SONG OF THE DAY: I Want You Back (Z-Trip Remix)

I went to the first Bonnaroo, which feels crazy now because I’d never do no shit like that. Even took my toddler. We got good camping spot right behind the main stage field, so a lot of times, me and Boogie Brown just sat on the roof of his Dodge Prospector truck and watched shit. The final headliner was that Trey dude from Phish, who by that point I had already become painfully tired of. My ex-wife wanted to go in for that one though, so we had the toddler, me and Brown, and were chilling at the truck. DJ Z-Trip played the transition set between whoever was before Trey and the Trey dude, and I guess mash-up DJing wasn’t huge yet at that point, and to be honest, Serrato Scratch probably wasn’t even out, so he was working from records, and it just cracked my skull wide open. It was like the promise of a genre of music that didn’t exist yet. Unfortunately, mash-up culture didn’t pan out as wonderfully amazing as originally hoped for, and is pretty limited by copyright ownership anyways.
I actually kicked it with Brown last weekend, working on some new Prolo material, and we were talking about music, and how there’s gotta be some new thing eventually, doesn’t it? But where will it come from? Has the digital age overexposed all the world to the rest of the world and no absolute mind-blowing newness incubates in some weird creative corner by itself? It seems like all possible combinations of genres has likely been tried, and anything brand new can’t be thought of as easy as a common combo. Hip hop has become so boring, which makes sense because it’s 50 years old. Rock-n-roll pretty much died after the early ‘90s, and just turned into boring ass indy rock or throwback vibes, and that was a rough half century after it first exploded.
The ultimate problem with trying to come up with something that’s never been done is most of our brains only think of what already exists. It takes a mad flash of universal lightning spark genius hitting, not just one person, but a collective, where the idea happens simultaneously in a few different minds, but close to each other, and they power each other further up into some wild ass new thing. I’m too old for that, my mind far too saturated with worn edges and fuzzy fissures to be struck like that by the universal magnetics. But I’m still pretty wide open to enjoying it. I’m bored with culture. It’s too goddamn predictable.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sorry (I Ran All The Way Home)

A super underrated genre of music is old school doowop groups that featured 3 or 4 white guys with one black dude. It’s an exploration of how a good player-coach can hype up the rest of the team. I wish we still had the old internet and there was a whole ass blogspot posting chopped and screwed doowop music. Instead, nobody sees anything except unclickable links on social media feeds, where they poke a heart button and it creates statistics that don’t mean shit. Did you know there’s no doowop music about social media? Weird, right? Makes no sense to me. If multiverse theory is true, I gotta really think humans are an even smaller part of it all, because through free market capitalism and “tech innovation”, we’ve given ourselves less shit. No chopped and screwed doowop. No purple dominos. No Vaughn Bode Cheech Wizard embroidered patches. No pH mineral water in blue glass bottles. Just a bunch of the same useless basic shit, everywhere. Humans are like the opposite of multiverse theory… basicverse theory, where everything becomes a shittier version of what it could’ve been because it’s too inconvenient to bother with, but at a mark-up in cost somehow. I can’t wait to write doowop lyrics on the inside of a spaceship in Elon Musk’s blood. Sorry. I'm sorry sorry sorry.

SONG OF THE DAY: I Wanna Say I Love You

Ain’t nearly enough love in the world, at least not the one I’m seeing. Maybe it’s my fault and I’m entrusting my time with the wrong circles. Gotta re-tune my vibrations, not to blind oblivious positivity, because you gotta acknowledge all the fucked up going on in order to hope to create a better version of life that doesn’t have so many suffering in their existence. But even if you acknowledge the fucked, you gotta keep your vibrations attuned to love and hope. I got a good dear friend, who’s been battling various illnesses for a while, and they’re one of the strongest people I know, not like in fists in your face type strong, but biggest heart acting in the world with the intent of that heart type strong. Standing up to things that will kill you because they need standing up to type strong. Anyways, they sent me a haiku about how if we lose hope, our ancestors survived for nothing. I think about that shit all the time. Without hope, it truly is end times. And without love, you can’t have hope.

SONG OF THE DAY: Imperio de Traficantes (chopped and skrewed)

Any time somebody tries to convince me streaming services are chill and not a complete and total rip-off to both the artists (who don’t get paid) and the listener (who has limited selection which can change without your realizing), I remember there’s no chopped and screwed norteño music on streaming services for the most part. In fact, streaming minded music listeners are more likely to think “slowed and reverb” is an actual thing. We never know what we have until it’s gone. RIP good internet.
Shout out to the Skrewed Up Meskins blog, which is nothing but dead links at this point, abandoned into internet purgatory until the blogspot servers purge inactive sites eventually as a cost-cutting measure. So much great shit buried into those dead links. I'm thankful I got a bunch of it on an external hard drive still. Once it's gone, it's gone. I still wonder about once a month, "Whatever happened to DJ Dreemz?"

SONG OF THE DAY: Cool Me Off

Still see grown ass dudes who seem to be trying to share social circles with me who say “FTW” as “for the win”, which just boggles my goddamn mind. Then I remember it’s a blessing, because what if I accidentally trusted one of these types and said some real life shit to them? It’d be immediately compromised by their unreal nature. And then I am also reminded more of the world is plastic than not, which is exactly why the traditional meaning of FTW is what it is.

