It’s All Such Bullshit

Artistic Apocalypse, by M.C. Murph

Well, here’s the title track. I remember Manny Rettinger said I absolutely needed to redo the chorus singing better. I wish I’d've listened to stuff like that. But it was so hard to get back in the studio for a mix, partly because mixing on an analog board means you can’t just recall it and make a fix. Man we used to take sheets of paper and write down where all the knobs were set and patch cables were plugged. Holy CRAP that was complicated. 24 tracks each with 10 knobs, plus 10 outboard processors. Recalling that is a nightmare, let me tell you.

Anyway I didn’t redo those vocals. Man I didn’t realize how compressed that snare drum is. It sounds strange, but neat in a way.

Anyway boy howdy, I guess I doomed myself to never working with any mo-town people on this record. I also wish I wouldn’t have that strange wigger accent on my r’s. It’s actually easier to rap that way, though.

Well, what else can I say? Enjoy this rendition of smooth jazzy trip hop anger.

Rest Or Relax, by M.C. Murph

Well I had quite a delay between posts! I had to go off and visit my girl Jenny in Houston! YAY! Here’s another Artistic Apocalypse song. Yet another music industry thing. I have two references to Wu Tang Clan on this record, one is in this song. I actually dig/dug Wu Tang, but my point was that even the dudes I like are super commercialized.

Of course, I’m getting more and more commercialized. Commerce IS, after all, how you make money. That’s what making money is, in fact, it’s kind of the definition of the word “commerce”.

There’s also stuff about selling people down the river in this song. “Why should I let you rest or relax?” etc.

Well, I’ll just listen now.

Interlude 1: That Death Cat

“I’ve seen a figure in a cape…” *LAUGH* YEAH!!! This is just a lyricless interlude tune. Almost like having a skit (remember when every damn rap album had skits?), but music, not a skit. The drums are sampled again! They’re a sample from Fun Lovin Criminals, and it’s sped up. Again, fuck you RIAA. Then there’s samples from The Frighteners (one of the all time great cult classics! So fun!) and then a sample from Braveheart, just for cheese I guess.

The dumb thing on this is I don’t know what I was doing, if maybe I was too lazy or something, but I don’t fade the Braveheart sample out in a good spot or anything. There’s all the commotion of dudes talking and it just cuts off. I should have cut it off at “I go to make sure that they have it” but somehow I just didn’t do it. WTF? The Frighteners sample is that way too. Somehow I just left this extra bit in where the guy goes “i’ve studied the coroner’s reports from every d—” and i just cut him off mid word! The end of that sample was supposed to be, in my mind it was, in my artistic sense, the end of it for ME, is “you killed your wife!” “NO!!!”

But somehow I just let it go on. WHAT THE FUCK, AARON???

I actually convinced myself that the Braveheart sample fit the theme of the record at the time. I think the whole bit about squabbling for the scraps from the King’s table. But also, the part where he says “why? why is that impossible?” That’s basically my whole thing, and that’s what NQuit really means. Yes it’s “never never quit” but really the more important part of the never never quit philosophy to me is the idea that anything is possible. So that whole thing of him doing the impossible, that was verification that I wasn’t the only one trying to say that.

So I put it on the record, using some kind of twisted logic to tell me that that fit the theme. Actually the logic still makes sense to me, now that I think about it *mad scientist furrow*

You Waited Too Long, by M.C. Murph

Let it be known, beatches!, that long before Limp Biskit and all these fucking wankers, and even before I heard Rage Against The Machine (but not before they were doing it), I was doing rap to rock guitars!!

I actually played this guitar part, and the bass part, which was actually done with the guitar as well. I used my blue Yamaha electric and yamaha practice amp, which my dad gave me for my 16th birthday and it was a total surprise. I came home and there was my dad playing the blues on this new guitar. I miss the FUCK out of that guitar now, because of the sentimentality. I never learned to really play it, and now I realize it’ll take a miracle and decades to ever play even close to as good as my dad, but I did use it to record stuff.

