"RAP MUSIC THAT I LIKE A LOT RIGHT NOW THAT JESSE WILL FEEL INDIFFERENT TOWARDS, PT. 3" BY THOMAS

Oh hi! How are things? I have a bunch of music to share with you, so let's get to it:

93 Feet of Smoke 

Oh man, I am VERY excited to talk about this guy! Easily one of my top 5 favorite artists out right now. 

This is the first song I ever heard by him and also a good jumping off point to see how much his music has evolved. The beat features a simple guitar loop over percussion that sounds like it's collapsing in on itself, but the real winner is the vocal effects, which sound completely bonkers. It sounds like he is buried in a coffin and yelling from a megaphone while also being waterboarded. 

My first impression of this song was "wow, bad mixing and mastering", but something about this one really gets under my skin, especially the bass guitar plucking @ around the 1:30 mark. What gets me is how the song builds from a simple guitar melody to a wall of noise and I LOVE how expressive his voice is, going from melancholy crooning to distorted screams. 93 has a level of musicality that is 10 steps above your average SoundCloud rapper with crushing drug problems.  

Wow I just realized there are like 6 more songs by this guy that I want to share, but let me just end it with this one for now. This is from his latest EP and the atmosphere of this beat is INSANE. If feels like you are bearing witness to the world ending in a very dramatic fashion. I also now know how to properly pronounce "Foyer", which is a big plus. All of his songs are about being a miserable piece of shit drug addict, so I really hope he is doing OK IRL.

Lil Narnia 

Lil Narnia is the answer to the question "how emo can emo rap go?" Turns out, very emo!

Oh man this song is an odd one and took me a long time to wrap my head around. The beat sounds like a downed power line; all jagged hi-hats with almost no low end. Listen for the bass in the beat, it's barely there! The guitars are dope, it sounds like a Deftones B-side that early 2000s teens would cry to. The fact that Lil Narnia looks like a craft beer and weed aficionado but has a high pitched emo voice will probably be the thing that sticks with most people and I too was definitely like 😮 when I first saw this. Major props to you if you can understand more than 20% of the lyrics. Embrace the unintelligibility as part of the aesthetic. 

The beat feels like an angel is playing a harp with a drum machine in the clouds for you (I am trying to avoid using the word "ethereal" lol). The chorus of this song is great: "thought we were humans/ but I was wrong/ things in pain is all we are" 😢 

A COUPLE LOOSIES

I get a strong New Wave/Post-punk vibe from this song and love how the drums don't come in until the 1:58 mark. Am I veering too far away from rap music at this point? As a former big time metalhead it was always a constant point of contention on the internet about what subgenre a particular artist fell under. Like there would be real human beings who liked death metal, but not black metal and vice versa and they would get in long-winded internet arguments about how their favorite bands should be classified. It feels like this is something people are taking less and less seriously these days and the idea of aligning your personal brand with one particular subgenre of music seems preposterous in 2019. Artists freely meld together whatever music they want nowadays and we are better off because of it. I feel kind of sorry for all the Punk Dads out there still stuck listening to the same 3 albums by the Vandals or whatever 😕

Let's finish with your regular reminder that Bladee is still the greatest rapper out of this niche of music. Again, the atmosphere is key; the downtrodden beat matches Bladee's emotionless autotuned voice perfectly. An essential track for all of the Doomers out there. 

OK I have many more songs to share with you, but I will save it for next time! Thank you for reading, friends. Have a nice time out there and stay safe 😊

Thomas is a blogger, birder and sad music enthusiast living in Oakland, CA. 

DIAL B FOR BIRDER, EPISODE 6

Yeah yeah yeah....hiatus sorry long time do better. What you have to understand, fans, is that it is VERY, VERY  COLD in my house. (If you think I can put off blogging or uploading a podcast for a long time, you should see how long I can put off insulating a floor. Especially when it's cold.) My feet are cold and my computer is cold and my typing fingers are cold, and that's my excuse.
For this episode of the podcast--"episode 6"--Thomas and I went to an east bay birding location selected by Thomas: "Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline." The whole 10 minute drive over, Thomas was going on and on about how dope it was gonna be, and how many birds he'd heard were there. "It will be like nothing you've ever seen before," he said at one point. The episode before this one, if you can remember that far back, was the "zero birds, and I get poison oak" episode, so I was really hoping we'd knock it out of the park this time, to get things back on track. 
Did we knock it out of the park? 
Will Thomas and I be podcasting more frequently in the future? 
Will there be photos from our expedition after the jump?
Listen right here, or on iTunes or Stitcher, to find out! Expedition photos after the jump. 

I GOT MY QUIZ RESULTS BACK, AND THEY DON'T LOOK GOOD

I took the "What Passion Of The Christ Character Are You?" quiz and got "Booing Villager."

