism, and in fact wish the whole fuckin’ thing just got cancelled and we could have a more direct line to happiness, instead of this Rube Goldberg ass contraption called western culture pursuit of happiness if you wasn’t born rich.

SONG OF THE DAY: So Wat Cha Sayin' (kudzu'd)

Slowed music is resistance to business as usual status quo go go go, which crushes us all. Slow living is a refusal of slow death. The too comfortable are uncomfortable with slowed music because it upsets their world view of how things are already in perfect order, and as they should be. We need to pitch shift our nihilistic rush towards doom.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Know You Got Soul (kudzu'd)

I had the chance to wander into Piedmont North Carolina, and do a little record digging last weekend. I really miss the earlier heyday of record stores, before compact discs and digital realm killed them off, because the bulk of stores that have popped up afterwards are missing a certain level of joy, not only of discovery but just general demeanor. Many of the new school record stores seem like vanity boutique shops for somebody not dependent upon their success to maintain wealth, so it’s more of a “look at all that I’ve curated!” vibe than actual joy. Those types tend to be very dismissive if you want for anything that’s not in their wheelhouse, and they also tend to be pretty commonly expensive, as are a majority of boutique small businesses, because the owners’ tend to have an inflated sense of their need in the community, as well as an entitlement to support because they’re so damned proud of their weird little curation of some random physical ass shit in late capitalist America.
But really, the main thing is the joy. Too many record stores have miserable operators who get mad at the dumbest shit, even if you’re like, “Damn, this is expensive.” There’s no joy. I mean, much less the missing bins of shit nobody ever felt like going through and pricing according to globalist internet rates, where you have the actual joy of random discovery of either new to you shit you never knew about but looked cool, or finding things you know are amazing but nobody in charge of pricing had any clue. Just the actual joy of someone who loves the fun of music, and has ideas of what you might dig from what you bring up, and there’s a section where more of it might be for you to fuck around in. Too many of today’s record stores and dealers are so fucking white… sterilized of joy and with miserable anger just waiting to pop out at any perceived indignation. It fucking sucks.
Luckily, at a record show I went to last month, and a couple spots I found last weekend, there’s still joy to be found, as there always will be. The miserable tend to be mapped out well online, and have strong social media presences, because they know how to manipulate an algorithm and live in the world of technologically connected. But there’s still plenty of cracks in the digital map and spots you’ll only find out about by word of mouth or random ass chance. And the other great thing is good people who recognize and love good spots know not to tell random assholes about those spots, or else they get ruined. So if you know a good spot, don’t tell me… I’m confident if I’m living right and meant to see it, the Universe will guide me towards finding it on my own.
On the other side of things, if a bunch of people who seem sorta like assholes tell you how great a record store is, trust your lounge intuition and don’t waste your time at that spot, unless you’ve got a colored vinyl fetish. Those spots are chock full of colored vinyl options.

SONG OF THE DAY: Trespassin'

Trespassing doesn’t exist. Decolonize yourself. (Also, don't buy a Decolonize flag, of any sort. That's mad corny, not to mention pretty dissonant.)

SONG OF THE DAY: Meat Grinder

I got one of those 33 1/3 books about Madvillain but I haven’t read much of it yet because it’s somehow a little bit more than a zine but not quite a book, and mostly my brain has been in zine level of attention mode lately, and if I happen to get more than that on a rare night, I try to knock 10-15 pages out of an actual book laying beside the bed, gathering more dust than thumbing. This is no diss to 33 1/3 books, other than they are zines pretending to be books and every author should be forced to get some comic artist they knew 15 years ago to do wonderful doodles to go with it. Or cut and paste some shit out of old Spin magazines.

SONG OF THE DAY: Down Home

There’s a train yard I love not far from where I sleep most of the time, and it’s a rundown part of a rundown city that has a neat ass throwback name to whatever it had once been. Some folks made a microbrewery with the name, even though the actual microbrewery is in a different part of the rundown town, but people love a microbrewery, so that other rundown part of the rundown city is becoming less rundown as the microbrewery starts buying up abandoned warehouses and converting it into shared spaces and coffeehouse and shit like that. Anyways, the microbrewery with the throwback name that has nothing to do with them making beer in a nearby section of the rundown city just won some big ass dork beer award – saw it on my google news feed. Plus, they got microbrewery spots in another city now too, expanding their “brand” (which of course is a forgotten industrial sector in a rundown city that they’ll market themselves as savior of once they keep expanding their renovating footprint). If you look at the beer website of the place, all the founders and key players in their structure are wacky smiling white dudes with large but well-trimmed beards. This is progress to most folks, but not to me. I can kinda give it the benefit of the doubt and pretend it’s the lesser of two evils maybe, but even then, I don’t feel like giving it the benefit of the doubt, because they also just cleared out a semi-permanent homeless camp that’s closer to the beer company’s namesake than their tasting room, and I don’t see these quirky white men out here doing shit about homelessness or drug addiction or poverty, other than pretending that having to hire more wait staff to serve impatient beer tourists somehow qualifies them as leading public citizens. I don’t know man, the microbrewery cosplaying as industrial titan thing is so tiring at this point, I’m not even sure how I got a couple hundred words of griping out about it.

SONG OF THE DAY: God Only Knows

This was already a weird song, as much as any of The Beach Boys work is. But then slap it as a cover on a soul singer’s last studio album in 1975, and it takes on even weirder vibes, although musically it actually sounds fairly normal, I guess. I mean it wouldn’t seem quite as weird if I didn’t know it was a weird ass Brian Wilson song. Everett’s youth was spent in Mississippi, singing in gospel music and playing piano before moving to Chicago to chase a music career as secular soul artist in 1957. She had some hits, but by 1975 her career was on the down swing. This track recorded by a childhood gospel church singer is pretty interesting to me, as this was the last studio album she dropped, and spent her elder years back in the churches near her home in Illinois. The trajectory of young creative dreamer, from the church to the exploitative music industry, and then ultimately back to the church, with this weird ass song as a slice of that life that touches on all of it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Like a Virgin (kudzu'd)

Two weeks from today, I take the cobbled together dirtgod sound system out in public for the first time, to spin slowed down 45s from 6 to 9 pm, at Blue Moon Diner in Charlottesville. This is what you can expect.

SONG OF THE DAY: Rainy Night in Georgia

Listening to Tony Joe White on John Brown’s birthday, contemplating how to be a better race traitor.

Sunday Slowdown Chapter 007: Gringo de Mayo

GRINGO DE MAYO

I might’ve forgot to post chapter 006 on here. You can find it at mixcloud too. Dropped an all cumbia mix yesterday called Gringo de Mayo, because white folks turning Cinco de Mayo into an excuse to drink margaritas at chain restaurants is both hilarious and shameful. We are such a superficial, ignorant people. And it’s funny how white people think culturally they’re the intellectuals. Have you talked to some of these folks from normal upper middle class realms? God these people are fucking stupid. Living off the trickle down of wealth from previous generations. Anyways, fuck all that. This is about slowed music, because slow music is resistance to business as usual or normal speed life, and normal speed life benefits those who it’s always benefitted. So fuck normal speed. Keep it slow.

SONG OF THE DAY: Journey to Lounge

The journey to lounge always has obstacles, sometimes even coming from inside your own mind. I know I was my own worst enemy to establishing quality lounge as young adult man-child with unresolved or unaddressed shit. Some folks never even bother, just keep ignoring the mold on the walls and act like “This is fine,” ploughing through a life with no regard for how they fuck up those around them with their chaotic bad ripples. I’m still chaotic as fuck, but I’d like to believe I’m chaotic good, and I definitely feel I’ve achieved a level of lounge in my life better than ever before. It’s at least more sustainable, like I don’t have to escape the whole fuckin’ world in a self-medicated stupor to find peace. It’s already here. But I still gotta get my mind right and avoid getting stuck in the mud of others who got nothing better to do with their lives than scatter negative influences in every direction. In fact, the journey to lounge begins inside your own mind. You can’t be at peace or encourage peace and healing in others if you’re a fuckin’ shit storm of unresolved bullshit. And even if all those traumas wasn’t your fault, at some point, you gotta take responsibility for not bothering to get your shit together. There should be like a second adulthood age, because 18/21 is too young. 36 maybe? I don’t know, but at some point, you should’ve at least tried to have enough knowledge of self to stop being a negatively charged ionic treatise upon your environment. This world is fucking us all up, and we can either try to do better, or shrug our shoulders and say fuck it and replicate the patterns that made us fucked in the first place. That doesn’t feel like solid work or a good plan on the journey to collective lounge.

SONG OF THE DAY: Slippin' Around

Slipping around the edges of what’s allowed, with a “tres pass” nature meaning fences and walls are suggestions rather than outright rules. None of these lines on the maps been here forever so it’s hard to accept ‘em as anything other than arbitrary. I don’t really care you had the money to pay somebody to stamp a piece of paper with the embossed red marks of supreme reality of ownership. That shit ain’t real.