In fact now that I remember, this isn’t the first song I did with rock guitars either. The first was called “Spiderweb”, and it was on my first CD, and I’ll try to find that for ya some time.

I like the way I did the intro drums on this. I played the drum beat through my headphones and mic’d the headphones. You can hear the fans in the room in the intro. *laugh*

Lyrically this song is kinda fucked up. It goes “you took something away from me red head” - how is that remotely universal? It’s not. It’s about how my girlfriend had “cheated on me” (ie: made out with this red headed dude) and I found out a YEAR LATER, and I had freaked out and got all angry and abusive about it, and finally “came out on top” and this was this victory song about how I still had my girl and fuck you you mother fucker. It’s SO not how I would react or deal with things now. It’s so incredible and violent and just stupid.

There’s some clever stuff though. There’s a double layered metaphor in the first verse, for example. The whole song has a metaphor of the robber coming in and stealing my stuff, representing my relationship, my trust, etc. But then I say:

you came into my home
you took my fuckin telephone
you took my pictures and you took my diamonds and my pearls
you took my stereo you took my fuckin vcr
you took the youngest one in curls

*LaUGH* i love that hee hee. Instead of saying TV, I give you a metaphor FOR the TV - the youngest one in curls - The Brady Bunch. Which rhymes with pearls. That just makes me giddy.

I also like the line “if you could you’d take my face”

Also interesting to me is I’m kinda listing the contents of our apartment at the time. Specific shit, like I say “you took the money in the face and if you could you’d take my place”

“The Face” was this jar we kept our loose change we were saving in. It had a carved face on it, it was really weird. We called it “The Face”. I also like the line “you took the car and the chase” *laughs and laughs* and my weird accent on “you took my alabaster, bastard!” *LAUGhs AND LAUGHS*

And the other crazy thing I just figured out is this is a laundry list of shit I don’t care about now. TV’s, cars, cable TV, money. Well, I still want money. But yeah.

But just like in other tunes of this time, there is this thing in the lyrics that I think is brilliant without having known it. During the chorus, there’s a little weird version of me saying “too much thinkin and not enough flowin too much thinkin and not enough knowin”. That has nothing to do with the song. I did that a lot in those days, and kinda still do if I’m not careful. I’ll have lyrical elements in the chorus, or a whole chorus, which has nothing to do with the verses. Sometimes this randomness sort of creates interesting marriages, sometimes it’s just stupid. But in this song, it’s funny because out of this entire soup of violence and idiocy, where I sound like a pimply teenager (but I was never actually pimply, for the record) trying to be macho, and the throw away line, the one that I was just putting in there because I had no idea what the hell to do, is the one with real weight.

Too much thinking and not enough knowing. That’s deep, wigga.

Rule Rope, by M.C. Murph

Eeee. I’m almost afraid to present this. I actually drove around in black neighborhoods in Indianapolis bumping the fuckballs out of this song. Scary idiot.

And I said “nigga” - this was when I was with Larrisse and I was basically indoctrinated. She called me nigga, I called her bitch. Seriously. Those weren’t derrogatory terms for us. People who think a lot usually call foul on that. Lot of slam poems out there about not using the N word even if you do think of it as brotherhood.

But this was before I’d heard all that. What I notice right now is that this album REALLY has a theme - it’s ALL about major label hip hop and r&b and the problem with it. Every song is about that except a couple. I actually still think this Rule Rope thing is clever and I actually can still stand behind what I’m saying.

I’m saying, ok, here you are, Black America, and you’re a big super star making money with your songs, and what are you putting forth? Stuff about how you’re a thug or you’re a womanizer, cocaine this, cocaine that, and if there WERE a conspiracy against Black America, some of the stuff super star artists are saying and doing is exactly what the enemy would want them to be saying and doing. I mean if you want to keep a group of people down, just encourage them through your mass media to do things that are bad for them.

Of course, when you get into it, you realize that the executives of these big companies are WHITE. And you really start to get suspicious. Of course, what I’m saying in this song is that WE’RE doing it to OURSELVES down here in the streets. And it’s NOT just Black artists, or Black America - it’s anyone who’s not in “power”, keeping ourselves down with ridiculous violent misogynistic drug addled bullshit.

