100 VINYLZ: #96 - Run Joe 12-inch by Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers

(1986, Future Records)
Go-go is a form of music with widespread popularity from the southern part of Maryland all the way down to the northern part of Virginia. At times, something or other will happen to have it hit a peak that spreads it wildly from Philly to Carolina, but that main area with D.C. as the epicenter is it’s homeland. Basically, in case you don’t know, instead of looping break beats like a DJ would do with the rapping musics, go-go has a live band play the loop in smoky drunken manner, with call and response type lyrics, and a tremendously ridiculous percussion section that owes as much to black marching bands and broke ass kids beating on five-gallon buckets as it does to the standard Afro-Spanish jazzy influences you’d expect to read up on in a WaxPoetics article on the subject. Concerts are advertised with large day-glo posters that I used to snag off of abandoned buildings in Shockoe Bottom and cover the walls of my studio room in the shitty Oregon Hill house we lived in when we had our first kid. Lime green and blaze orange backgrounds with black block letters and the faces of Rare Essence or the Junkyard Band or Backyard Band or Northeast Groovers or Chuck Brown staring out.
Chuck Brown has earned the nickname the Godfather of Go-go, and is as famous a D.C. landmark as Ben’s Chili Bowl, guys who used to hang with Rayful Edmonds, or homeless con men with maps waiting for you once you step off the metro at the National Mall. The aforementioned WaxPoetics just had an article on Brown himself, and I learned that he actually spent time living near where I grew up, he in the far end of Charlotte County, Virginia, plus all over southside Virginia he bounced around as a kid. And he maintains his base throughout that region, as he’s usually scheduled to play Brown’s Island free Friday evening shows in Richmond, that standard deal where you can groove and drink overpriced cheap beers using beer tickets, except the Richmond ones tend to have that upwardly mobile black couple demographic covered, which is always fun to soak up. (It’s odd to me how many families like that have weird old sambo advertising art up in their homes, I guess to remember something or other and be thankful, but it’d be kind of like me keeping a framed print of like Junior Samples from Hee Haw in my bathroom… which come to think of it, would be pretty damn pimp.)
Anyway, the past few years I have acquired a decent collection of good to fair go-go singles, mostly happening to catch record stores that have no idea even what the fuck go-go music is. I got a slew of 12-inches, including this one, at a indy record store in Charlottesville in this manner, because the guy just had it all lumped into the soul $1 bin, and when I came up with a stack of T.T.E.D. and Future Records releases, the guy behind the counter (also the owner) was all like, “What is this stuff?” And I had to do the thing where you know what it is but you don’t act like it’s really anything or the fucker would’ve been like, “Okay, let me look these up…” then fucked around in the ebays long enough to charge me five bucks for each shitty, half-scratched 12-inch. And even though “Bustin’ Loose” is probably considered Chuck Brown’s biggest national hit (I remember a black kid telling me in like first grade a joke about how the Incredible Hulk sang “I feel like bustin’ loose! Bustin’ loose!” after busting through a wall, which was hellafied funny when you’re like six seeing who can piss into the urinals the farthest across the room, all geeked up on grape Kool-Aid with like triple the recommended sugar), but “Run Joe” is my favorite go-go single I’ve gotten hold of over the years. Basically, it’s a song (I think it’s actually an older song reworked by Chuck Brown into your standard eight-minute go-go groovefest) about a dude having to bolt out the club because the cops have showed up. It’s also an ironic go-go hit, since Washington D.C. sort of outlawed go-go music at most clubs in the ‘80s because of people getting shot up, although to be fair to go-go music, at that point in D.C.’s history, when crack and crack money were flooding the streets, it was a notoriously insane place and you couldn’t really gather together more than a hundred black people under the age of 25 without expecting somebody to get shot at.
The terrible thing is how screwed music has brainwashed me into loving everything screwed at times, and I had a long kick where I would only buy 12-inch disco singles and play them with the pitch control dragged as slow as it would go. This was when my man Boogie Brown had given me a pair of Numarks to fuck around with, and I was working up some retarded sets. The only two sets I really came up with were a good 25-minute or so redneck hippie funk set, and taking the best breaks from all the immensely shitty disco singles and mixing in some go-go and hard funk shit from the mid-’70s, of course all of it slowed down. I made a couple mixtapes of this, including a spell where the only cassettes I could find were some shitty 60-minute TDKs (I usually only rocked the Maxells - preferably 100-minutes, but of course, I don’t think you have more than one choice most times nowadays for cassettes), and playing “Run Joe”, which usually was towards the front of me making these slowed down disco/go-go mega-mixes, ended up usually running most of the first side of the 60-minute tape, pushing a good 11 minutes when dragged slow. Man, that’s some good shit to get high to. But not crack. Crack doesn’t give you the right mindframe to enjoy that constant go-go percussion, which is probably why there used to be so much violence at go-go shows.

100 VINYLZ: #97 - Steal Your Face 2xLP by The Grateful Dead

(1976, Grateful Dead Records)
The Grateful Dead are kind of like politics in that people who care to have an opinion have a very strong opinion at the far ends of for or against. Plenty folks hate the Dead, and what they term hippies in general, with a passion, full of contempt for anything remotely close to even credit to the Dead for anything, much less musically related. And those into the Dead blindly talk of unfiltered, unhindered creativity that you can't really understand unless you get into it deep enough to truly understand it. I accepted them at a young age because I was really into drugs and drugs and the Dead went hand and hand. There are conspiracies that the CIA was involved in the trafficking of LSD in association with Dead tour for decades, with the death of Jerry Garcia times perfectly with the rise of more pharmaceutical hallucinogenics. I went to my first Dead show in like 1990, with two buddies from high school, both of whom had already graduated. They both had cleared it with their folks; I was still only 17 with one year left and think I mentioned it to my dad the evening before at my sister's softball practice, and he was all bugged up about it, not because he was uptight, because he did far more drugs in his short life than I could hope to touch, but he knew the deal. He knew what was up and shit, and didn't want me doing something retarded like buying up a couple hundred hits of acid to sell back home to avoid having a for-real job.
I can see both sides of the Dead opinion spectrum, probably leaning more towards the hatred than the love, but the truth, like always, is in the grey area in between. I grew up with the influence of redneck hippies who had no pretensions really, more of a Miller High Life/homegrown set than a Newcastle Brown Ale/killer kind bud set. It took a few years of college (okay, a couple weeks) to realize the fucking full of shit suburban fucks who buy into hippie looks and make it embarrassing to have anything to do with anything resembling them. Idealistic chicks driving Subaru stationwagons with VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS bumper stickers with their stupid clean-shaven dreadlocked boyfriend in his NORML shirt. But I could still enjoy a Dead show now and then (even getting miracled at a show where everybody I went with didn't get in, got mad stoned and made out with what in hindsight was probably a 14-year-old, and while wandering around completely fucked afterwards trying to find the dudes I came with, realized I was walking fifty feet behind the guy who drove us up there, who was looking for his own ride, but had some shrooms to split with me... perfectly fucked up day), but I couldn't get into that Dead worship bullshit. When Jerry died, man, I didn't really give too much of a fuck.
As for records, Workingman's Dead is probably their best studio album, when Garcia was first exploring his country/bluegrass interests, but they were always more of a live group, being they are the most famous shitty cover band to ever have existed, so Steal Your Face is what I'd consider my favorite, or most personally memorable record. I've probably played Europe '72 a bit more, mostly because it has a version of "Tennessee Jed" which they always played at every live show I ever saw, but Steal Your Face I have associated in my mind of not yet being completely hateful towards hippies and dabbling in hippie vagina crack and laying on a sweaty bed in a shitty apartment with a stoned chick, buzzed on THC together and excited to fuck like fuckers. "Sugaree", "Big River", "U.S. Blues"... I got personal fuck memories to all that shit. It should also be noted that, regardless of how stupid hippies or the Grateful Dead are, if you removed all personal preconceptions from it, the Steal Your Face logo is pretty fucking awesome.
I'm sure there's hardcore Deadheads who have bootleg live shows pressed on vinyl, but that's one of those serious business sub-cultures, where you get into something so heavily it is SERIOUS ASS BUSINESS. No mic dubs but shit straight from the soundboard, and no sharing with you unless you have something to share in return. Man, I've gotten high with dudes like that, with racks and racks of live shows on cassette, pulling out a specific one because "it has the best version of 'Me and My Uncle' you'd ever hear, Jerry was on fire that night man" or some nonsense. The funny thing is, that sub-culture obviously grew with the internet, but then the Grateful Dead shut it down, after decades of letting people tape shows, because they want to slowly release everything as Dick's Picks Volume 329 and on or whatever. The local community radio station has some dudes who have a Dead show on the weekends, and they are all about it, still, even in this age of the crushing corporate marketing of the Grateful Dead. They were never going to perform again, but oh wait, they did for a fucking Barack Obama fundraiser. Fucking bastards.
I will admit to seeing a couple of decent Phil Lesh & Friends shows early on when they did that, but I think part of my enjoyment was he had some hippie dude who looked exactl like Mr. Show's David Cross from a distance who played the pianeys, including a Hammond organ. But once that got popular, the rest of the stupid Dead got involved, chased off most of Phil Lesh's friends, and it was basically the stupid non-Jerry Garcia Dead still.
Honestly, stupid fucking trustafarian hippie types have ruined it so badly for me that it's hard for me to remember the Dead can be non-annoying at times. But on some days - a warm spring Saturday afternoon where there's no obligations except to do serious damage to a cold 12-pack sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, I can drag a speaker out on top of the camper and hook up the turntable and throw on Steal Your Face and still enjoy it. But if someone shows up at the house, I get all self-conscious about it and probably put on a Black Sabbath record or something, just to make sure they know I'm not a pussy.

