Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

by

I’m starting to feel sorry for the records. Not all of them, but boxes upon boxes.

Even though my taste in music runs pretty slim these days, i’m not ignorant; i know my Evelyn Champagne King, my DJ Shadow, my No Limits crew, and my Jets singles with blue rainbowed MCA labels on them. Still, i find myself going through boxes of LPs and singles, primarily Hip Hop, and not recognizing a single name. At first i was prone to write this off to ignorance, but after a week i’m sure that isn’t the case. The records i’m pawing through aren’t all big name acts … instead, they are debut singles, self-owned labels, and one hit wonders looking for a rebound. I don’t know them because they aren’t known.


The thing that gets me about these records, though, is the effort they took. It takes a couple of hours for me to get ready for a Trio, not counting the time i spent writing, arranging, and practicing. It took me an on&off month in the studio to record my demo cd, which is nearly all solo. How long do you think it takes to record a solid hip hop track? Brainstorming and refining the rhymes, finding a hook or a sample to build on, getting into the studio to lay it down, adding other instruments, remixing and editing …it’s a long labor. And, a labor of love. Singer-songwriter snob that i am, i tend to marginalize a lot of urban artists because they don’t write their own music and play their own instruments. But, they’re not Celine Dion, that’s for sure. They own the words, they built the beat, and they might have produced on it as well. Forgetting for a moment about their ridik-u-lezlee mizspellled namz and overblown posturing, they took the time to create something, and they were hoping to get noticed because of it


And they’re in my $6 bargain bin.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85017433/

by

I try to listen to my body when it screams at me.

Earlier in the evening it seemed as though everyone suddenly needed to talk to me. Lindsay had locked herself out and needed me to let her in, our friend Chris called to leave a mysterious message about how “important” it was for me to call him, members of my music fraternity were hounding me via email and instant messenger. Just as suddenly, i needed to go to sleep. It wasn’t even midnight yet, and i didn’t feel tired; my body just didn’t want to operate. I couldn’t type, or think, just slide into a dreamy haze every time i relaxed and listened to the music i had on.

I bid everyone a farewell for the night, started a cd on tenth track, and was asleep before the end of the eleventh.

It was in that same manner that i woke up: ostensibly because i heard a noise, but really because my body needed fuel. Lately I seem to have found myself on a sort of a diet, which is to say that i’m not eating a pint of ice cream every third day and i’m not eating half a pound of chocolate as a midnight snack. I know, though, what waking up like that means: i need some sort of fuel.

Down in the kitchen my body was like a compass: milk rather than juice & two small pieces of chocolate. I was obviously a little dehydrated and a little low on sugar, though i would have never noticed it on my own. In retrospect, i had hardly drank anything yesterday – definitely not the half gallon of water that’s suggested. Similarly, i had only had sugar from a fruit salad much earlier in the day.

My body knew exactly what i needed once i was in the kitchen, but did it send me down there as well? Did i wake up with the explicit purpose of needing a drink? Was the vaguely disturbing dream i had been having my subconscious mind’s way of waking me up to refuel? The dream i had been having was definitely strange … the nearest i could come to describing it would be to say that the Borg were drugrunning from a largish warehouse that was being fronted as an Acme Supermarket that my mother and i drove into by mistake, and that our only means of survival were pretending to have been already assimilated and making sure to sell out of our small stock of vintage G.I. Joes (who would apparently inform their child owners of the distress we were in, because all of the adults were on the drugs). The overall tone of it was one of horror … knowing that the tiniest slip would make everyone aware that i wasn’t who i was pretending to be.

The birds are already trumpeting sunlight, and my body seems to be through with telling me what it needs to keep it going. If only the rest my life were so succinct.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85009938/

by

Is there a reason that three different phone companies just called attempting to get me to switch my service within a single hour? Does it have something to do with today being Tax Day and everyone wanting to save a few bucks? I have no idea. Meanwhile, me performing Extreme’s “More Than Words” with any amount of vocal accuracy is about as likely as my getting signed on the strength of my stripped down cover of “Walk Like An Egyptian” — which is to say that i can’t hit the melody or even find the harmony on the former (and have yet to figure out the chords to the latter).

My god, life moves so slowly sometimes.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85008836/