SONG OF THE DAY: Diamond in the Back (chopped and screwed)

It’s pretty simple… be thankful for what you got, and then slow it down even further. About to take a four hour ride 15 minutes away, window down, and the screwed slow jams blasting.
I considered putting the actual song title up on the heading there, but one thing I love about the chaos that has come from digitally archiving old Screw tapes is all the data ain't right. This one's been labelled the wrong thing for decades now, which might make it the right thing by now. Who am I to judge (or jury)?

SONG OF THE DAY: Time of the Preacher

Some “tugging at the roots of family” energy swirled in today, blurring the lines of spirituality and random chance of the Universe, which isn’t really blurred at all but the exact same thing, except Earthly people have perverted spirit into dogma and ruined the power of it for folks like me. Someone in Minnesota benched an old dirtgod moniker from 4 years ago which said “Dot & Tuna’s Firstborn”, and at the same time, I’m discussing the tendrils of alcoholism with my own offspring, while also receiving a poem submission for my zine from an amazing young person in West Virginia who wrote about the “synthetic exhilaration” that certain families chase, and when this young poet read her poem in West Virginia a few weeks ago, I was sitting at a table nearby, sort of MCing the affairs at that point, and she read, “And the children? Doomed from conception,” and I wanted to cry on the spot, and then wanted to cry again when I read it today in my inbox, and it’s one of those lines of poetry that is a shovel that struck the septic tank everybody forgot where it was located, and now the shit is leaking into the yard, but it had to happen. It’s been a time of the preacher since most all our stories began, but the words have been hollowed out by blank-eyed sermonizers more worried about the weight of the collection plate than helping sinners to love themselves. When one scans the environment and sees all these people who appear doomed, and feel doomed themselves, a compassionate response would never be one of condemnation (or deportation, or denial of humanity). I hate to see the patterns repeat, and the ripples of time still rippling all around me, tossing about those I love, even if I have figured out how to halfway shimmy my own ass up on this rock and feel less susceptible to them. And from your own struggles, you know how slippery and slimy the rock is trying to crawl up out the muck, and how good the momentary exhilaration of embracing the shit show can pretend to be. And you can share the possibility of climbing up on the rocks into the sunshine, but you can’t do it for nobody else. Shit, they might get up on your rock and be mad at you because it ain’t how they hoped anyways, and then they slide back down into it all, and start bouncing around inside the chaotic ripples of the doomed, and you love them, and you want to make it all better, but you can’t. You’re just a person, not a god. “Now the preachin’ is over, and the lesson’s begun.” Hopefully.

SONG OF THE DAY:

I shall always appreciate people gyrating sexually who don’t look like HBO Max prestige TV ready characters visually. Ugly people are immensely beautiful, and not the true uglies. We all only have one body we are imprisoned inside of upon our Earthly existence, thus it is a good idea to maximize your serotonin induction. Fuck the haters (but not literally).

SONG OF THE DAY: So Real (slowed and throwed)

Been listening to a lot of DJ Screw lately. That’s just how it is sometimes.

SONG OF THE DAY: Enough Rope

I am one of those contrary ass types that thinks neither country music or Americana has a solid claim on actual rural country art. The country music industry has been so hyperpop for decades now, not to mention heavily politically reactionary. And Americana is simultaneously an opposite type of reactionary while also that weird classist “gentrified bakery in a formerly abandoned industrial part of town where brown people used to live” that I can’t stand with that all that confidently either. However, even while not feeling like either of those binaries represents a good country story, I can say without doubt, that this fuckin’ song gets it, and get to it.

SONG OF THE DAY: Overnight Scenario

I am older now, so when I hear the timetable for “Overnight Scenario”, it’s absolutely exhausting. Like, I’m gonna have to be in a crazy fired up mood just to make it til 3 at the pancake house. But we can eat quick and get to the house before 4. And a whole ‘other hour before the lights go out? What the fuck are we doing? And sure, six in the morning, hearing her start to shout is a great notion, but to be honest, can’t we just come home early, fuck, then go out to breakfast, have a couple café con leches and think about doing it again some other time? There ain’t enough energy drinks my chicken grease constrained heart can stand to be pulling this schedule off anymore.