A Blog you should check out

My good friend Tom Ace has started a blog about his life as a corporate record store clerk. It is a pretty good read, which means everyone will ignore it.


http://corporatemusicstore.blogspot.com/

http://corporatemusicstore.blogspot.com/

100 VINYLZ: #98 - Another Sign 12-inch by Schoolly D

(1994, Ruffhouse Records)
Schoolly D is a hip hop living legend. I know the standard rap dork meme is "hip hop's original gangster," but whether or not that is true is unimportant to me. He dropped Saturday Night, where he drew the cover on notebook paper (or at least it looks that way), which is where people got killed on wax for the first time, to paraphrase every rap historian's stupid book ever. But beyond that, he dropped Am I Black Enough For Ya and Smoke Some Kill, both of which took black nationalism to a different level entirely. Shit, Smoke Some Kill is one of my all-time most played tapes ever, a classic from start to stop. Oddly enough, he had a track on there called "No More Rock-n-Roll" where he declares an end to the rock era, of course over top a classic rock guitar sample.
All that history is what led me to buy this "Another Sign" single by Schoolly when he was well past his prime. It was on the same label as Cypress Hill, and produced by Joe "the Butcher" Nicolo, who helped Muggs create that weird rock-n-roll/rap hybrid that helped Cypress Hill hold top spots in the High Times 100 for years. But I think this song is one of the most classic, unheralded rap/rock hybrids songs (aka rack-rop, which is also how Koreans with Down's syndrome say "laptop") to ever be. The beat is laid back as fuck, but the guitar is pure studio electric guitarism filtered heavily through someone who had been digging on the blues lately. And Schoolly's lyrics are beyond revolution, beyond caring. He's given up and doesn't give a fuck anymore, but not in a "I'LL SHOOT ANY MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE" not giving a fuck but more of a "sigh... I guess I'll get drunk tonight and sleep on the couch and maybe tomorrow if I'm lucky I'll die." It's a great song, and not often remembered in the normal hip hop nerd memes regarding Schoolly D, because it came out after Schoolly was considered relevant. I still play it whenever I'm on one of my moody ass fuck-the-world kicks.
I remember watching Space Ghost one night all blazed up and Schoolly D was on that bama. On one hand, shit like that makes you think, "Cool, they got some wild shit up on the TVs nowadays," but on the other more realistic hand it just means you're an old ass washed-up piece of shit that's moved into a more marketable demographic of your life. It's like that cell phone commercial with the dude wearing the Motorhead shirt but talking like a prep school faggot in theater class. There's nothing cool about that commercial, but it does point out to you how uncool you are now, for even sitting around on the couch long enough to see that shit, so you might as well give up and buy the useless shit they're trying to sell to you. What the fuck else are you gonna do until you die? Get drunk and sleep on the couch? Ha! Yeah right, you've got to work in the morning, you fucking square.

a wonderful podcast I highly recommend

So this dude Chris Bopst started a radio show in Richmond years ago, where he bought time on some shitty AM radio station during the daytime, played his retarded mix of music, and it was great. Any time I was in RVA within the minute range of their AM tower, I'd have that shit on. Bopst is one of those hardcore music nerd dudes who refuses to download shit and pretty much still buys everything in a tangible format (meaning physical, with art and shit to clutter up your life). His show grew in popularity because it was one of the best things on the Richmond radio machines, but also because Richmond is chock full of misfits, malcontents, and retards. Well, the AM radio station, after it got more notoriety, decided to change it's format and dump Mr. Bopst, which means almost half the people who were listening stopped listening. (I think they went on some black nationalism "for us by us" kick.) After a couple of months of it being gone, The Bopst Show is back in the world, albeit inside the stupid internetz. I can't recommend this dude's show enough. He's given Solaris Earth Pipeline a lot of love, but beyond that, his show is always good for some shit you hadn't heard or needed to hear. HERE IS THE PAGE FOR THE FIRST WEEK'S SHOW. There are options there for either dl'ing the single first week show or for subscribing to that jank for eternity. You should snag this shit before that website's bandwidth explodes.