I took the "What Cuss Word Are You?" quiz and got "Bitch-ass."

I took the "What Type Of Friend Are You?" quiz and got "Fat." 

I took the "What's Your Type?" quiz and got italic.

I took the "What Kind Of Owl Are You?" quiz and got "Spotted."
I took the "What Comic Strip Character Are You?" quiz and got fuckin' CATHY!!!! Shit!!!!!!!!!!

Book Review: THE PURE AND THE IMPURE by Colette

THE PURE AND THE IMPURE is a book written in French in the 1930s that teaches you about how love and sex works. I read the whole thing (translated into english) and I still feel like a love and sex novice, but it did two of the things I'm looking for when I read a book: it articulated some things that I've observed and felt, but never told anyone, and it broadened my horizons by showing me the world through a different brain.
Two things that it didn't do is make me laugh or have any lesbian sex in it. Which is OK. Neither of those things are "deal breakers" for me. A book called "The Pure and The Impure" is just not going to be funny. (Plus, French people aren't that funny. Except Marcel Marceau and Le Pétomane.) The lesbian sex thing was a bit more of a letdown, since this looked like the type of book that was going to have a lot of lesbian sex in it, but that's fine too. I don't read to get aroused. I just thought I should warn you.
The format of the book is basically a big rant. Each chapter is about a person or couple who Colette has known, who was queer or promiscuous or both. Like a lot of rants, it can get tedious, and sometimes you want to shake the ranter and say "what the fuck are you talking about?" but as a ranter myself I found it all kind of endearing. Sometimes Colette seems to be overthinking things, and sometimes she seems to be painting with a broad brush, and that's how I am too.
The most relatable part to me was when she said, of herself and one of her male friends, "He and I and others like us come from the distant past and are inclined to cherish the arbitrary, to prefer passion to goodness, to prefer combat to discussion." AMEN, sister!
Unfortunately, since she's French, Colette also comes across as a know it all. She'll say things like "I am alluding to a certain hermaphroditism which burdens certain highly complex human beings" and you just want to smack the cigarette out of her hand. Really, Colette? Are you and your friends really so highly complex? Passages like this, for me, evoke Leonardo DiCaprio's slave owner character in DJANGO UNCHAINED, who talks in a refined, intellectual voice all the time to mask the fact that he's dumb as shit. But, like I said, I'm a ranter too, so I can forgive these things, as long as you're not measuring people's skulls.
The most horizon-broadening thing for me was the "sensuality" of the writing. I don't mean this in the erotic sense (remember, there are NO LESBIAN SEX scenes in this book) but in the sense of talking about the senses. Colette, since she is French, is very in touch with the smells and tastes of things, and reads into what people are wearing. I never describe smell, taste, or fashion in my own writing, and this book made me feel a little "basic" for that, in a helpful way.
Overall, I'm going to have to give this book a 0/1, because it got a pretty tedious at times, and probably should've just been an essay, but I'm glad that I was forced to read it. (It was this month's selection in my book club.) I like Colette, and in fact I think I have a crush on her. The description of the acoustic qualities of the word "pure" at the end was fantastic, and tied the whole thing together. (The word "pure" in French is "pur," so it translated well.) Also, this book looks good on my shelf. It makes me look like a "highly complex human being." Maybe--hopefully--the kind of human being another human being would want to have sex with.

FINAL SCORE: 0/1

COVER: 0/1

SMELL: 1/1

NEWS

-Boring Hat of the Month is back! Please follow me so I can amass more followers than my mother, who is currently beating me by one follower. (I could unfollow her to catch up, but she posts such good photos!) What gives, Ma? Don't you know you're not allowed to BEAT YOUR CHILDREN anymore??

-The Buies Creek Astros, a minor league baseball team from North Carolina, has rebranded themselves as the Fayettville Woodpeckers, in honor of a beloved local bird known as the red-cockaded woodpecker. The new name was elected by local residents, who said that they admired the woodpecker for its looks, tenacity, and baseball-esque affection for BORING. 

-Welcome back, Nyquil510! The gang from the Nyquil510.tumblr.com comment section missed you.

-What do you guys think about the movies and stuff that've been coming out? Here's what I think: SUSPIRIA (2018) is dope, Bud Smith's weekly column in The Nervous Breakdown is dope, and this "Letter of Recommendation" about Old English is dope. THE FAVOURITE (don't you just love leaning into that extra British syllable, when you say it out loud? I know I do!) is pretty dope, but the dopest Yorgos Lanthimos movie is THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER. BIRD BOX, surprisingly, had something to do with birds, but was BAD. THE PANTY SYMPHONIC is dope.

-No One Dies Forever HQ was attacked by a bear the other night! This is true. It knocked down the company trash can, ate some of our trash, and then ran off into the woods to take a shit. He never tried to attack us or anything, but my roommate was so freaked out by the experience he ran right upstairs to the gun vault and put all of our honey in it.

