It’s All Such Bullshit

Monkey Rhymes, by Third Option

Quick song. I could barely get the link and the lyrics and the buy button pasted by the time it was over!

Yes this is the money rhymes one I talked of before that was so berated by some cat on Broadjam.com - here it is in all it’s glory!

i don’t know but i been told
that you want me to fold
i don’t know but i been told
that you want monkey to fold

anymore.

You Can Never Stop Us

Oh wow I almost forgot about this one. The thing that I like about this one, actually, is how there’s this group of dudes (multiple version of me of course) saying “you can never stop us” real fast and for most of the time, it just sounds like rhythm instruments, but then at times I notice “oh yeah those are dudes saying you can never stop us!” That’s neat

There’s really a mixed message in this piece of poem. It’s interesting, because I do that a lot, but I think that makes a more accurate representation of “truth”. “Truth” isn’t this black and white thing where you can take one position. I’ve always said (not always - but a long time) that “truth is a mobius” - meaning that if you take a “position” on something, and follow the train of logic long enough, you’ll find yourself saying the opposite of what you started saying. I think this is part of the fundamental nature of things, where reality is paradoxical - and we do find that most of the greatest truths ARE very paradoxical. Committment-Non-Attachment is one of the major ones.

When it comes to this poem, there isn’t really a paradox as much as a double-edged sword. I was ranting about the wonderfulness of monkeys (monkeys still of course being a very thinly veiled metaphor for humanity) and I say how we dance on the corpse of impossibleness and it seems that this is good news to me, and I like it, and I want it. And then I say how we will adapt, and that still seems to be good news, but then in the next line I say “too dry, monkey? casinos with water fountains every 30 feet” and at that point it no longer seems like good news. Now I’m saying this is ridiculous, we’re not accepting, in effect, we’re NOT adapting, we’re forcing the environment to adapt, we’re trying to put water where this is not water.

And that does sort of emphasize again the mobius nature of truth and reality. We start out with adapting, take it too far, and come out not adapting. Doing the very opposite. And well, I guess I just become another person pointing out that there can be too much of a good thing, that anything taken too far is too much.

I guess that’s why some wise people say “everything in moderation, even moderation.”

The “lyrics” in question:

allow me to introduce myself
i’m the tallest monkey in the clouds
and you can never stop us
because monkeys know just what to do
where to do it
and how

you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us

Run, by Third Option

Pretty sure I improv’d this whole piece of poem here to tape. I remember a few days later I did an improv based on this - or - wait - it could be - yes I think it is - I think it’s reversed. What really happened was I did an improv with this refrain “run out the door we don’t need no more plastic floors” at a youth/teen slam in Spring, TX which I was hosting. We had a little round of doing improv and they all wanted me to try, and something like this is what I said. I didn’t say monkeys, but I did use that run out the door thing. I remember that I did it much better at the slam, actually. I remember I kind of starting taking off and getting into this socio political shit about 7up bottles and plastic floors and it was really powerful and people were like “WOW! DAMN! AMAZING! HOLY SHIT!” and such.

Yeah, and then this time, I didn’t quite get the same badassness as at the slam, but I got somethin.

That reminds me of this one guy who used to slam around the nation. His name was Abraham and he was from the south somewhere. He had a really sort of huck finn/way spiritual vibe - not straight essay style easy to understand spoken word like they do in slam nowadays, but poetry stuff, but he’d really go off. And he was an amazing improv person. I saw him improv at the Taos Poetry Circus slam and the thing about him was, his improv, the stuff that just came to mind for him, was the same as his written poetry. He just thought and talked like that. I mean I guess he didn’t talk like that if you sat at coffee with him, but when he improv’d it was no less poetic and crafted and beautiful. He could probably improv and you wouldn’t be able to tell. But not like guys who write as if they were talking or writing a prose essay. Like a POET, which was really weird and amazing to watch. He would just launch into this spiritual flight immedietly. I really tried to take him into me and have his thing become a part of my style. He was fuckin amazing. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Anyway here’s what’s on the record as far as poem for “Run”:

run
run
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run
run
out the door
where the tree lined skies begin again
run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run out the door
run out the cage
run out the stage
run off the stage
run off this stage of monkey lies and monkey things
and monkey things we must not do run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we got dirt
we got soil
we got the red wet earth
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
monkeys
belong
in trees
in jungles
in the earth
on the earth
on the red wet earth
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more
plastic floors

Climb, Monkey, Climb, by Third Option

Not sure if I improv’d some of this or not. I think maybe I did. If I didn’t, then I just jotted something down real quick. You can tell by all the repetition that it’s not a long-crafted work of utter care.