SONG OF THE DAY: Ghetto Red Hot

There are certain sounds that perfectly encapsulate early ‘90s era hip hop and its influence on other genres, and this was also a time I lived in Richmond and tended to walk downtown with Boogie Brown on Friday afternoons to buy records at Willie’s, and downtown Richmond back then was WAY DIFFERENT. You’d have tons of people hanging out, waiting on the bus, or just kicking it downtown on Broad Street, and cars would be cruising, just BLASTING music, like ungodly levels of blast, but which still sounded crispy clear with immense thump. There’s like 3 or 4 beats that specifically just fire up those memories in my mind, to where I can smell the heaty stank of the city again, and this is one of them.

SONG OF THE DAY: Five Minutes of Funk (screwed & chopped)

I always look forward to the redbud blossoms in the spring, even though I love all the daffodils and tulips and forsythia and blackberry blossoms and phlox spreading further as well. But there’s something about the redbuds once they pop, the days are getting warmer, I can sleep with the windows open at night, and I know I survived another year. Yesterday, I went back in the woods and got a handful to eat, and need to go back out and get more today, too. Such a satisfying crispy flavor full of life and raw energy.
And inevitably, once redbuds season hit, I always think in my mind that it’s proof that Allah loved DJ Screw, because the redbuds are such a lovely purple pink shade, and since my windows are down on the car because it’s warm again, and the roads have all these redbuds showing themselves like a magical mist this time of year, brightening the sides of the human paths and edges of the woods, mystical corpus callosum bridges between nature and man, I end up also starting to bump DJ Screw mixes again. His body of work was immense in his lifetime, having made far more redbud blossoms worth of mixtapes than having lived for less than three decades would suggest. And since my ancient iMac died, killing with it over a decade of musical data, which can’t be reimported because I’ve got too much shit for an internal hard drive, and it has to travel between eras as external vagabond of audio, I’ve been revisiting them Screw tapes afresh, finding myself drawn to some stuff I’d always loved for a while now, and discovering new segments of tapes I never bumped all that much as well. One of my favorites, both old and new exploration, is the tinkering with “Five Minutes of Funk”, originally by Whodini.
One of the great things about Screw becoming so famous is all he did was make mixtapes constantly, for immediate sale, to people who bumped his shit. He did it prolifically and as regular as the sunrise. Eventually he got a shop, to avoid cops harassing him at home for the long lines, and they put out tapes as they could. When you go online, they’re laid out in “chapters” with three-digit numbers, but those aren’t in any chronological order. It’s just how they got reissued or released at the Screwed Up Records Shop, or who the fuck knows. They still keep finding some. The track data for this song on my hard drive claims it’s Leanin’ n The Leans, but that doesn’t match what shows up online now, for Chapter 219 by that name. And it’s a pretty amazing example of DJ Screw’s actual DJ skills, juggling the song, mixing and scratching, working from instrumental and vocal versions, and just generally fucking it up like only he could. Screw was an outsider artist in hip hop, just doing what he did without thinking it needed to be cataloged or categorized. So now, decades later, when the University of Houston has a DJ Screw archive, and is trying to do just that, it’s impossible work. It’s like when Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, the T’ang era poet, was discovered by a bureaucrat, so they sent folks out into the woods to gather what poems of his they could find written on stones and inside caves, and that became what we know now as Cold Mountain’s poetry. I actually emailed the archivist in charge of the Screw collection at Houston, asking her about the chronology of all the tapes, because I was thinking about trying to do that, and she said as far she knew, it hadn’t been done. Folks had rough year ideas for many of the Screw tapes, but no hard dates whatsoever, not even months.
I didn’t follow through with it, because it was more work than I cared to do. I’d rather just be riding down a back road, soaking up another spring’s redbud ambiance, and blasting Screw myself, rather than trying to dissect and analyze and categorize and pin it down further like poking a butterfly to a piece of cardboard to prove how beautiful the wings were, killing the creature in the process. Just ride with it.
And the great lesson of Screw, the great Saint of Southern Gothicc Futurism, is that by slowing it down, you extend the beauty. Five minutes of funk becomes almost nine minutes, thus we extend the goodness of our life, but slowing the fuck down, and letting the good parts ride a little extra, and letting the regular parts, and even the occasional mistakes, just pass on by without calling attention to it. Goddamn, I love me some Screw.