-Birders from all over the country have driving down--"flocking," you might even say--to Los Angeles to catch a glimpse of the red-flanked bluetail, an extremely rare siberian bird that has mysteriously taken up residence in a hedge near the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of UCLA. Apparently, this is only the 3rd such bird ever spotted in California. When asked to comment, birders and library-goers told reporters to "keep it down." 

RIBALD LIMERICKS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

for Ethan Coen and Thomas

there once was a man from nantucket

whose dick was so long he could suck it

it was easy and fun 

but he longed for a son

as he spat his cum into a bucket

there was an old man from old hickory

who once showed his wrinkly old dick to me

inside those folds

was an army of molds

that could have led dixie to victory

a lady named katie just stated

the number of men she's fellated

it's so strikingly high 

it makes me want to cry   

i wish we weren't so closely related!

i destroyed the receipts and the playbill 

and my voice, as i lied, sounded stable

but again, i got caught   

cause i somehow forgot  

to wipe all of your shit off the table 

DIAL B FOR BIRDER, EPISODE 5

Available on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud and Audiomack.

BOOK REVIEW: BEHIND THE PAINT by Violent J and Hobey Echlin

Do YOU know how magnets work, shithead? That's how I feel about people who make fun of Insane Clown Posse. Like bros, vegans and DJ's, ICP has become a go-to target for people for unfunny people who think they're funny.  Even Troma movies make fun of them, and Troma fans (pointing at myself) are some of the most contrarian, unfuckable people on the planet.

I don't listen to ICP (except Chicken Huntin', I Want My Shit, Thy Unveiling, and The Neden Game. And Bitches) but I often find myself drunkenly defending them to people at bonfires. Their music might be grating, and they might make too many sex puns, but at the end of the day ICP is funnier and more interesting than 95% of the people making fun of them--and they have better taste in music, too is the gist of my arguement. It's rare for me to take the "anti-hater" position like that, but for some reason I always felt strongly about it. This book, given to me by Nyquil after he lost my copy of SWEET JONES: PIMP C'S TRILL LIFE STORY, proves that these feelings are valid. 

Raised on the sultry nocturnal sounds of Esham, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Geto Boys and Awesome Dre, The Insane Clowns are wiggers of the most endearing sort. They're wiggers from a time before the internet, when kids were beat up and socially alienated for being wiggers. It was a lot harder to copy black culture then. You couldn't just buy a Cam'ron shower curtain and start saying lit. As an unpopular person and obscure regional rap afficionado myself, I found this "early years" section of this book--usually the most tedious part of an autobiography--to be fascinating.

One problem with the book, which I'm remembering as this review gets longer and longer, is that it's too long. If you include the annotated discography, and the "what Psychopathic records means to me" section at the end (by everyone on the Psychopathic records roster), it's 596 pages. I suspect that the book wasn't "written" so much as dictated by Violent J, while he was high, and this technique makes for hilarious reading ("I was like, 'Whoa, this is the shit! Slash likes my song! The chick he fucks likes it, too.'") but 600 pages of reminiscince is a lot from any man. If I was the editor, I'd probably cut some of the wrestling stuff. And give it a better cover.

Ratings-wise, I have no choice but to give this 1/1 stars. BEHIND THE PAINT was funny, inspirational and full of rap gossip, and how much more can you demand from a book? You want it to have a neden?

FINAL SCORE: 1/1
COVER: 0/1

NEWS

-DIAL B FOR BIRDER is on iTunes now, and also SoundCloud and "Stitcher." Tell your friends, if you ever make any.
-In case you're not savvy enough to know yet, the Nyquil510.tumblr.com comment section is home to one of the most vibrant fan communities online.
- Follow Thomas on twitter.
-Sorry To Bother You is dope, the new Byron Crawford book is dope, and the new episode of Tarantula is dope. Music is still mostly bad.
-This crazy crow lady's blog post about crow necrophilia has gotten a lot of attention lately. How can I get a picture of a crow doing something even more fucked up? Sound off in the comments... 
-Speaking of hot news stories, I've been running into a lot of news coverage of these so-called "bird scooters" recently. Are you guys up on this? I'm not. I've heard of the bird Scoter before, but this sounds different.
-According to an article in The New Republic that came out last year, white people living in rural areas of the South make up the highest percentage of birdwatchers in America. Yeah--too bad they're watching em through the scopes of their AK-47s.
-You know, I've been thinking about it, and maybe Ben Franklin was right: Maybe the bald eagle shouldn't be America's National Bird. Maybe America's National Bird should change, based on who the president is. For Lincoln, it it's an owl. For LBJ, it's a rooster. And for Donald Trump? Scrooge McDuck. (UPDATE: Shit, Penn Jillette beat me to this comparison.) Maybe a cuckoo bird.