7-list: 7 Songs I Would've Wrote About Were We Still Doing The Monthly EWA Thing

Sometimes I get bummed the Expert Whiteboy Analysis thing died down, but as we tried to add people to pick up the slack, we only ended up adding far more slack. And it's hard to get four whiteboys (well, one is only half-white, but it's the half with his opinions) to keep agreeing enough to do something like that. I'm also glad I don't have to listen to so much shitty music, although I try my best to keep listening to as much shitty ass music as possible, through the use of local mix shows and the stupid Sirius satellite radio.
The hip hop whiteboy is nothing now. It used to be that was a remarkable feat to be a down ass whiteboy (don't get a twisted face and think I rocked that style, in full on Vanilla Ice mode, as I've always just been whatever the fuck I felt like being, so that I could get along with as many people as possible, to increase my chances of free weed). I was coming out the Food Lion yesterday, and a weird cross section of wigger culture hit my vision all at once while I put the groceries into the back of my wife's Subaru. First off, across from me was this guy, probably my age, with a big ole fat potbelly, and a normal white man's haircut with bangs, getting into his work truck which had been running the whole time (most likely because he wouldn't be able to start it again easily), yet you could tell he used to be some sort of hip hop whiteboy, even if he looked like every doughboy racist within fifty miles of here, because he had cursive neck tattoos and shit. Usually prominent tattoos like that mean either hip hop or metalhead, but no metalhead has ever gotten cursive letters tattooed on his neck, because no metal band has ever had a cursive letter logo. Metalheads might get their mom's name on their neck, but it's going to be in Slayer font or look like dripping blood or some shit, no matter how sweet the sentiment is. Only a wigger dude would have cursive shit on his neck.
But that was just the first guy. Also standing nearby was a teenage wigger kid who I had seen walking with his mom inside, short hair (to trick you into thinking he's Puerto Rican or at least a yellowbone motherfucker) looking hard with his baseball hat matching the color of his basketball shorts, shorts oversized and hat cocked slightly off-kilter, and he was drinking a Mountain Dew as if it were a blunt, oozing cool. It was and always is to see some teenage boy doing that shit.
And third of all out comes one of the manager types at the Food Lion (you can tell because he doesn't have to wear the same standard shirt the rest of them do) to collect up shopping carts, and he's got the close-cropped crewcut and attended to styled beard of a wigger dude, but he's also at that age showing he's about five years removed from his wigger heyday of high school, where he was the star whiteboy on the basketball team (and thus about the seventh best guy on the basketball team), but he settled down with his boo and got a job at the Food Lion and now he's a manager and he's taken business classes at the community college and in a few years he's going to really love the latest Jay-Z/Nas download even though it will suck a fat dick.
So it's everywhere. Expert whiteboys every fucking where. Including all over the internets, so I thought I'd throw my bullshit unnecessary remarkings on seven recent (somewhat) songs that I would've expounded upon, breaking down to organic compounds, inside the monthly EWA were we still rocking that style (sidenote: I do be rocking more than my dumpin shit at my own blog - rojonekku - but also all this shit is cross-posted there, in case you didn't know where your friendly neighborhood faggot was wasting all his time at)...
#1: "Lollipop" by Lil Wayne - I was painting at the main intersection of my stupid little town last week, and I heard the annoying tweaky sounds of this song come by at least once an hour, so I know that beyond the realms of my music interaction, this is some sort of mega-hit. That bothers me so immensely, mostly because I've seen already too much "Lil Wayne = retarded genius" explications after Da Drought 3 mixtape leak. And although there were a couple of things I enjoyed off that particular joint, the fact he released a new mixtape every 23 hours last year did not trick me into thinking he was brilliant. Some fuckface with a rotating crew of ghostwriters and an endless access to studio space does not equal proficient brilliance. And as everybody asked Wayne to do the guest spot on their remix in recent months, that became fairly obvious. There were a couple of songs ("100 Billion" I think was one, and maybe the remix to "Dey Know") where he was downright terrible. I mean, not even close to good, but repeated the same two vowel sounds at the end of every line, often times just rhyming the same two words with each other, yet with far less idiot savant style than Mike Jones, and you could see through his greatest rapper alive gimmick, easily. One of those songs, he did the T-Pain vocoder deal, like everybody seems to be required to do for some reason, all of them sounding even stupider than T-Pain, so I guess that gave him the idea to do a whole song that way, which is this song. Which is terrible. Third graders with access to nothing but the UPN network could come up with better metaphors. But the electronic voice is catchy, and everybody seems fixated on oral sex nowadays, so I guess a hit is born.
It's sad because Lil Wayne will never make a good CD's worth of stuff, especially if his recent contributions are any sign of the direction he's heading. Whereas most people have that commercial peak, even if it's just one release, where people will reminisce and be like, "Man, I remember that Lil Wayne shit was big back when I was fucking those two chicks that lived in the same apartment building and I would have to go up the back steps and then walk around the block to the front door to hit up the other chick. Texting one bitch 'in your hood, can I stop by?' after fucking the other one, with that Lil Wayne joint on all the time when we sat on the porch drinking tall cans." Instead it will be people cleaning out their ipods of old useless shit and maybe keeping like two songs off the stolen mixtape or finding it on a hard drive of music they forgot they had. You were behind your time Lil Wayne.
#2: "That's Gangsta" by Bun B featuring Sean Kingston - For some reason, probably from one picture I saw one time, I think of Sean Kingston as that black guy from Saturday Night Live, who I in turn think of as a kid on Nickelodeon. So whenever I hear the hook from this, I chuckle to myself at a Nickelodeon kid acting so gangsta when his little ass was coming on right after they were doing the noodle dance on PB&J Otter. But that doesn't take away the fact that this is probably my most favoritest song that's been on the radios thus far this year. It's a catchy as fuck song, and Bun B has always been the cream of Texas MCs. I think Pimp C as the occasional palate cleanser was a good combo, but that equal parts of MCing shit they did once he got out of jail wasn't right. Really, U.G.K. ultimately was best as a Public Enemy style partnership where Bun had most of the lyrics and Pimp C broke up things within songs or maybe had a few songs of his own. But they shouldn't have been splitting duties half-and-half, or you end up with shit like Pimp C talking about his dick's myspace page.
I am intrigued to see what Bun B does next, because he has no more Pimp C, no more Free Pimp C (with the purchase of a Pimp C of equal value), so it's all on him. But between this track and the original non-remixed version of "Draped Out", he's got two solo classics already to go with the official U.G.K. classics. Hopefully he's not still signed to Rap-a-Lot, because they tend to put rather underwhelmingly awesome albums, albeit awesome. Rap-a-Lot never seems to get that all-time classic out, because even on something like the Geto Boys' We Can't Be Stopped, you'll have some nonsense like Willie D giving out awards to the Grateful Dead and Elvis Presley.
#3: "Royal Flush" by Outkast and Raekwon - I guess this is supposed to be a reunion of sorts from that one single off of Aquemini, but man holy fuck does Raekwon always sound so fucking bored lately. Did he quit doing cocaine? He should start again. It's like stories of multi-ethnic criminology but delivered with the excitement of the taped message telling you movie times at the cineplex. I am most intrigued by whatever it will be that Outkast will come up with next time they put out an actual CD. Andre 3000 has been on some strange lyrical kicks this past year, probably one of the best MCs going, as much as it pains the hipster contrarian in me to say that, and this is not his best verse, but it's still about twelve years ahead of what everybody else is doing. And Big Boi seems to be trying to keep pace with the experimental styles. I don't think his concerned crackhead style of this song is the best he's come up with in the past year, but it's good to see the both of them attempting to push the envelope. Now hopefully they deliver with a retarded crazy album and not just 27 guest spots on an album produced by Jazze Pha, Dangermouse, and Polow da Don, with a beat kicked in by Pete Rock and one by DJ Premier, plus like three token ones from Dungeon Family.
#4: "My World is Empty Without You" by Prodigy - Man, I really dug "Mac 10 Handle" from last year too, as it was a throwback track. This is even more of a throwback track, back to when motherfuckers would talk metaphysical shit about the Original Black Man building pyramids on Mars while drinking 40s and smoking blunts. What the fuck happened? Everybody's dreaming of diamonds and champagne and shit, wearing bedazzled hoodies with super swollen Ben Franklin faces, when we all could just be standing around on the porch drinking a cheap ass 40 or three, smoking a couple of communal fat blunts, and we'd still have money to make rent by the middle of the month. I hope Prodigy's whole new solo tape is all like this, but I also understand rap music is fucked so it won't be at all. He'll probably have a song right after this one on the official tape where he's selling kilos of cocaine off of private jets with 50 Cent mumbling the hook.
#5: "Superstar (remix)" by Lupe Fiasco featuring Young Jeezy and T.I. - First off, I do not get into Lupe Fiasco, and this was a source of soreness amongst the EWA Clubhouse at one point, I guess because I couldn't recognize Lupe's brilliant creativity because he was a skater kid or some shit. And for the most part, I still can't stand him, including the original version of this song, which is the soundtrack to a recurring Eurotrash men with hair like Dirk Nowitzki and Adam Morrison trying to rape me with the help of GHB in a dance club bathroom nightmare I've been having. The bathroom has one of those long urinals with the sprinkler pipe above it where everyone just pisses in this big tub together. (In the dream, Charles Barkley always ends up saving me, except for once when it was Rafer Alston.) And whatever song it is I heard recently ("Tokyo, Paris"?) where Lupe says "pass-purt" to make it rhyme his previous line really pisses me off. Like he's ever said "passpurt" in his life. That's some weak shit.
But his fifteen minutes of fame metaphorical basis for his verse here was enough for me to forget the rape nightmare guy's chorus, and to ignore Young Jeezy half-heartedly ad-libbing through another $10,000 check. I get caught up in T.I.'s verse, because he does some crazy shit linguistically, but it's a lot like how Busta Rhymes is awesome in that it's very rhythmic gibberish and might not actually be saying a fucking thing at all, although occasionally you hear something you recognize as complete thoughts to make you think maybe all of it is complete thoughts. But it's probably not. I doubt T.I. ever would've mentioned Cirque du Soleil before he was at home on house arrest watching a lot of TV though.
#6: "Louie Bags" by Blood Raw featuring Young Jeezy - I know, I see the progression from "Duffle Bag Boy" to Jay-Z having shoeboxes with money, to this theme, where you stuff expensive handbags with money. But what the fuck? Why are rappers bragging about shopping for designer brands and wearing certain cuts of diamonds? When did it turn cool to be an old rich Jewish bitch? I mean I guess basically old school big dooky gold chains with Gucci sunglasses was like an old rich Jewish bitch too, so perhaps rap music is an elaborate joke amongst Zionist elders to see what kind of ridiculous shit they can get urban black culture to cherish beyond life. I guess that would make it slightly funny, but not too much since I'm the outside of that inside joke. It is funny how dudes are coming up with elaborately more elegant ways to store their excess money. Me, I usually opt for certificates of deposit.
Also, Blood Raw is the stupidest fucking rap name in forever.
#7: "$20K Money-Making Brothers on the Corner" by the Re-Up Gang - Basically, I needed one more song and they play this every hour on Shade 45 and I'm still not completely sick of it. I like to highlight The Clipse because other than them, most rap notoriety Virginia has gotten has been for things of questionable sexuality (Timbaland, Missy Elliott, the Neptunes). I meant to get this mixtape off the internets, but I forgot a whole lot of times to do so. And now I mostly don't dl shit, even if my former physical mixtape connection shop got busted for selling crack like a block from police headquarters in Charlottesville. Usually, any shop that has a good mixtape selection is going to get busted for drug sales, unless it's a ghetto beauty shop too. I guess those godawful wigs must pull in plenty of loot to keep a business legit.