Of course, I don’t believe that white record executives are sitting there going “ok let’s release this guy because he says dumb shit and he’ll keep black people down”. This kind of bad habit doesn’t work that way. It’s subtle, it’s deep under the surface, and usually, corporate America just keeps in place whatever we show them we’ll buy. So usually, they keep in place what’s familiar, because that sells. So in the end, WE have the power. Of course, those assholes could help out too, but I don’t expect their greedy asses to any time soon. Whoever THEY are.

Anyway this song is exactly the same song as that super popular hilarious diddy that came around more recently:

I think DMite does a better job with this message than I did with Rule Rope, and here’s why: He tells you something to do. I tell you what we’re doing wrong, he gives you a solution. I think that’s a crucial difference, and it’s a mistake I made a lot back then, in music and in life.

So you go, dmite.

Disappear, by M.C. Murph

This one I remember felt like this break through. I felt like it sounded more “real”. From day 1 of doing any music, I’ve always just been trying to figure out how to make something sound like “real” music, as opposed to pretend stuff from pretend synthesizers. It’s funny because I’ve realized that’s my whole life. Growing up in Taos was all about the homemade thing. Then there’s school, and everything being a pretend project. That’s why I released these first two M.C. Murph CD’s and made the NQuit label. I was in school doing this as projects but it was so ridiculous to me to do pretend work that would never see the light of day. I still hate that. I did the same thing in my master’s program at Stanford. I have yet to release the work I did there, but it’s in the queue and will be out this year. I just can’t get into pretending.

Unfortunately EVERYTHING I do sounds pretend and fischer price to me. But this one I liked at the time so much because I didn’t do the drums. I sampled them. Yes that’s right, very illegal. I have no idea from where. I’ve never made any money off it so fuck you, RIAA. The whole process of doing this song was odd and different to me. The way I synced the sampled drums and edited them together and created a MIDI sequence and did the vocals. I remember also that I did these vocals, most of the vocals from Artistic Apocalypse, at home. I had done the vocals from the previous CD, Martyrs And Heroes, in a real studio, Ubik Sound. But at this time, I was working at KNME Channel 5 (public television) and I took one of their ADATS home and sync’d it to the MIDI sequencer and did the vocals in the closet. Some of these vocals - if not all - were done using an AKG D1000E microphone, which can best be described as a very very shitty SM57. But I had a very quiet good sounding closet, and I think this is where I learned that the accoustic environment you’re recording in is usually much more important than the equipment you’re using. I oughtta keep that in mind now. I’m being a little haphazard about that the past few weeks.

I’ve shared Disappear with people before. I’m not the only one to have that feeling of wanting to become a shadow in this land. But for me that sentiment is a double edged sword and not necessarily good. Slipping through the cracks and feeling like I don’t or shouldn’t exist has been the bane of my existence, and the degree to which I’ve gotten past that feeling or any desire to have it is the degree to which I’ve succeeded in my career, and the degree to which I’ve found happiness. I think it’s important NOT to disappear in life, and NOT to become shadow and mystery. Reveal yourself, share yourself, and you find love. Unfortunately, at the time in my life when I recorded this, I was not such a person in the least. In fact, I was quite a twisted person, to be honest.

However, I do still truck with one notion in this song (which I also did as a slam poem for a while):

underneath silk sounds because the music never fakes you
berates you or hates you or constantly debates you

This was me saying sometimes I don’t want to try to write lyrics, or figure out how to language something out, or win an argument (I think I was dropping my philosophy class at UNM right about this time), that there is a very powerful truth in pre-language, and that in melody, in sound that is NOT language, there is a clear message, a communication, that is best left UNdescribed (so excuse me if I’m not describing it well here!). Also that I sometimes seek comfort in that pre-language place that music sits. You can also see that I was never into debate. I hated arguing or trying to “prove” what I knew. I still hate that. When I moved to Houston, I was running in these intellectual circles, and certain people, I just ended up refusing to talk to at all. I eventually developed a pretty fast rule that I would not engage in debate. Later, I read things that justified me and untwisted my feeling about this into something better than it was. At the time of Disappear, I was a 19 year old college hockey player with an ego problem, and what it usually turned into was kicking your ass if you questioned me.

