It's been the weirdest January on record... so warm, and it's gone by so fast. I think it's doing something to my poor brain chemistry, and I doubt I'm alone. An owl almost landed on me the other night during my walk... not kidding. I'm not down with all these omens. Next thing, someone's going to tell me the Spazz was built on an Algonquin burial ground.
I think MC Homeless is with me on this. He's more of a Mayan doomsayer, but that's fine. He's just as optimistic as the other apocalypse-heads I know. I mean, he does tend to sound a little victorious when he says “2012 is not a random number.”
I don't know what possessed me, maybe it was the sleep deprivation, maybe it was the brainfuzz that follows my favorite high gravity beer around, but I wanted to hear the Big Hate. Specifically: what grinds his gears? Mainly I got unprintable rants on foreign policy and addled recollections of questionable legality.
“Anywhere that doesn't give me free beer for gracing their stage gets the Big Hate. Let's see... shady promoters get the Big Hate. As far as towns, though, I don't know. Every place I played on the last tour was cool,” said Homeless, whose birth name is unpronounceable by human tongue. He's been on the move for so many years now, living all over the place and touring relentlessly. He has to have played with some losers in that time... dig deeper.
“Who stands out as bad? God, I've played with so many bad rappers it's not even funny. Tali Demon. She went on tour with the Insane Clown Posse, and she had a little juggalo following, that was definitely the worst show.”
“What the hell's a juggalo?” I asked. I was convinced it was either something he'd made up or an obscure Australian marsupial.
“It was a great show, they just sucked. A juggalo is, like, ICP's fans,” he clarified. I need to Wikipedia that word... I'm still convinced it's some kind of miniature kangaroo. “Their CD kept skipping and it was the show where we were opening up for the Coup, it was that one, where I almost fought. It was Tali Demon and her Two Loyal Servents, or something like that, and it was these two hillbilly rapper guys... but, to make a long story short, they tried to rush the stage and fight me.”
“Her people?”
“Yeah, and they got kicked out. Then they fought each other outside and got arrested.”
“They got kicked out of their own show?”
“They were one of the opening acts for the Coup. I don't know why they put them on, they were just horrible redneck rappers. ICP just attracts the scum of the earth. Anybody who still wears JNCO Jeans.”
Homeless paused, smiling at something invisible for a second. “It's like the hip hop version of trailer metal. They're trailer hop. Really bad, bad news.”
It was a really nice night, one of those nights where you can solve any problem with a minimum of effort. 27 degrees, feels like 19. Overnight low projected to be 9 degrees… sunny and 9 degrees. Cold enough to think. I felt like Batman, back in Gotham City after years of vacation.
There are heroes of the national underground, too. I won’t call MC Homeless a hero, but he knows what he’s doing. Pretty much anyone can hop on Myspace, put up their band page, and book a national tour. There are benefits and detriments. I was talking to a friend the other night, and he was saying that MTV ruined the regional nature of music.
I found myself arguing in defense of Myspace. It has, in the positive, brought a new relevance to the independent scene. Music needs to be approachable. Music needs to be made by real people, not celebrities. Maybe the fever has broken, maybe the curse of MTV has been lifted. Regional success exists! In the independent touring scene is a more complex and complete six degrees of separation than Kevin Bacon ever dreamed of. The giants of the scene come through every few months, but they lift us all to the rare heights. We're in the presence of greatness, but not in its shadow.
Amen.
Then, there’s the downside. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes the most innovative band, beyond what you could imagine, shows up out of the random and blows your mind. More often, though, you’ll dig through endless strata of imitators of the latest sonic fad… and they’ll catch on faster because they sound so familiar. Still, the control is being wrenched from the hands of the mega-conglomerate record labels. Why else would iTunes, which is quickly eclipsing CD shops in music purchases, sell self-released music? There's a demographic that loves the realness, the sounds that no producer has had a chance to ruin.
Homeless and I were placing bets on the outcome to a fight to the death between Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus. His money was on Paris Hilton, but I was hoping for mutual annihilation. It's so punk rock, really, to make your own name in the music industry. When so many people buy their way in, or are born into it (through the strange crosseyed dynasty that gave us this Cyrus creature), it's so pure to make records and tours happen through hard work and intuition. Anyone can tour once... Homeless has done it three times a year for the past four years, and he doesn't even own a car. How does he do it?
I'm not sure. He was babbling about something that really confused him in the brain. I didn't catch all of it.
“...Sublime cover bands that travel the country and put out DVDs,” he was saying. “I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw that this band, I won't mention their name or anything, but they're this big Sublime cover band. They had a DVD out of a set they did, just covering Sublime songs.”
We're through the looking glass, people. Scary stuff. Danger stuff. Strange stuff.
But strange is good... and it's not hard to get to this conclusion. It's good to not fit in. Sometimes it's good to be the nerdy little metal-obsessed rapper who's drunk at his own show. Sometimes it's good to go broke and live on the road, year after year, building an underground power base and grabbing for a tiny little corner of immortality. It's good to be at least a little strange in a town where party hats serve as aggression amplifiers and most bartenders can read your thoughts.
Save us from people who can't tell beatnik from gonzo. Save us from creativity cannibals. Send us an 120lb nerd rapper, wandering in among the roaring chainsaw drunks, speaking his own incoherence but doing it so well.
He's at myspace.com/mchomeless
I'm at hawkseason.blogspot.com and hawkseason@gmail.com
Peace.
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