100 VINYLZ: #99 - Santo Swings! 2x7-inch by Southern Culture on the Skids

(1996, Estrus Records)
Having grown up in Shitsville, Southern America, afflicted with the genetic shortcomings of those disdainfully referred to as "white trash" (shortcomings include but not are limited to: embracing poverty as nobility, affinity for cars more than homes, a love for alcohols either held in aluminum or cooked up in copper, fried foods especially assorted parts of the chicken, and a hatred of urban things), I have a giant amount of prejudice towards people who seem to have that campy kitschy pseudo-redneck thing going on. And it gets more and more prominent. The spread of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, as well as the growth of roller derby teams are just two examples of this. I automatically hate both, not that I'm above drinking cheap ass beer or finding some tattooed thick-legged slut hot, but having lived in Richmond, Virginia, in a college environment long enough to see how many people swear off their successful suburban upbringings to slum it up as pseudo-rednecks, I can't trust these things when I see them.
First off, when slumming it up, people either don't give a fuck about what they are pretending to be (which means they don't give a fuck about how I grew up, so I should fight them) or they have chosen, at least in terms of personal image, something less affluent than what they were born into (which is retarded to me, because I have spent a good part of my life trying to escape the retarded lines of thinking I was seemingly poisoned with upon birth).
Of course, this is a cancerous way to think, because just by having a stupid blog, anyone who reads this who feels themself white trash will assume I'm a fake ass because I put words together inside the internets like someone's supposed to give a shit what I think. I can say that I've been to multiple funerals inside junkyards, multiple funerals with confederate flags on the coffin (including one where a good third of the people in attendance were black, and not shocked at all), where "Freebird" was played unironically. Shit, I just had a moment like this the other night, as last week I had two family funerals come up. One was my aunt's boyfriend, who was a truck driver, and his funeral was beautiful. Standing room only in the church I'm sure he only went to twice a year, but the preacher did a good sermon, and we all went graveside, and as is the norm, they opened it up for people to speak on his behalf. That's my favorite local tradition at funerals, because you get to hear the non-preachy shit about how someone was a good ass dude. Anyways, one lady said they always sung some song at the end of the night when they were all drinking and doing karaoke at this bar, a gospel song, but she couldn't sing it. But this old school looking country dude in one of those dress jackets with the leather part at the top like an old bluegrass musician would wear to court with two ladies said, "How about 'I'll Fly Away', will that one work?" And the other lady across the funeral said, "That'll be nice." And the fancy country dude and the two women with him busted it out. And I ain't gonna lie, I cried. Of course, being raised in Shitsville, Southern America, I didn't make a sound and I, in macho mode, wiped my eyes one at a time in a strong sweeping motion, almost like a punch, to show I was in control of my uncontrolled emotions. Well, we (meaning my family and me) were at a cookout the other night, and most of our friends aren't that wild or wacky, but this couple is. But most of the people we know are uptight ass white people, which is why I stay to myself a lot of times, and a couple of them, while bluegrass music was playing on the radio, busted into an oversung rendition of "I'll Fly Away", their little Whole Foods fed lungs working as hard as they could in between sips of $8 a 6-pack beer. (Haha, it's funny how many of the stupid things I said above I was trying to get better about I've still done in this paragraph.) They had no idea how real that song was to me, fresh in my head from seeing old country suave dude sing it at a truck driver's funeral in bumfuck Charlotte County, Virginia. Oh well. Fuck it.
Anyways, Southern Culture on the Skids is popular with the college town fake-ass redneck set, which would automatically seem they would be that way too. And with the overdone hillbilly stereotypes and songs about Little Debbie snack cakes and them throwing fried chicken into the crowd, it's hard to argue there's not a ton of posturing going on. But you know what? I have been able to overlook this because Southern Culture on the Skids has always been this way, for a long ass time now, and it's not like they've gotten rich off it. Maybe their trust fund kids all of them, and instead of having some retarded green building carpentry crew, this is their post-rich family hustle. But I am able to enjoy them.
When my wife (then not my wife) first got pregnant, we hadn't even found a house to live in together yet, and the first thing we did was tag along with my mom to the beach (northern Southerners go to the Outer Banks in North Carolina), and we saw Southern Culture on the Skids play at whatever that gaudy ass club is in Nags Head. It was my wife's first time going to a show sober, and having just quit smoking since she was knocked up, it was interesting. I don't think I even drank to be honest, but that's kind of hard for me to imagine being true. But it was a good show. And then again a few years back, she took me the night before my actual birthday to see them at Starr Hill (R.I.P.) in Charlottesville, and that was a great ass show. When they called for a volunteer to sing along with "Viva Del Santo" my wife tried to push me into the role, being it was natural for me, what with my retarded affection for Mexican wrestling, and actually owning the single, but some fratboy chump did it instead. Which was fine, because he was afraid after the second time he said it, hiding behind his Faggotland Lacrosse baseball hat which he most likely wore in the shower for a week to get that perfect curve to the bill.
Anyways, this double 7-inch is one I keep in good shape, and most likely if I ever get my never-fixed jukebox actually fixed, both singles will go into the mix, being Estrus Records was nice enough to have them be actual 45s with actual big holes. (It is worth noting here that when it comes to good shitty rock-n-roll in cheap vinyl format, Estrus Records was the standard at one point in my life. A lot of punk-ish labels are pretentious beyond their archaic format, but Estrus was always heavily steeped in drunkenness.) They came on colored vinyl as well (one red and one green), and as I've grown and minimized the collections, and been annoyed by others who like Southern Culture on the Skids, this double 7-inch has become my lone survivor of their music. I mean, you get the basic wacky song with old blues/funk chicken picking guitar solo idea they always do, and this one has that all covered in spades.
It's funny, as I try to pretend I'm some well-grown non-piece of shit, I looked up to take the last sip of this bottle of Yuengling, and realized that although I'm typing on a fancy assed new-fangled (but cheapest model available) laptop, I'm playing shitty records in a shitty camper (that some gypsy lady left on my property and may come back to retrieve at any point, which is going to be a tough day since I've trashed it, again due to genetics) looking at a picture of El Santo (which is really just a picture of his son, El Hijo Del Santo, behind a piece of glass, taped together with green tape that barely bends around the front to create a "frame"). So as much as I hate people faking the redneck funk, I'm as fucked as ever. I don't have a working satellite anymore, so I can't watch the Mexican wrestling anymore, but the non-working dish (a small new school one, not one of those old West Virginia state flower ones) is still mounted to my house, holding an empty bird feeder. And it's moments like this where I look around and realize no matter how many steps I've taken to improve my lot in life, I am seemingly as fucked as I was the day my 17-year-old parents popped me out into this world.

100 VINYLZ: #100 - Tattooed Beat Messiah LP by Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction

(1988, Vertigo Records)
This is a replacement vinyl, as originally I had this on one of many yellow shell Sony 90 minute dubbed tapes I made from my boy Evil Ed back in high school, back when tape dubbing was the RIAA‘s piracy threat of doom. It was always a favorite tape of mine (I think Faster Pussycat’s first self-titled album may have been dubbed on the other side), and while in the college, I saw it one time in the used record store of note in Richmond, which would be Plan 9 in Carytown. (I am sure I will get into a long explanation of that place during this project, but the first entry is not the time for it yet.)
Zodiac Mindwarp, by today’s standards, would be lumped into the “hair metal” movement, which is why I have always hated that hair metal label. As a dude (haha, I said “dude”) who was listening to music back then, it wasn’t as black and white as “heavy metal” and “hair metal”. Lots of music was being made that bridged that gap (Guns’n’Roses most famously, but also shit like Circus of Power, Armored Saint, Accept, L.A. Guns, The Cult, etc.). Most of what I’d consider to be bonafide hair metal was designed for pussies (either girls with actual pussies, because they need music too, or dudes who acted like pussies and worked too hard to fit in, not drinking too much nor smoking homegrown at the local arcade, and just fitting in pussy-getting skills around such delinquent behavior, which is also funny because us delinquents usually got more pussy - or at least more awesome pussy - than those pussy dudes with the watered-down rock-n-roll ever could). Hair metal makes it seem so fucking gay and stupid, and a lot of it was (insert standard VH1 learned music critic meme of “Nirvana changed everything blah blah blah” right here). But there was a lot of shit that was straight up rock-n-roll, fuck the bitches (both figuratively and literally), let’s get fucked up as fuck and fucking fuck, you fucks.
The one and only Zodiac Mindwarp record (that I know of) is this, but even better. A lot of these guys have their mental faculties, and for as crazy as everyone says Axl Rose is, he knows what he’s doing. Zodiac Mindwarp (real name Mark Manning) was a drugged-up space cowboy who could think 3000 words a minute and make them rhyme and have sort of a reason, but like a paranoid schizophrenic handing out homemade Jack Chick-style pamphlets, he didn’t really “know” what he was doing. This, of course, makes this album way better than others like it. He uses big words and combines shit that doesn’t really make sense (for example: Zodiac Mindwarp), but pulls it off, because in his personally warped mindstate, he believed it. You can see those aging fags on VH1 playing washed-up rock star talking about “hair metal” all the time, but those guys were playing a role, waiting for the gimmick to die so they could move on to some other stage of their life. Zodiac Mindwarp was all-in from the get-go (double-hyphenated cliché word score internet Scrabble rules - 153 points!).
For further proof of all this, consult your local library for Fucked By Rock by Mark Manning. My wife got it for me for my birthday because a guy I internet-know who was involved with GNR at times highly do-or-die recommended it to me. And it’s a crazy fucking book, with full insight into an acid casualty rock star two decades behind the well-known wave of hippie fuckers who you’d expect to be acid casualties. Manning was going to be the singer or was the singer or some shit for The Cult at some point, but ruined the gig by being... well, by being himself, so pretentious ass Ian Astbury was the singer instead. If you are a fan of reading books by semi-famous people who tell you how debaucherous their life was (European brothels where underage girls were duct taped into position ass-up for your personal pleasures, for example), then this is a book you probably ought to try and check out.
In the dilapidated camper behind my house where I do most of my compound-related quality lounging, there are three album covers with the albums removed taped up to the walls - The Coup’s 12-inch single cover for “Not Yet Free” (which is a highly-stylized drawing of a woman with her baby in a sling on one shoulder and a machine gun strapped over her other shoulder), the recalled cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors with guitarist Steve Gaines wobbly-eyed and engulfed in flames (which became poor taste soon after when he died in a fiery plane crash the band had), and the cover for Tattooed Beat Messiah. It inspires me, like a motherfucker.