But it was deeper than that, and I suspect that it is in fact deeper than that for most “don’t argue with me” ass kickers. What it really is is that underneath somewhere, I’m too aware that reality is maliable, and too aware that everything I could possibly say can be easily counteracted, to go around trying to prove things without driving myself crazy. When I was told by one spiritual teacher that there is no such thing as “THE Truth”, only “truth”, it really helped me start to unwind that. Finally I’m getting to a place of being unwound on that enough to not be violent. It’s taken a long time, though.

Inspiration! I wrote this in my private journal, and thought “well fuck you should post that on the music blog” At this point the readership isn’t different between the two, but the idea is it may be sometime.

Here tis:

So I have this wild fan in Oakland - not a person I met living in Oakland. This guy, Craig, has an online radio station, and a new site called BuddyFetch which is kind of this crazy search tool that finds people’s IM addresses based on their interests and such - where you can go looking out in the non-browsered cybersphere for people of like mind, which is kind of a wicked concept to me.

Anyway I think Craig was DJing or writing some publication about - oh 13 years ago or so. Or 15? Hell. He has a BUNCH of my old recordings - I mean OLD - like from before I ever did a CD. He has cassette tape demos I did when I was like 17 or 18.

He found me again and reconnected and is totally about how I’m fucking badass and creative and compared to me Eminem is a fucking douchebag (which may be, who knows). He’ll get on IM and shoot me a message quoting some old song - now bear in mind these are REALLY bad recordings, distorted as fuck, made with pause loop taping and crappy synths and no knowledge and burned out radio shack mics and - just holy bad. And sick, angry, twisted violent stuff, a lot of it. Nothing way out there like Eminem or ICP, no shit like I might say nowadays for fun, like “HEY MOTHER FUCKER GONNA CUT YOUR ARMS AND LEGS OFF AND USE ‘EM FOR FIREWOOD, BUT BEFORE I DO THAT I’M GONNA SHOVE A CORN DOG IN YOUR MOTHER’S ASSHOLE AND WATCH IT COME OUT HER EAR AND EAT THE BRAINS OFF THE END FOR FIBER SO I CAN SHIT IN A CANISTER AND SEND IT TO IRAN, BUT HEY IT’S ALL GOOD!” (see how that actually rhymed?), just, I was angry and young and I’m almost embarassed that some dudes are still big fans of my whole “i’ll fuck you up!” era. Examples of some lyrics Craig likes:

“thin kids gonna fuck you up!”

“fuck me up fuck me up fuck me up”

“mutha fuckin heroes, got me bleedin in a dixie cup”

That last one is actually worth revisiting I think. But that’s another topic.

So anyway that reminded me to make a new music blog post and up next in my queue to talk about was Artistic Apocalypse, which I think Craig has as well. It’s a couple years newer than the oldest stuff. And I was listening to some of it just now expecting it to just suck so bad but now I feel all empowered because dude’s right on one point at least: I’m so fuckin creative - or I was *shrug* *laugh* I’m so all over the map and man I was breaking every fucking rule I had no idea wtf I was doing but I was ROCKIN it dude. WOOT!!!

And I also expected all the lyrics to be violent angry machismo, but they’re not. Yes I was violent and macho, and it shows big time, but there’s some real concepts man, that frankly, I can still get behind a lot of ‘em. Like this one that’s playing right now in my speakers:

corporate identity
confusion of humanity
major label conspiracy
industrial hipocracy

i don’t really care just who you are
i ain’t hitchin my wagon to a black hole

I mean sure i’m pissed off and saying yo a lot, like a dumbass, because I’m from fuckin Taos - maybe if I said “you’re just another one of their rich whores, esse” it would be less dumb. Of course I still say yo alot, yo. anyway but yeah - FUCK you fuckers! *shakes fun fist* *funnly shakes fist* *fist shaking booty shake* *truck punch*

Oh fine, Steve and Mischief and Spec and whoever else, here: Quietly Manic, by M.C. Murph

Now this a music blog all of a sudden. I might repost this up there later. or part of it.

