Fighting. I don’t have a lot of fighting stories, because I don’t fight much. The reason I don’t fight much is, well, now it’s because I’m an adult (for the most part) and I just don’t conduct myself that way. However, when I wore a younger man’s shoes I could often walk around in a pretty angry state of mind, and, well, you know, shit happens. Altercations. Bad Blood. For me, my attitude toward fighting was pretty “I will if I have to” with chances of “oh hell yes I’m gonna” until my senior year in high school, when something happened that taught me to avoid physical confrontation whenever possible. I’ll get around to that story next time the slots come up “fighting” on this machine. In the interim, this week I’d like to play you a song about fighting. It’s by High On Fire and it’s pretty awesome. The opening line is, “Drive the fist into your face and blacken your eyes.”
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
Statement: You can drink to most any music, but not all music was crafted to drink to.
Furthermore, there is some music specifically made to accompany the act of drinking and, perhaps more specifically, intoxication.
Elaboration: If I’m having a couple of beers I can toss anything on. When I’m with my friends in Chicago, the ones I grew up with, the ones I socked it out in the Schlitz Family Robinson with, then it’s a different thing, and it’s going to require a different soundtrack.
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
And we’ve come to crying. Anyone here unable to admit to crying from time to time? More than time to time? In some reverse macho way I love crying – it’s one of the reasons I always keep a handful of albums by The Cure on hand. Crying is such a visceral, cathartic experience, it’s like nothing else, except maybe sneezing (which I used to overlook until I read Anton Lavey’s article about sneezing where he refers to it as ‘little death’).
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
If there was ever a musical group who specialized in laying down sounds smooth and sultry enough to coax people out of their garments and into one another’s arms, it is British band Sade.
Sade is both the name of the band and the stage name of Helen Adu, and it is the combination of both her voice and the smooth – and I mean smooooth – musical accompaniment of her band that, legendarily, can set a mood that inspires coitus like no other act.
And it works.
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
Circa 1998 – This is another Schlitz Family Robinson story. It’s too perfect for the “Fighting” category not to use it.
Sonny, Brown, Grez and I finished practice on a Saturday about 8:00 PM. Three fourths the members of Celestial Crumb had come over earlier that night, to hang out and hear our new material. Mike from their group rolled a massive joint from which everyone partook and the practice veered into rather experimental territory after that. Pretty sure we culled more new material from that session but I can’t say for sure. One thing about smoking when you’re playing music – for me, if I smoke first, then it’ll probably be a shit session. but if I do it after I’m warmed up and in sync with the other musicians, especially ones I am as comfortable with as I was at the time with these guys (and probably still would be if we played), the session usually transforms into something spiritual.
The Joup Friday Album: David Bowie – Black Tie White Noise
This month it’s been two years since David Bowie left this Earth for parts unknown, and in honor I wanted to step in and cover Sonny on the Friday Album for a week so I could commemorate one of my favorite human being’s passing with ‘a very special edition of The Joup Friday Album. Sonny will be back next week, in the meantime let’s slide into the weekend together with an oft-neglected, sometimes maligned entry in Mr. Bowie’s catalogue. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Joup Friday Album: David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise!
Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying
This is the first of a new, ongoing column I’m going to try and churn out once a week, here on Joup. My involvement with this wonderful website has waxed and waned over the last two years or so; work takes up more and more of my time – and conversely so does the commute to and fro – as well as the fact that I have ramped up work on several different prose projects. Here in the first quarter of 2018 I stand poised to release several of those projects and as both a kind of celebratory undertaking as well as one of camaraderie with constant contributor Thomas, I’d been trying to think of a column I could contribute on a weekly basis that didn’t command hours of writing and editing time. In other words the exact opposite of the column I tried to launch and failed several years ago, Beautiful Brutality. Thomas has a really great thing going with his Endless Loop column; he can choose how involved each week’s edition is based on how he’s feeling at the time. So in narrowing down literally dozens of ideas I came up with for a new column, this is the one that won:
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Czech
Danish
Filipino
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Lithuanian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Thai