SONG OF THE DAY: Muñequita Blanca

Too many people got record collections without ever thinking about sound systems. And I don’t mean stereo components so much as haphazard pieces of equipment strung together in ways they might not have been designed to do so. Anybody with money can buy a bunch of records and pretend they’re a master curator of unique vibes. It takes fuckin’ skills to string a bunch of cheap ass shit together in ways they wasn’t ever meant to go together. And I guess that applies to DJing too. A true old school DJ mind is spinning easily affordable shit to themselves that got overlooked by the masses. Everything’s become too predictable. I’m bored. Let’s go set something on fire.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Little White Cloud That Cried

There’s a flag design that’s sort of become the unofficially accepted flag of Appalachia, and the person who designed it was reddit user Opossum Fucker 1863. Fun tidbits like that are what make living in the post-digital age so ridiculous weird, so that it feels nothing like the dark dystopias ‘80s sci-fi movies inclined us to believe. It’s all so absurd in actuality. Anyways, I hope you have founded a tiny little autonomous zone today, even if only for a few hours. Dirtgod loves you.

SONG OF THE DAY: Take A Look At Yourself

Been feeling off kilter and not on top of my own universal magnetics flow lately. Trying to take a look at myself, and also trying to eliminate the hating, even if of self. Hating ain’t healthy. Been feeling like I’m trapped inside clouds, and can’t get a clear look at what’s ahead, and it’s been so long like that I’m starting to doubt I’m still on the right path. But I can’t tell if the path is wrong either. Probably just been too much thinking and not enough trusting heart to lead the right way through the clouds.

SONG OF THE DAY: Poison (kudzu'd)

When I was a kid, they fed us poison through a garden hose then offered their cures in the bed of a pick-up truck with no seat belts. And even though it flipped over because drunk driving was still legal or at least acceptable or at least neither but got did anyways, I turned out okay, because I was wearing my standard issue country boy overalls, with one strap flopped sexily off my shoulder, and "yung dirtgod" airbrushed on the left leg. I never would've gotten that airbrushed on the right leg. I mean, no offense to people who airbrush nicknames on their right leg, I'm open minded and know times have changed. But I never would've done that. Just wasn't raised that way I guess.

SONG OF THE DAY: Birds

I love a good cover version so goddamned good it actually makes you forget the original even existed, and the cover takes on this weird familiarity owned by the remake. Previously to this Meters’ cover of the Neil Young song, probably the greatest example of this in my life was Swamp Dogg doing John Prine’s “Sam Stone”. This version of “Birds” is great, and for some reason, was only issued on 45 in the Caribbean. It’s on my wish list, for when my pockets ain’t flat.

SONG OF THE DAY: Just Me And You

Numero Group is my favorite label. All their reissue sets are so fuckin’ great. I ain’t had discretionary income lately, so the ol’ record collection has been put on pause for a while. Thankfully there’s a ton of good Numero comps, including all their variations on the East Side Story comps. Haha, my dumbass was looking at the back one day, actually hoping there were actually 19 volumes of the South West Side Story. Magic realism is way better than actual realism.

SONG OF THE DAY: You Made A Fool Out Of Me

I've been drawing The Fool card daily for 7 months. Not like pulling it from a Tarot deck (mostly because I pull from standard deck, as is the way of my people... though I have pulled the Big Joker pretty often in this same period), but drawing it. At first it was on paper, then in a black book, but I've begun drawing it on the walls of the third bedroom which is sort of my studio since the oldest kid is filling up a passport as ex-pat. You can't have too much The Fool iconography in your life, dancing at the edge without consciously acknowledging it, so it seems. But true Fools always know the edge is right there, and understand the potentially horrible repercussions of going over that edge. But we dance anyways, because fuck it. It's the only way we know how to be.

SONG OF THE DAY: Sin Control (kudzu'd)

Just vibing to the rising temperatures in this old house in rural America, about to break out the window fan arsenal to point in at night and out in heavy sunlight. Got a couple window units upstairs in the kids’ rooms, but I don’t fuck with the conditioned air. If it’s gonna keep getting hotter and the electric grid eventually fails sporadically, gotta get used to it. It’s weird to me folks that think survivalism is having an expensive generator that they financed. That’s temporary survival at best. You gotta have life skills and the ability to deal with bullshit. And hot ass days is dealing with bullshit.
But this is also the sweet spot, because even as it cracks 90 degrees god awfully early in the calendar year, the house still has that nice cool earth floor basement shooting cold up through the floor. Winter hadn’t been baked out the house’s bones yet. Come August, it’s gonna be different, and my sweating ass will probably be cussing the heat and wondering about getting one of those new-fangled mini-splits. Anything that’s gotta get financed though is out of my price range.
I actually hate that about green energy and generators, or getting solar panels. All it is in America is a financing scam, and you don’t save money, and you don’t save the environment unless you got the money to throw away on it, and everything is filtered through the prism of “how can we make an industry off this that can extract additional wealth?” It’s such bullshit. That’s why I look forward to grid collapse some days. All this bullshit won’t last. It never does. Wintertime comes for every self-important empire.