Actually I think [my friend] Spec saw me perform that one live. I did two, count ‘em two, shows where i performed Artistic Apocalypse songs live. Not sure which ones I did. It was at Word [a poetry show I used to run with The Outsider, of Word. fame, and Tamara Nicholl, of Third Option fame], and just to be nice and small worldish, the 2nd show, the bigger one, where I might have done this tune, was at Monte Vista Fire Station [in Albuquerque] at Word. on the night that [my friend] Shanti and Spec met [and subsequently dated for five years, lived together, bought a house, and broke eachother's hearts and broke up - sorry guys - love you both though still!].

I also puked on the bar at Monte Vista Fire Station years later on St. Patty’s Day right after getting dumped by aforementioned Tamara of Third Option fame, with Spec sitting on one side of me and Shanti sitting on the other. They rushed me to the bathroom where I sang along to some Irish tune playing OVER AND OVER which had some swear word bleeped out so I would yell “SHIT!!!” as loud as possible whenever it came up, and whenever someone came to pee in the urinal, I’d yell “SHOES!” I also was on Prosac at the time, which can react with large amounts of alcohol and kill you, I’d heard, so I was praying for my life.

I’m rambling.

Oh man. Remember when I was MC Murph?

Aww HELL no.

Advisory Intro, M.C. Murph - from “Artistic Apocalypse”

That’s how the last M.C. Murph record starts - with Larrisse, my then girlfriend, forever immortalized saying “the staff of nquit records would like to advise you that portions of the following program contain language which may be offensive to certain members of your family. listener discretion is advised”

Which makes me laugh. It’s also funny because I think that was the exact quote that the hip-hop show at KUNM, the campus radio station at UNM, was required to play before it got going. I mean, obviously, they had their own recording that didn’t get all jumbled.

The next track is this one:

Magnetic Poetry, by M.C. Murph

This is also an intro track - instrumental. It’s called Magnetic Poetry because the little phrases I’m saying/whispering are actual magnetic poetry phrases that were on me and Larrisse’s fridge for a really long time during that time. Also weird was I put together all that mish mash of voices in my electronic music class at UNM with Manny Rettinger, using this software called Deck, which I never touched again. I remember I kept that little chunk of audio on a zip disk. Zip disks came out, they were sort of little crosses between hard drives and floppies - more capacity. Then Jaz disks came out and were like a gig, and zip disks sort of went away.

My regret on this is that in the mastering stage of this record, I made most of the songs too bright and harsh, especially this one. I have the pre-master mix, i could fix it maybe, but i can’t fix it out in the world. It’s released, iTunes has it, Borders, Barnes And Noble, it’s in everybody’s catalog, and once that’s done, it’s that audio, period.

That explains to you why things like reissues or special editions come out. That’s so labels or artists can go back when new technology comes and fix something that they don’t like, and reissue it. I guess it wasn’t really that way before digital distribution though. I mean, before, you could sort of just have subsequent copies of a record or tape or even CD be different. Young M.C. did that. I had his tape a long time, and then it got eaten or melted or something, so I bought a new one. The last song on the first side was the same rap, but a totally different music sample. It shocked the hell out of me. WHAT THE HELL????

But now, once iTunes has ahold of it, they have THAT audio, and there’s no mechanism for you to change your audio. If you have to fix something, you do another release. Title it something else, new barcode, the works. “Artistic Apocalypse remastered version” or something. Maybe I should do that. The goddamned fucking distributor spelled half the goddamn song titles wrong. Go look:

Artistic Apocalypse on iTunes

The best typo is that they call the last song, which is called “Whinerz”, Whirlwheez - WHIRLWHEEZ????

God. *laugh*