I like the notion “this isn’t a monkey’s job all this beating down of apes” - I remember that one. It isn’t really our calling to be all violent and dominating - our calling is to climb and exalt and whatever you wanna say. So yeah, here you go.

this isn’t
this isn’t
this isn’t wasted time
wake up in the morning
and find your tail wrapped around a naked rhyme

monkey in the sky!

Kong, by Third Option

and here we are
at the green leafy apocalypse of it all
fallen down
broken bones

we forgot the last
we beat sense into our own breast and put the smaller monkeys back
we call ourselves king
and kong sits soon to follow

Hmm. Interesting. A lot in here. I’ll just listen.

Monkey See, by Third Option

Hmm. Maybe I should have made other songs called “monkey do” and…oh that’s the whole phrase.

Some of this is improv’d too, but then I guess I wrote it down and then recorded it - or something.

monkey monkey monkey see
monkey do
monkey make money in the back of the zoo
monkey take
monkey make
monkey make money make money monkey
make take money take monkey take
monkey take
monkey don’t like to give
now all the vicious monkeys in the jungle cage the rest in zoos

and now monkey gets all fucked up on qualudes and burnt toast
and all monkey wants to do is fuck some little monkey girls
but monkey girls know better than to fuck with monkey now
’cause monkey look more like an ape these days
all buffed up on horse hormones
lookin like he mighta gone to mad monkey land
“yeah, i’m mad,” monkey says
“I’m really really mad! because they don’t play my song anymore!”
“because they won’t give me what I want anymore”
“because all those things we talked about before ain’t happenin anymore”
“because I NEED my monkey greed, motherfucker”
“and I’mon wrap my tail around any tree limb coca leaf twig bean or branch”
“that takes me outta this fucked up America of broken monkey lives”
“i’m not a monkey, I’m just a brown man with a brown plan”
“and maybe you oughtta remember that the next time you slap my hand”
“yeah, monkey read, monkey think, monkey LEAD”
“monkey rise up and make a revolution”
“how many king kongs are there?”
“only ONE”
“and when he falls,
“all the monkeys and lions and wildebeasts in the jungle are gonna have a little love in”
“til there ain’t no more powder cane monkeys spillin poison in the jungle streets”
“til there ain’t no more woe or wonder or hard monkey choices”
“til the rest of us take charge”
“and NOBODY calls us monkey anymore!!!”

Monkeys Belong In The Jungle Baby

Well here’s the first “track” of The Monkey Set. It’s really just the build up to the first poem thing/second track. Here’s the “lyrics”, or the “poem” for this part. Which isn’t really lyrics or a poem. It’s just some improv I did on the mic. But then I noticed that that had a little statement - we belong in the jungle. Not in vast expanses of concrete. Etc.

I’m not really sure why I was saying “lonely lovely bouncing baby”. *laugh*

monkey

lonely
lovely
bouncing baby
lonely
lovely
bouncing baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby
lonely lovely bouncing baby
monkeys belong in the jungle baby

That’s - you know - kind of all there is to this one. I regret having the vocals throughout this whole CD be a little too quiet. But I kinda like my performances from just a vocal art/sound perspective. *shrug*

Hi! Ok first off just a note: I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments - which I just select and mark as spam/delete in my handy dandy admin tool. Thing about it is, I may have sometimes accidentally deleted comments that were legitimate. I think I deleted at least a couple that had been sitting up on the blog for a while. So sorry for that! It means nothing! I don’t hate it!