100 VINYLZ: The Introduction

My favorite material possession, if you can count it as only one thing, would be my record collection. It is the one thing I have accumulated through the wasteful spending of money that has given me the most joy, and the one thing that if I don’t mess around with for a while, I get all weirded out and need to just hole up with it for a few hours, immersing myself within it’s oddball variety. It has been alphabetized, but within the subset of categories at one point (I think the basic categories were “white people’s music”, “black people’s music sans hip hop”, and “hip hop” in it’s most categorized days), but nowadays is all sorts of hodgepodged and broken into parts. First off, when me and my wife moved in together ten years ago, we combined our records, which was more of a difficult situation for us to accept than us mixing our DNA into a child. Over the years, with there being no real set record playing part of our home, the precise alphabetization has long been lost. I used to have this wood shelf I took out of a rental house I painted years ago that all my records fit in for the most part, with a bit of overflow running into the bottom two rows of a bookshelf from Target. When we moved to this current house like eight years ago, I cut my record collection down from around 3000 to what would fit into the old rental house shelves (spraypainted black with gold trim by me) - roughly 1500 or so. Of course, it has grown since then, but there is no alphabetized nothing about it. At the far right or left ends of the two shelves, you can run into pockets of things still in alphabetical order, that obviously have never been played in five or six years, but for the most part, it’s all fucked. More than half of it is in the house on that shelf, but as I pull things from it, I push what’s left to the far left and right, leaving empty space in the middle, which I refill when too many records are left sitting out by one of the turntables (we have three working ones right now, but have had as many as five at a time in different parts of our compound for this or that purpose) and need to be returned to Raven’s vinyl homeland.
Except I do a lot of quality lounging out in the borrowed camper behind my house (which is where two of the working turntables are located, although one is a tweener, carried back and forth between the house and camper fairly regularly as necessitated by my own personal brand of mad scientifics), so a good amount of records are now out there, including just about all of my 7-inch collection (at least the ones with big holes that would work in the unfixed jukebox doubling as a hangerless coatrack in my unfinished hallway). So my shit is everywhere.
I have always been a budget-minded record collector, which is probably where the $20 record challenge came from. I do not go into a record store and think, “Oh shit, awesome, a $25 record I’ve always wanted.” I think, “Man, this sucks. I’ve always wanted this record and these faggots want $25 for it. I wonder if I can stuff it into my hoodie?” This is difficult, because record collecting is a very well-known faggot science now, and the sharp-faced guys who price records at used record stores are aware of this, and price accordingly. Also, the ebays fucked everything up for everybody, because if some schmuck in Illinois is getting $23 for his old Voivod War and Pain record, every asshole everywhere thinks they deserve the same $23 for their copy. Except that ain’t the way it works, at least not the way I think it should work. I have wasted tax return money once or twice buying things inside the ebays, but I’m too budget conscious, which means I lose most every auction unless it’s to some disreputable fucker from Australia who ends up ripping me off too. Plus, shipping is the jew’s magic touch to the ebays, and that’s where you make, or lose money, depending on your end of the globalized flea market bargain. I am to this day more of a “let me dig through the endless uncategorized crates of dollar records” type of guy than a “let’s dig through this well-labelled section of top quality records”. Music is meant to be used, not accumulated, and I would say a majority of what I still have is here for a reason, meaning it has use at one mood or another to actually be played. I do not deify the records, and through the years have used various methods of marking them as played or most recent. I used to have a roll of like 5000 little alien head stickers that I’d put the ascending number of and slap on an album side when I played it all the way through, and some of my records are peppered with these, like college football helmets. For a brief time, when I had a bunch of my old rapping 12-inch singles in the camper, whenever I played one I would put a silver Sharpie mark on the sleeve, like I was counting days in jail in an old western flick. All sorts of stupid shit like that. These are not keepsakes to sell later. The perfect example of that is the first MF Doom single, which I have on 12-inch, that Mike Dikk and John Dawson told me might be worth some money. I looked it up inside the ebays and it was worth some money. But I didn’t feel like selling it. Since then, it sat in a pile of records one time near where I had a Tupperware cat bowl for water and food in the camper because the cat was in heat but we couldn’t afford to get it fixed so I trapped it in the camper instead so it didn’t annoy us in the main house with it’s incessant cat-slut cooing. It knocked over the water bowl, which dripped under a sideways stack of records, and just a couple of weeks ago I was digging through them, pulled out the MF Doom single, whose sleeve was stuck to like a BDP single or some shit, and I had to rip them apart. The MF Doom sleeve is all mildewy, but the record is finer than fuck. I played it three times that night.
It’s funny too, because my folks had a good record collection (in fact, parts of mine are just sneaky embezzlements on my part when they split up when I was 16 and my dad lived in a trailer too small for too many possessions and my mom could give a fuck about all that fucking music my drunk ass dad always played), so I was always into records. I remember compact discs coming out (I don’t call them “CDs” because CD is a nickname and nicknames are for friends and I’m a giant hipster fag who thinks Mr. Show is hilarious) and some of my boys being all like, “Man, CDs will last forever but records scratch.” Except CDs felt like a transitory thing even then. I mean, yeah, 8-tracks died out, and cassettes I could envision dying out as well, but records had been around for decades. Compact discs were the same shape and idea, just digitized and mysterious, but in an evil way. Like Third World tribal religions are mysterious, but in a fun “shouldn’t kill me but even if it does it’ll be an awesome story” type mysterious. Compact discs had this ominious futuristic soylent green nature to them. I wasn’t down. And to be truthful, until I was 25 (which was 1998), I had stolen more compact discs in two burglaries than I’d ever bought, new or used. I think in ‘98, I used a fake name (C.R. McClellan) to join Columbia House, and that probably put me over the top for buying more than I had stolen, to that point in life.
Now, it’s gotten even worse, with MP3s (I couldn’t remember what that stood for, to further sell the Mr. Show David Cross as Allen Ginsburg character reference) and people downloading shit, CDs became obsolete quicker than fuck, but people became more removed from the music as something in their house. As opposed to a giant collection of records to look at and feel and peruse for whatever info you can, or better yet to cut the stems and seeds out of a half ounce bag, all your music is inside this tiny little robot that can just disappear. Or you can click a couple of buttons and make it all go away. I know dudes with like two and three external hard drives just full of music - a million billion gigs of shit they’ll never have a chance to listen to because they use all their free time acquiring more music. It is the new CD, because people can get it so easily, and now records are more relevant than compact discs. (HA! What’s up now, my boys from high school? I’m talking to you Dave Jenkins.) We are so far removed from our music as a part of our life, and it’s more part of the background clutter. Theme music has been replaced by ringtones... sigh.
For me, each and every record I have has personal experiences attached. How I got it, what happened while it was playing, what it’s been through with me... Shit, my record collection, during extreme bouts of self-created poverty, has suffered a number of genocides, wiping out entire genres or cherry-picking classics that I’ve missed intensely almost immediately after selling and ever since. The current record collection is almost a conglomeration of survivors - those things too important to me or lacking enough value to others to ever be abandoned into another weird fucker’s hands.
Well, what I decided to do was go through what’s left, what I have here and now, on my five acre compound of chaotic, blemished perfection, and compile this list of my 100 Most Valuable to Me Vinyls. It is highly subjective, and I could probably, once done, immediately do it again and it’d be entirely different. (And I do plan on revisiting this list again... in four years. My record collection always fluctuates and is far more important to me than some fake ass rich fucker trying to be my political figurehead, so I imagine this will be a good way for me to occupy myself during Presidential election years - sitting in my dilapidated camper with no TV and no computer, listening to old records.) But this is the list.
I will forewarn you though, I am going to be long-winded and highly detailed to an almost retarded personal extent. There will be no google searching or wikipedia consultations for historical facts behind the records in question. But there will be entirely too much information about myself, almost to the point of this being a memoir. Which is great, because I’d like to remember a bunch of this shit one more time. There will be no download links for you to see what I’m talking about musically, because blip blooping the sound wave patterns into your own personal robot won’t include attachments for the activities connected and the things that make it special to me and probably only me. That is your forewarning. And that is your introduction to my 100 Most Valuable to Me Vinyls for 2008.

7-list: Personal Hairstyles Since Thanksgiving (both past truth and futuristic projection)

So I had dreadlocks for a good five years, growing them when I worked for this asshole at a place that did trade show exhibits for big pharmaceutical companies, because he was a straight-laced full of shit fuckface with a sexy wife and almost-sexy teenage daughter, and I was the guy in the finishing department who did the work of three men, so I figured I’d force his straight-lacedness into uncomfortable realms by looking as fucked as I could while still being an invaluable cog in his license to print money and throw me pork chop bones. What a stupid fucking reason to grow dreadlocks - to scare squares, not that being a white dude into deracialized Rastafarianism is any better.
Anyways, I got sick of them, sick of people asking me about weed, sick of cops mad-dogging me in vehicle passing, sick of having lumps of my own tangled hair disturbing the perfect softness of my pillow reaching my aching brain-encasing skull at night. So I cut them the fuck off, going from dreads halfway down my back to hair an inch or two at the longest. This was difficult because growing up with a longhaired redneck father figure, I hadn’t actually had short hair since I was like 11. No shit. I have always been afraid I had like giant lumps in my head from milk crates being thrown against me or falling down flights of stairs while drunk to even entertain having short hair. But there was no choice. It had to come off, all under the plan to grow it back long as quickly as that shit will grow. My wife was dead-set against me cutting it, but once it was cut, she loved how cute I was (and in fact, I’ve had a lot of regular-looking women double take me since cutting it, but I’m more into the retarded poetry-writing dirtbag teenage girl types working at Subway who like longhair) and wanted me to keep it short. But it ain’t staying short. The day after Thanksgiving when I cut my hair off might have been the last time I ever cut the hair on my head, ever (except my mustache hairs which have to be trimmed or else I have pussy-juice smelling fishing wire getting into every bite of food I try to put into my mouth). So here are the seven stages of my hair since shorning away my locked dread...

STAGE ONE: SHORT UNKEMPT HAIR (aka the Jimmy Fallon) - The one major misconception about having dreadlocks is that you don’t wash your hair. I did, all the time, because if I didn’t that shit would stink. But you have to squeeze the water out or else they get all mildewy (bleach solves that though, in case you were wondering). But I washed them every time I took a shower, at least twice a week. But once I had short combable hair, I remembered the high grease content of my hair (due to intense fried chicken eating, not to Italian or Mexican heritage), and I’d have to remember to wash it at the worst every other day. But the added grease, even in minimal amounts, would make my hairs stick out and over or up and sideways in odd manners. It was kind of like being a budding mad scientist, except there was no science I was tinkering with obsessive compulsively to cause it to happen. Luckily, my hair grew.

STAGE TWO: SLIGHTLY LONGER BUT STILL SHORT UNKEMPT HAIR (aka the Indy Rock Douchebag) - Basically the exact same cut as above, but slightly longer. It was a good experience in personal judgemental nature though, because I automatically hate on all those indy rock fuckers with that look. But I have slightly oily hair, and when sleeping on the couch watching The Price Is Right because I didn’t go to work (Drew Carey sucks as the new Bob Barker by the way, and I like Drew Carey; he’s trying to hard to be like Bob Barker; he needs to just be like “fuck it, let’s do this shit” in his own way), my hair would stick three ways in uncaring manners. It looked funny, but I never let myself leave the house on purpose like that, because I know there’s people who actually style themselves to look unkempt like that, and that is the most atrocious beer bottle upside the head (with the beer bottle being full of gasoline and a rag wick and it going upside your head from afar) activity I can think of, at this moment at least. So I would hand comb it down, since I didn’t own a brush. This is when I realized, much to my amusement (and my wife’s chagrin) that by wiping your hands over your hair in the Indy Rock Douchebag stage, you could easily achieve the 67% Redneck, 33% Wigger look, with the short greasy bangs going straight down your forehead. I would always do that look and roll into the living room, singing some Dr. Dre lyrics, and my wife would flip out and tell me not to ever do it again. But I did it again. I got mind control over my wife.

STAGE THREE: MOP-TOP HAIR (aka the Beatles Come to America) - Man, this is the absolute worst stage. Anyone who has been forced by lice or jail or hallucination or employment opportunities to chop off their beloved longhair will tell you this is the worst in-between part, too long for looking good really but too short to hold back with a child’s sized hair tie. Unfortunately, this is where I currently sit, which has been good for business, because people trust me, as I don’t look like I’m going to creepy crawl my way into someone’s personal wealth, yet I don’t look like some fratboy con artist. I would say in the construction industry, this is the most prosperous hairstyle you could possibly have - long enough to show you too busy and competent to be fucking around with haircuts, yet short enough to prove you are not some carefree idealistic flake bound to flip out and disappear at any point.

STAGE FOUR: SHAGGY EUROTRASH HAIR (aka the NBA Whiteboy) - I’m actually looking forward to this stage, as I’m way into art lately, and I figured once I hit this stage in the next month or two, I’m gonna start hitting as many art shows as I can with my wife and kids in tow and create this aura of “This guy is for-real” to the fake ass pseudo-strugglers that populate events like that. I am a committed married man, happy to have found a woman who not only tolerates but encourages my personal inane insanities, so I’m not going to jeopardize that for other pussy. But having other bitches, hot or not, flash googly eyes (which is the female equivalent to man drool) at me makes me feel like a big man and makes my little penis fill with alcohol-stained blood much faster at the end of the night. I totally understand this haircut too, because in an effort to get back in shape at age 35, I’ve been playing basketball lately, and the shaggy hair is a white man’s genetic advantage at times. It accentuates head fakes and makes the tuck-under-a-jumping-other-dude-and-do-a-finger-roll move so much easier. In fact, if Allen Iverson had been born white, I doubt he would’ve ever felt the need to develop his crossover dribble. He could’ve just tossed his hair one way, bolted the other, and added two points to his team’s total on the motherfucking regular. Also on the scoreboard.

STAGE FIVE: IF YOU FORCE IT MOST CAN BE KEPT BACK BY A HAIR TIE (aka the Primus Fan) - This is a tough one too for a lot of people, because you can keep most back, but you have some at the front of your head that’s too short and falls out of any hair tie you try and enslave your folicle growths inside of. I have always thought that this stage was the cause for a lot of dudes like Primus fans, and ferret owners, and bike messengers, to shave that little bit on both sides of their head, to prevent those short parts that couldn’t be held back in a nice full-head ponytail. Except this prolongs the problem rather than solving it. Thus, you have to keep shaving those two parts on the side of your head. This is a really bad stage in hair growth I’m not looking forward to, because you can’t just play it off like you have an extra-long stage four cut, because it’ll hang in your eyes and look like a Mexican metalhead rapist from 1987 (aka the Adam Morrison). I wear glasses so the Mexican metalhead rapist is counteracted by the glasses (which no Mexican metalhead has ever worn, regardless of how much they might have needed them) and just makes me look like a fucking fool. And that’s what I’ll be. But luckily, my hair will grow.

STAGE SIX: THE THIN PONYTAIL (aka the Birkenstocks) - Another tough one, even worse because like I said, I wear glasses, which means I’m going to look like any asshole ever picking through overpriced organic fruit in the Whole Foods produce section. I have briefly though lately that a neck tattoo would be a good way to counteract against the negative visual effects of the thin ponytail, which has yet to get the full hair girth needed to make a chunky ass fistful of longhair behind your head, but what do you get tattooed on your neck? The only thing I thought of that wouldn’t be stupid to me forever was getting, in cursive handwriting, wrapping around the back three-quarters of my neck, “CURSIVE HANDWRITING FOREVER” so on my right neck it would say “CURSIVE” and on my left neck it would say “FOREVER” and underneath my eventual awesome mane of machismo redneck hippie with a penchant for self-destruction hair would be the “HANDWRITING” part. The only problem is if I turn into a total fag and decide to rock short hair for the rest of my life like a total fag, I’d have that wrapping around my neck.

STAGE SEVEN: BRAIDED PONYTAIL (aka the Willie Nelson) - Basically, this was the whole reason I cut my hair. I was raised much more of a braided ponytail man than a dreadlocked man, so I was faking my own personal funk. And when I was younger, I would rock the braided ponytail, or even the double braids like Willie himself. The only problem was I was younger, with a fresh face, and just looked like I was looking for an ass-kicking. And actually I was at times. But now, I’m 35, have plenty of scars, including a couple of facial ones, a goofy beard that hasn’t been trimmed or shaved in almost a decade (but still isn’t as long as like a David Allan Coe or Jimmy Valiant... but that’s a separate seven-list completely, about my beard and long beard envy), the braided ponytail or the double Pippy Longstockings would be nothing but perfect. And the fact I have grey hairs popping out my beard now only adds to that. In fact, it would look fucked and premeditated if I didn’t. Of course, it is premeditated, because you can’t not cut your hair for that long unless you think about it. But I try not to think about it. I just hope once I get to the longhair like this and can braid it, I don’t get all stylish and stupid like the opposite but equal of an indy rock douchebag and shave my facial hair into a fu manchu. That shit is the worst.

CLEOPATRA, COMINATCHA

I can also bring the hatred, even if most shit generally doesn't do more than annoy me. What I have for you now is constructive hatred. I'm mostly resigned to the fact that T-Pain has like 4-6 singles and/or guest-spots out every single month. Some of those are pretty good songs, too. But there is some inexcusably stupid shit T-Pain does that deserves to get clowned. Today, it's his total lack of lyrical ability. Example, from "Bartender":

"Ooh, she made us drinks
to drink
we drunk 'em
got drunk"

T-Pain also gets really close to that farting in the microphone line. He could make a song with EEP-OPP-ORK-AH-AH as the chorus and people would have a new dance craze in the first week.

Dude is a Rapper Ternt Sanger (Because He Couldn't Fucking Rap In The First Place & Didn't Want To Be A Rapper Ternt Exterminator.) I don't hate T-Pain, but the motherfucker could hire a ghostwriter or something.

What up, my people-weeble? This be Kingm0b: the Feeble..

So I didn't quite die, I just did a lot of working 'nshit. What happens when you have a bored DJ with some instrumentals and an afternoon? Grand-scale Dumbassery, that's what the fuck happens. All this stuff is live, I don't have the know-how yet to play with computer music editing like some of y'all.

Part of this is a side-track from a big ass set I am trying to piece together before it all falls out of order in my brain. It will be the most gangsta thing I've ever done, so naturally you guys will be all "BLARG WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY RAKIM?" but I may end up hawking this shit to people in real life if I can work it out the way I want to This here is loosely a remix, I just got a different Bun verse.

Gangsta Boo (f. Playa Fly & Bun B) - Spinnin & Sippin (King Mob remix): http://www.zshare.net/audio/10257615e286340e/

This is what happens when you give a wrestling nerd a WWF music album. It may take years for that little seed to take fruit, but they will do something nerdy with it. My family can take pride in the fact that I never acted out Stone Cold Steve Austin entrances and did toasts with cartons of milk. I never did that shit, but I e-knew a dude who said he did. So yeah, this is more of a blend I guess.

King Mob - Brood Ryderz Anthem: http://www.zshare.net/audio/102552506e629eb8/

This is one that scratches an itch I've had for a couple years with "Circles." At first, I tried to throw it on top of TROY, but it never fit that well. Then I would just play around with the Soul Coughing because it's so sparse you can throw it in electronic shit or whatever you want. I remembered I had downloaded a bunch of DJ Quik instrumentals (by the way, DJ Quik used to fucking KILL on some beats.) Enter "You's A Ganxta" and that's where babies come from. I finally got the phrasing right, too.

Soul Coughing - Circles (Kingm0b blend): http://www.zshare.net/audio/1025609883acd7cb/


This last one is what got me on the remix/mashup/whatever kick in the first place. I don't know how it is where you, the reader, live but here in Texas they are overplaying the fuck out of Lil Wayne - "Lollipop". I am not joking when I tell you they have on more than one occasion played the whole 6 minute song twice in a row. It is such a piece of shit song with Lil Jabbering Windbag verses run through the vocoder filter. This is about as close to an artist testing out that farting in a microphone thing as you or I will ever witness. With that in mind, I had a Sifl & Olly clip around and decided to make the HOTTEST NEW LOLLIPOP REMIX YOU WILL EVER HEAR IN YOUR MOTHERFUCKING LIVES. Yeah, perhaps that spike in traffic for my CERTIFIED HOOD BANGER LOLLIPOP REMIX will bring in some new readers who will stay for the awesome EWA bullshit.

Anyway back to the BRAND NEW EXCLUSIVE LOLLIPOP REMIXED BY KING MOB. Also featuring Gorilla Zoe for about 10 seconds or so.

Lil Wayne - Lollipop (Kingmob remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/10246698a119c0aa/

Coming Back!!

Here is a re-up of the EWA Top 100 Jamz 100-81 entries. Possibly because we are making an effort to finally finish that fucker off.


EWA JAMZ 100-81

Buncocky 4, 5, 6, 7

Man, I hav been slacking with posting this. Anyway, the incresingly successful Buncocky Cast is up to #7. We've covered a lot of ground over the past few weeks, so put aside 4 hours and catch up.

Also, we are now officially on iTunes. There's a direct link below, but if you're ever far away from home, but somehow near iTunes, you just have to go to the iTunes store and search "buncocky" and it will pop up. If you're a fan, or just an impartial frequent listener, PLEASE subscribe. The more subs we get, the more legit we look. If you have an iTunes account, leave a review, good or bad.

CLICK HERE TO CATCH UP ON ALL THE EPISODES

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if you have a question or concern or just want to e-mail us, E-MAIL: buncocky @ gmail.com

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THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT!!!!!

Another $20 Record Challenge

So yeah, I got them records a couple months back for my birthday, and had planned to write the second half of two $20 Record Challenges (where you buy $20 worth of records at a record shop, which tests your skill to uncover gems as well as the record store's ability to not suck a fat dick), and never did, mostly because poverty seems to be embedded in my DNA and I am living in constant fear I will come home to find a bank sitting inside my house with all my shit piled up in the ditch. But hey, welcome to America in 2008. Motherfuckers are arguing over whether or not we're in a recession and I'm wondering if I'm gonna be standing in line for an eighth parcel of rotten apples by the end of the summer. Our credit card had $50 on it, so I bought $48 worth of seeds though, so we can have a fat ass garden. Of course, if the place is no longer our's, I guess we'll have to sneak into the garden to get our shit we grew back, but at the same time, I feel more valuable as a life insurance policy than an actual working member of society a lot of times, so if worse came to worse, I'd probably go out on some outlaw retard tip, holed up in my house shooting through windows which are conveniently already busted up in a couple of spots. Anyways, enough of that talk; here's another $20 worth of records I got in the basement at Plan 9 in Carytown, Richmond, Virginia, which is a hipster hellhole to be sure, where all the workers look like eastern Europeans in Chuck Taylors, but you have to be ahead of their hipster curve and you can still find mad awesome shit because they have crazy amounts of dollar records, of a far greater quality (set to record store standard, not Salvation Army standard) than most dollar bins.

ICE-T - SOMEBODY GOTTA DO IT/OUR MOST REQUESTED RECORD 12-INCH SINGLE - $3
My boy Paul-Ski in high school had co-opted the 7-inch version of "Somebody Gotta Do It" (aka Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!) from his older brother, and we used to play that shit constantly. Somebody Gotta Do It was a classic old school shit-talking to the nth degree, about wealth in this case, and no lying, I used to be a hardcore ass Ice-T fan, all the way up until O.G. Original Gangster sort of alienated me because I was in college and mad dorks were loving on that shit. And yes, I see the obvious observation, that I was probably a mad dork in college too, and I probably was, but there is a feeling of entitlement you get when you are down with an artist from his first record, then second, and on, and then he has something that blows up more mainstream, and when you're a contrarian fuckface like myself, it makes you think less of it. But also, O.G. wasn't nearly as good as Rhyme Pays or Power, though it's probably better than the Iceberg.
The B-side to this I'd never heard and it's an interesting old school "let's rhyme over a breakbeat and the DJ busting up a Led Zeppelin snippet on the tables. It's like listening to Ice-T do a Schoolly D-style song, just it has that west coast flavor of extra roller skating rink-sounding bells in the beat. And both songs have bonus beats extras, which makes this a smart $3.

SLIM THUG - WOOD GRAIN WHEEL 12-INCH SINGLE - $1
I am a big fan of Houston rappers, even the second-wave of DJ Screw-influenced guys that blew up a couple years back (I have been wishing my man Kingmob would make a H-Town's greatest hits mix with the best Paul Wall/Mike Jones/Lil Flip/Lil Keke/Chamillionaire/Slim Thug/Bun B shit from that two year window where it was going crazy), but Slim Thug is not one of my favorites, mostly because he's always talking about being "the boss". Dude, jobs suck, and most every black person knows this as well as most lower-level white people like myself, so I do not understand why you'd want to advertise yourself as a boss. This is standard second wave Screw-influenced, with the standard Fat Pat slowed down lyric doubling as a hook. I had been excited to see this because I thought it was a track I had heard on the satellite radio with a weird bass kick pattern I wanted to share with the PSY/OPSogist for example purposes upon future beatmaking endeavors, except I was mistaken (it was actually a Chamillionaire song), so this isn't the best dollar I wasted that day. Still, you slow the pitch down on an instrumental track with a Fat Pat hook and motherfuckers (even whiteboys) can freestyle for hours.
Also, added dick in the mouth to whoever decided it made sense to just have Radio/LP/instrumental on both sides of a fucking record (which is even worse when the producer is full of himself and only puts the radio/street versions on both sides with no instrumentals). Not only was the early '90s a much greater heyday for rap peoples putting out better music, musically and conceptually, but shit, they had extra tracks that they put as B-sides or bonus cuts. And all these shitty free "mixtapes" you can get inside these internets don't make up for it.

TAKA BOOM - NIGHT DANCIN'/CLOUD DANCER 12-INCH SINGLE - $1
I got this because at one point I was buying up 12-inch disco singles and just playing them as slow as the turntable would go, and you could find some great loops that way (and who the fuck who is into regular music listens to shitty disco music from the '70s, so it's an untapped genre of samplitude). I eventually stopped doing this because I ended up with so many shitty disco singles that didn't even have a good horn-heavy loopable section that I was afraid I would turn gay. Unfortunately, this single pushes me further towards gaydom. The fact it's on Ariola Records, which is what tricked me into giving it a shot, doesn't make it less gay; I think it's a hairy beer-bellied bear dude's areola they're talking about, although I'm not sure if areola only refers to bitch nipples or all nipples. I never took anatomy, though I play one on dvd.
Wait, "Cloud Dancer" does have a nice acoustic intro with some "oooooh oooooh ooooooooh"s, but it's not really sample material as it sounds more like somebody doing an electronica remix to an L.A. Guns or Skid Row power ballad.

VARIOUS ARTISTS - ORIGINAL EXPERIENCE LP - $4
This is a collection of people I never heard of produced by a guy called Jah Screw on 1-Time Records out of Jamaica, but with no date. It might be good dub music, or it might be early ragga music, or it might be really shitty shit from somewhere in the middle '90s.
Actually, it is even worse than any of those... it is the same shitty synth-pulse beat but with like ten different set of vocals over the same beat. By the third one, it wouldn't matter if you had ODB freestyling while Louie Armstrong scatted in the background, it would drive you crazy. This shit is some Son of Sam's neighbor's dog barking to me.

LITTLE MEEKY - SWEAR PT. 2 7-INCH - $1
Sounds like late '80s raggamuffin (meaning the dude rhymes like the "Pass the Duchie" kids), but it's catchy enough and unsynthesized enough to make it into my never-get-fixed jukebox. Some old dude who does that thing has promised me three times he'd call me regularly to get it in his shop, but fucker always flails. He sounds on the phone like he smells like mothballs and hates black people though. I saw a truck for some other amusement company that actually had "jukeboxes" on the side in letters, but mostly they deal with dollar-operated digital jukeboxes nowadays. Nobody's got that old school actual fan slotted 45 jukebox knowledge. World's gone to hell, in a bootleg Louie Vutton handbag.

THE JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH - KING KONG PT. I/PT. II 7-INCH - $1
I often buy stupid worthless Jimmy Castor singles, based on the ridiculously unquestionable awesomeness of "Troglogyte (Cave Man Song)". There is some serious funk here, and the story of King Kong is Jimmy Castor at his mid-level - not too over-the-top stupid, but not great. The fake King Kong groans during the break are probably more than worth the one dollar though, except I bet like 7000 fag nerd Aesop Rock-loving DJs have sampled it already. It kinda bums me out that the music I do is probably gonna end up falling into that stupid Sage Francis/Aesop Rock college dork kids love it genre. Oh well, I guess I can work for years to get popular, fight mood swings and depression, and then go nuts and blow up like 38 college kids along with myself on some hole-in-the-wall stage in some university town where the PBRs are in full motherfucking effect at the bar.

JOE SIMON - ALL MY HARD TIMES/GEORGIA BLUE 7-INCH - $1
Hey, I know this "All My Hard Times" song, and it's great. Life's got my man Joe Simon pushed around and pissed, but he keeps on trucking along. A great thing to remember, except he should be glad he wasn't around now because diesel's over four dollars a gallon and you can't just keep on trucking no more.
B-side ain't bad either, although I wore my needle down letting it skip over the ending for eight minutes because I was in the middle of masturbating to Penthouse Forum book from 1978. I like old porn letters better because dudes are more about fucking more women back then as opposed to watching more dudes fuck their woman like nowadays porn letters be tripping over.

LITTLE JOE BLUE - DON'T START ME TO TALKING/DIRTY WORK GOING ON 7-INCH - $1
It is blues music, meaning there is chicken scratch guitar solos and the lyrics are about the pain and struggle of everyday situations, usually nasty cheating bitches or dirty britches with no dollar bills in them pockets.
B-side is more of the same, except the 7-inch was sitting slightly underneath that plastic spacer thing for the turntable, so the song had a slow down/speed up rhythm to it since it was spinning off kilter. I need to remember to tell PSY/OPS about that because with a most proper sounding song, you could find some weird ass changing rhythm yet still on rhythm samples in such an accidental mannerism.

BOBBY GREGG AND HIS FRIENDS - THE JAM PART 1/PART 2 7-INCH - $1
This song is upbeat as a motherfucker. In fact, I'm not depressed anymore. Who cares if I'm broke? Man, I'm able-bodied, and the rain will stop, and I've got work out the ass to do once the sun comes out and it's warm. I just work, and by Monday, I could probably clock $1200. Except, let's be reasonable, and stay home on Sunday to put the garden in the ground and settle for just making $1000 by next Monday. That gets me one month closer on being caught up on the crib, plus stocks the house full of groceries that ain't corn flakes, rice, and frozen squash from the freezer from last year. Thanks Bobby Gregg and whoever your motherfucking friends are. I'm gonna go out in the rain and do some high-speed yoga.
Seriously, this song is awesome as fuck. It makes me happy, although with the wife having had our third kid two months ago, it's been almost three months since I've had sex, much less one that involved a serious amount of foreplayriffic fellatio beforehand, so my idea of happy is probably all sorts of out of wack right now. When they give you a vasectomy, the semen is absorbed inside your body, which freaks me out, but I'm also of the belief is you do not have sex enough, the same thing happens to a regular unfixed dude, and it makes you crazy. Were I a scientist, I'd do research on such manners with semen absorption into the body and sexual predatory actions, but I'm not a scientist, just a housepainter, so I try to explain to the Mexicans who work for me when I need someone to work for me what I'm talking about, using the 300 Mexican words I know.

MILLIE JACKSON - IF YOU LOVING YOU IS WRONG I DON'T WANT TO BE RIGHT/THE RAP 7-INCH - $1
Oh, you know that A-side song as it's well-known, but the B-side is a play off that first song and B-side is the motherfucking shit. It is a definite jukebox stuffer, guaranteed to hold a solid spot in one of my 100 slots, without a fucking doubt. Millie Jackson is akin to Jimmy Castor in that she has some top-notch songs that give her a reputation, except she also has a bunch of dumb shit. I'd like someone to just send me a link to a Millie Jackson megamix of all her awesomest stuff, so I could get excited, but then never download it because I never do. I have a real disconnect between real music and the internets, that borders on mental problem. But then again, that's the beauty of the internets as it allows us all a great spot to develop our mental problems way more fully than our parents ever could, at least not in a safe environment.

OTIS REDDING - (SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY/SWEET LORENE 7-INCH - $1
Basically bought this specifically for the jukebox since Otis is one of the all-time bestest and this was the only stupid dollar single stupid Plan 9 was offering, slapping $3 price tags on all his other 7-inches. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is played out of course, and "Sweet Lorene" is a standard R&B slammer from that time period, talking shit to some hot skank to try and get inside her pussy tissues, but still, it's Otis Redding. It's funny, you get all hung up on modern standards where Amy Winehouse is throaty and bluesy as fuck, but then you listen to one Otis Redding song and realize she's just a stupid ugly bitch hooked on crack with a nice marketing gimmick that tricked a bunch of magazine reviewers.

REVEREND THOMAS L. WALKER - I'LL MAKE IT SOMEHOW/I DON'T DESERVE A MANSION 7-INCH - $1
This dude Ace I used to know was a way better music nerd than me (he used to do album reviews for Spin I think), and he had all these wonderfully crazy black gospel records he'd play. It tricks me into thinking you can just start buying the shit and find gems, which led to me having a ton of shitty ass gospel LPs at one point, but I learned, you can't try too hard. Still, on $20 missions, I usually like to get one 7-inch to give it a shot, based mostly on the title of the songs, kind of like an NFL team's 7th round draft pick as a possible project that pays off. This was that choice for me this time. Way too much choir in the A-side, which killed off a great Hammond organ-heavy start. Basically, all great gospel music should have a Hammond organ plus somebody playing electric guitar who idolizes Wes Montgomery. And "I'll Make It Somehow" is that, just clusterfucked up with too much goddamned choir. B-side was even worse, so thanks a fucking lot Reverend Johnny Walker, now I'm one step closer to the devil. Thrash bands from 1987 never muck up their intrinsic awesomeness with too much goddamned choir.

JONNY OSBOURNE - ONE RUB-A-DUB FOR THE ROAD/DUB FOR THE ROAD 7-INCH - $3
On Top Rank Records, and it delivers fairly well enough. It's no Madlib compilation-worthy ass single, but it's good enough to make it into the imaginary broken jukebox rotation. Man, if I ever get that thing fixed, I could probably write a book figuring out what 100 singles to put into it out of the stupid boxes and milk crates full of stupid vinyl I have.
Of course, the dub side is most enjoyable, as usual for middling quality Jamaican singles of this sort. I'd love to do a $20 record challenge in Kingston. Actually, I am in the process of attempting to set aside enough money to take two weeks towards the end of fall and travel a loop through the southeast, hitting up record stores for a $20 record challenge each day. Except, thus far, my saving up for it has involved me thinking of it and realizing I'm a couple grand behind on regular bills already. But yeah.