Gil Frusciante.

Gil Scott-Heron. Soul, spoken word, proto-rap, call it what you will, it's good either way. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Another real good one and probably my favorite from the album.














One of a quarter billion(? sounds about right) solo efforts dude has put out now. Anyway, shit's good, probably better than you'd imagine. Here's the opening track. And here is one called Loss.

Old And Still Good Green Day.

More or less their first album. Feel free to split hairs if you want. Check it. Check this too.















Second album. Here and here please.

"you've got a deadline. you've got 22 minutes to compose something that anyone will care enough to even skim, 21 by the time you've finished scrawling the previous sentence. so what'll it be? staring at a blank slate isn't exactly the best muse, though it may be the brightest in an otherwise dark room. you frantically search your even darker mind, darkened by sleep and the efforts of the continued day and nothing will come to you, a feeling comparable to writers block but possibly even more frustrating. a total vaccum of ideas is worse than feeling a nebulous need to create only to not willfully eek a single thing out, or at least it sometimes seems that way. instead you impress upon the bright white slate darkened letters comprising what amounts to a giant heap of bullshit, so you scrap them and start over, slate seeming brighter than ever, burning your eyes but unfortunately not any ideas into the brain that you once thought to lie behind them. so now what? you've got 14 minutes left and it took your addled brain the better part of 45 seconds to figure the math out on that one. at this point you find yourself wondering weighing the pros and cons of submitting a giant pile of bullshit that is now steaming and beginning to gather flies, or simply aborting the process in it's entirety and retreating to sleep having realized how futile it is to attempt to construct something out of nothing. it's at this point you also realize you've failed to bother to use capital letters and punctuation has probably taken a backseat to timeliness. and don't even bother thinking about coherance or clarity, you should probably be lucky you have words on the page that you haven't the gall to scrap yet. i guess it's at this point you just press submit hoping the maggots that have now become present at least bloom into something more worthy than the heap they crawled out of."

"Ever find yourself staring at a paper laid open to the obituaries and being sad that that is what the persons life amounted to, summed up in the requisite 100 words or less? Or even that whomever ended up being saddled with the arduous task of condensing what was hopefully a lifes worth of events into mere bullet points assumed (be it correctly or not) that these were the ultimate and seemingly unfortunate highlights to fill up this arbitrary summation of a subjects life? Subject being used because they always tend to read detached and cold as the body, no matter the effort, rather coming across as a mere chore, a required acknowledgment of loss. Here's hoping some warmth and care was taken with the eulogy."

"As I walked around the old mill town in what remained of a long day, I slowly began to take notice of the ramshackle way it had been cobbled together. Patched piece by piece and tarred at the seams with seemingly shoddy respect for all to follow and all that preceded. Doors that were once bustling portals of activity now had been closed and painted up seemingly only remaining for the purpose of holding errant tags and the incessant vulgar scrawl of seemingly overgrown but not yet grown up school children. It was then I began to wonder with the imminent demise of print media if that was what my generation would be reduced to, mindless sloganeering masquerading as wit.

And yet seemingly in spite of this observation or perhaps out of pure compliance and acquiescence I sit inside one of these patchwork establishments touching pen to paper. For the most part directly inside the door of these buildings is what I can only assume is meant to pass for a bar. Jutting angular protrusions of wood or something like it pieced together into a ramshackle counter covered in the only obvious clue to it being a bar aside from the surly half tanked patrons scattered about, alcohol, and plenty of it. These surroundings do however seem to become increasingly more homey as soon as you've been caught in the realization that the man pouring your drinks (phrased that way because he's precisely that and nothing more) is rather heavy handed with the whiskey much to your eventual chagrin. That is until you end up as immediately outside the door as you were in, in what may or may not be a gutter."

Fifteen.

Fifteen is a punk band out of California from a bit back that came out after Crimpshine was no more. Certainly not for everyone understandably but I dig it. Lotsa environmental, drug abuse, racism yadda yadda centered lyrics.



Album from 1994. Had the song that first got me into them when I heard a cover of it, Petroleum Distillation. Ok so apparently there's either a 30 second clip or a terrible live version, I went with the clip.














1999. Dedicated to friend and bass player Lucky who killed himself possibly in part to his speed addiction. Title track is clearly dedicated to him as well. My Congressman addresses the need for needle exchange programs and a handy way to remember how to clean your needles. Family Values covers working for a shitty boss/corporation.

Just get this shit...

...already.