Back to music. Well I think maybe I should post all the songs for The Monkey Set at once - or maybe I’ll just embed the music player from the NQuit site. Thing is, it’s really just one long set - a 20 minute mix set - and there’s distinct sort of “songs” sort of, but taken out of context they all kind of suck in a way. I remember I was posting them individually one time on broadjam.com and people can anonymously review them, and some of them were like “this is the biggest trash I’ve seen ever!” and such. Granted that was probably a bit harsh

The one that got me was the last tune, “Monkey Rhymes” is specifically supposed to be this sort of sarcastic commentary on the vapidness of rappers and the culture and such. But it’s a “persona” piece, if you will, because I take on the character of this vapid frat boy type monkey, and start bragging and stuff. The larger context and commentary was totally lost on the person that just tore it to shreds, talking about how insufferably shallow and idiotic it was and such. But then again, the thing is, I’m not sure even in the context of the whole mix set that I’ve really made it clear what I’m trying to do.

So here I am in a blog EXPLAINING what I’m trying to do

The Monkey Set was this thing I did in literally one day. Maybe a half day’s worth of work. I made all the basic beats and themes using Propellerhead’s (a software company) “Rebirth”. This is a piece of software that emulates some very old classic synthesizers - the three synthesizers that are responsible for the sound we associate with “techno” music. You know that “808″ bass drum, the big smooth booming thing you hear every time you go to the club? That’s the Roland TR-808, one of the original drum machines.

Anyway, too technical, I know. I fired up that software, and it’s a looping software. You set it in motion and it just keeps playing some loop of something and as it goes, you can change settings and have it change what it’s doing. So what I did was, I live on the fly changed and morphed and mixed like a DJ or something, and I did that for around 20 minutes. I recorded that on a .wav file. I did this on my normal old PC in my apartment. This was the first time I started doing things this way, realizing that technology had changed, and since I could save stuff to digital files, I could easily do a bunch of the work that used to be done in the studio on any old computer.

Then I took that big ‘ol .wav file to my little studio (which was downstairs in this house a bunch of us lived in - Hello Jilly and J and Rebecca and Tamara!), and I went and added a few extra drums and played some other synthesizer stuff on the keyboard to make it a little bigger and juicier. Then I took this little “poem” I’d jotted down about a monkey escaping from Santa Monica Zoo (track 2 I think) and going with that theme, I started recording vocals and writing new little stuff and recording it.

The picture in my head was of Curious George if he’d decided to become “cool” and started going to nightclubs and dancing with the sorority chicks and becoming one of these 20 something hipsters I hear so much about Really it was this jokey funny fuck around thing, but then I started looking at it and this jokey funny fuck around thing I thought I was doing was really this commentary on life in the club scene, life in general, the fuck ups of our society, all that shit. And there was this really pedestrian analogy of human-monkey, which has been done to death, but I didn’t mean to do it, so there it was. And in one piece, there was all this race stuff that I hadn’t noticed, and I had without even realizing it, thrown in this black thing and said “and NOBODY calls us MONKEY, anymore”, and realized “oh my god the slave drivers and klansmen and racist boobs of the south used to call black guys monkeys a lot” and I thought shit man, this is sort of powerful.

So I went forward with it, taking on the persona of this monkey who’s been wrapped into this world of fucked up drugs and anger and machismo and dominance, but who is in fact NOT the vapid dumbass you hear in the last tune (if you’re not paying attention). He’s actually smart, and he’s decided to become educated, and he’s the leader of this revolution. And there’s even some of one of my core beliefs in there, about the cycle repeating, and about how when you rise up and make a revolution, and take power, you become the thing that someone else needs to rise up and revolt against. You become your enemy.

There’s just a lot of stuff in there, man.

But in the end it’s so avant-garde and thrown together, that I mean I kind of doubt that most people will really hear all that’s in there, from a poetic standpoint. From a musical standpoint it’s really just this mixset. Big deal big whoop. But I ended up releasing it and it’s sort of turned out to be this Third Option thing that’s a lot different from any other Third Option thing.

Tell ya what. What I’ll do is I will post each track individually along with the poetry, but in this particular post, I’ll post the whole flash audio deal so if you want you can listen through without breaks.

And of course, the buy link: