Hump Jones

Naturetone ft. Thirtyseven - “Over the Horizon”

2012-05-15T22:58:00Z

Richard Francis Burton rap. It’s not a common commodity in 2012, or any other year, but World Around Records invests in exploration. This track is a cut from Naturetone’s second solo album for World Around, Turnings of the Sun, which is an ambitious & expansive project showcasing his continued growth as not only a producer but a composer.

The lyrics are a psychedelic mix of frontier mythology and the actual, unbelievable life of Burton himself, who was a legendary human being worth checking out.

One of the biggest lies in popular esteem goes a little something like this: There are no more frontiers for feral primates to explore and/or escape to, and every horizon has been conquered by the bland empire of the Parking Lot. Not only a lie, though: a lie with a bright future, a blossoming corpse, it gets less true with every passing day.

Fact is, the entire surface of the planet is unexplored terrain as far as your Personal Universe is concerned.

Get out there.

Over the Horizon | Lyrics

I turned my back on Oxford lectures and walked to Mecca
I’ve had the need to walk away since I cannot remember
wanderlust...all that London ever offered us
was cholera coughs and the constant smell of coffin dust
my hearts at home in parts unknown and forgotten
it’s not a hobby or job, I just got no other options
greed is a game, money’s just a means of escape
I was playing it by saying what I needed to say
lied to kings, queens and popes for boats and gold
gave them all the glory, gave them no control
we used to be pirates, today we disguise it as science
...obsessed with that silent horizon
the sky is not the limit, it’s stupid to assume
don’t underestimate the apes who put some bootprints on the moon
today the names that get admired are the petty liars
...Marco Polo never even went to China
I been alone for days on the frozen wastes
tracing constellations while Satan spoke my name
I stowed away on a boat from Spain
a boat that sank off the coast of Maine in the soaking rain
survived for weeks off whatever I could find to eat
no time to sleep, walked a hundred miles at least
saw lost monuments to wasted greatness
nameless places, pagan standing on the graves of ancients
off the map, on the map, constant back and forth
before I pass the torch understand what you’re asking for
and I will not answer questions so don’t bore me
there’s no glory, once you get to know the whole story
I got a thousand and one, doubt what I’ve done
scaled K2 shaking with a mouth full of blood
the sherpas turned silent, then turned and left
I headed further west in the face of certain death

Second verse
escaped from Nicaragua, sailed from Grenada
hit the rock of gibraltar and washed up in Malta
from there it gets sketchy and the symbolism’s heavy
walked to Greece, swam across the baltic sea
woke up sober in Genova with a migraine
stole a stolen horse and rode across the high plains
to Rome...in diguise since my face is known
you place faith in Fate but I create my own
secret chiefs speak to me in fever dream fragments
fasted for weeks on the peaks of the East Passage
the need to exceed the known, just leave and go
the fever broke, I walked bleeding down Phonecian roads
found London in flames...as the populace panicked
I finally found my ride back across the Atlantic
the family manor was a prison to me
so I will never regret the things I did to be free
besides, before his whole enlightenment gig
first the Buddha walked out on his wife and his kid
and I won’t deny I’ve provided some tribal chiefs
with some white meat from missionary bible freaks
and I know I don’t die because the Jungle doesn’t let me
off into the nothing with a compass and machete

Dear Humpasaur: Fuck the Dumb

2012-04-12T06:54:00Z

The Question:

I notice you’ve been a real asshole on Twitter lately, no offense. I also remember an incident last year when I asked you for more information on something and you refused. So I have to ask, what’s the point of learning all this great knowledge if you’re not going to put it out into the world? Don’t you think you owe people? If you’re in a position to teach, aren’t you obligated to?

Sincerely, [redacted]

Well, Boy Howdy.

I definitely had to answer this one publicly. The answer to pretty much everything thrown at me above is a flat and emphatic No.

If anything, here’s what I’m working on in 2012: talking less. I don’t want to just be “holding my tongue” when I hear people say things that are factually wrong and/or deeply stupid, I want to let it all flow right past me, like a tachyon flows through purified water. I don’t say that with anything resembling malice, either. I firmly believe that I contribute less than nothing by trying to correct people. My own life is a vivid proof that I have absolutely no business doing that, under any conceivable circumstances.

Think about it this way: there’s millions of people who need blood, but I’ve only got about 8 pints of the stuff and I need pretty much of all of it. When people do give blood transfusions, it’s a small amount and they’re seriously debilitated for the rest of the week. Every single day, you’re confronted by a burning & gaping maw of ignorance, and it will suck you dry in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. You will be angry, stressed out, and depressed...and for what? Some bullshit noun you can’t even define in concrete terms?

I have no problem with the contention that I am an asshole on Twitter, of course: done deal.

I do have a problem with the fact that I’m an asshole for not putting the weight a couple billion mouth breathers on my shoulders because you think I’m smarter than you. It’s not that I don’t care about other people, it’s that other people don’t care about what I have to say.

I don’t like being the dude who is always starting off sentences with “Actually...” because that, THAT is asshole behavior. Reality is insanely gnarled and complex, there are no simple causes for anything, history is almost entirely bullshit, and just because I might have read a couple books in my day doesn’t make my opinions any less wrong, shallow and completely inadequate in the face of God herself.

Look: I used to think I wanted to save the world. A perceptive and blunt woman showed me what a masturbatory lie that was and I am eternally grateful for it. I don’t do all this reading and research because I’m a good person, I do it because I love doing it. I always have. I fill up notebooks and smile politely at strangers who ask me what school I go to. I don’t do it for anyone but myself.

If you think you’re different, right on. That’s a good thing, zero sarcasm, all heart. I cannot help but admire that. I’m not going to tell you that I know your motives any better. I’m not going to tell you that you’re lying to yourself because I have no possible way of knowing that.

Either way, Death is breathing down the back of my neck every single day and I have so much, so much work to do. I won’t pretend it’s more important, or better than yours, but it’s what I’m here to do.

Life is short, too short. Fuck the dumb.

New Video: “Promotional Gift” - Hump Jones & Signifire

2012-03-13T22:49:00Z

We obviously had a blast shooting this. Short, strong and simple. Signifire has been coming through Vault 46 and putting in regular work on the #SQUIDTAPE project, so we decided to start shooting video. Workflow: Kodak Zi8 ==> Sony Vegas ==> Your Eyeholes. All critical feedback welcome: YoHumpJones@gmail.com and yes, the Ask Hump Jones video series is being shot now, too. Not to mention Sixteens Walken...but, you know, stay tuned.

Behind the Curtain @ Rap Genius

2012-03-06T01:27:00Z

An interesting peek at the mind behind Rap Genius—with the more than slightly hysterical title ”The Take Over and Ether of Hip Hop Sites?” but hey, headlines are all about grabbing eyeballs...and those eyeballs, they’re getting dumber every year. What matters is the meat, and this is blogger brainfood.

Mahbod drops some science: “Lyric sites are all run by these wack ass Russian mobsters and they’re all totally a joke. And blogs, music blogs especially, are completely horrible. Like, Pitchfork is a joke, I think the writing’s terrible.”

Their whole project is some highly elevated rap nerdery that I highly approve of, and they’ve definitely got a big team because that Big K.R.I.T. mixtape that dropped today? They’ve already got all the lyrics up.

I definitely recommend Big K.R.I.T. to young and hungry emcees because he’s not very good at writing rhymes yet he’s fucking great at writing songs. Anyone working on their craft seriously should value cats like K.R.I.T. (or GZA or DJ Quik) who can teach you the intangibles. Rapping is one skill set, but songs and albums are a whole other Universe. Get inspired…

Big KRIT – The Alarm Lyrics
Big KRIT – Boobie Miles Lyrics
Big KRIT – Country Rap Tunes Lyrics
Big KRIT – Down N Out Lyrics
Big KRIT – Handwriting Lyrics
Big KRIT – I Got This Lyrics
Big KRIT – Insomnia Lyrics
Big KRIT – Package Store Lyrics
Big KRIT – Red Eye Lyrics
Big KRIT – Ride Clean Lyrics
Big KRIT – Temptation Lyrics
Big KRIT – Wake Up (Morning) Lyrics
Big KRIT – Yesterday Lyrics

IV the Polymath x Thirtyseven - “The Frame”

2012-02-29T23:17:00Z

Fresh tracks for the seventh installment of World Around Wednesdays...

The Frame by IV the Polymath & Thirtyseven

For the last installment, we dug into the archives, but this latest cut actually got finalized the night before we released it. Exceedingly fresh. IV the Polymath is a spooky talented, hard-working producer who integrates vinyl and live instruments and builds his beats on the MPC: a real-deal classical stylist. It was an honor to get handed such a lush banger and I hope I did it justice here.

Lyrics - “The Frame” - IV the Polymath x Thirtyseven
flavor of the frickin’ week, critics say you’re spitting heat
I say you lack the minerals to skin a beat convincingly
got a thousand faces, a lotta doubt and hatred,
recording albums naked, you can take it how you take it
I got mild tourettes, got X-Files connects
reptiles for pets who fuck other reptiles to death
framing it up, everything I came to discuss
is courtesy of good books and some dangerous drugs
yeah we got some new shit my neighbors just love
cuz I cranked it up to eleven every day for a month, yup
...got proud mistakes, I’ve got down and prayed
lost countless games until I dropped out of frame, cut
...got hopeless, upped the raw dosage
now I’m making power plays in fuzzy soft focus
with a face full of acid, my life is straight page turner status
paperback mass made murder madness
like Stephen King getting hit with a van,
same shit, now I’m a different man, just give it a chance…
went from stupid cynical to “way too political” quick
it’s never fashionable giving a shit, but shit
if it’s not a revolution, I’ll take an occupation
but if it’s not an occupation then I’m better off just moving
exactly what the fuck is wrong with white people today?
I’ve watched a lotta closet racists go completely insane
please, say you’re not racist...bro, it’s so obvious
he’s a black George Bush and y’all are calling him a communist
look....I’m not saying I have faith in my leaders
I’m saying, fuck your Fox News motivational speakers
fuck every last democrat, all republicans
plus the dumb-as-shit citizens who vote these blooduckers in
and if you’re listening, that’s probably you
...so stay tuned and turn the volume up, too
like: Tea Party Nation.. here’s the situation…
your grandma was an activist… FOR segregation
against brown vs. the board of education
march to montgomery, she was there waiting
...but brainwashing is a dangerous game
so granny had a daughter and she raised her to hate
she lied about Jesus and she claimed it was Faith
and she filled her with guilt that remains to this day
but if you’re an 80’s baby, the hate’s undercover
it’s baked in the system, the guns and the butter
claiming that victims create what they suffer
made welfare queens out of poor black mothers
languages changes, but goals remain
that’s exactly why the CIA sold cocaine
now this is not a secret, it’s an open case
all those men are still alive and we know their names
...powdernose rappers wanna floss in the source
I just want an honest talk with Oliver North
like I just want a couple million dollars or more
fuck status, get power, that is all that it’s for
conspiracies are nothing, the big open secret
is how we all slit our own throats but won’t believe it
and every rebel wants to fight the machine
it’s easier than questioning the life that we lead, peace

RapGenius Update: Kid Cudi - WZRD Lyrics

2012-02-28T21:40:00Z

The latest from the awesomely ambitious rap nerd olympians over at RapGenius...

Kid Cudi – Brake Lyrics
Kid Cudi – Teleport 2 Me, Jamie Lyrics
WZRD – Ride 4 U Lyrics
WZRD – The Dream Time Machine Lyrics
WZRD – Dr. Pill Lyrics
WZRD – Efflictim Lyrics
WZRD – High Off Life Lyrics
WZRD – Live And Learn Lyrics
WZRD – Love Haard Lyrics
WZRD – Upper Room Lyrics
WZRD – Where Did You Sleep Last Night?? Lyrics
WZRD – Love Hard Lyrics

5 Spot: Uncle Humpasaur’s Rap Selections

2012-02-27T22:23:00Z

None of this music is mine. 5 Spot is just a recommendation series where we get an artist to evangelize for their favorite creators, a single track at a time. It will be running on Real Yeti Rap, but I’m kicking it off here Because I Can.

1. Godforbid - “Driveway”

Driveway by Doc Delay & Godforbid

Fresh storytelling from one of my all-time favorite rappers? Hell yes. This track is basically a short film and I’ve been playing it for every rapper I know. It’s so rare to hear a song that really takes advantage of the infinite horizon that “Words + Beats” has to offer us.

2. Sene - “exit,us.”

sene - exit,us. by sene

An extended instrumental & classical conceptual rap masterpiece from a rapper I’d never heard of? Hell yes. What an introduction this was. Sene is going to make noble noise in the future. In the meantime, give this cut your full attention.

3. Sulaiman - “As a Man Thinketh”

My favorite Chicago rapper over my favorite Chicago producer? Hell yes. Sulaiman is smart, funny and rolls with 10,000 flow patterns at least. Thelonious Martin is intensely fucking good, because there’s a thousand talented & consistent producers making great beats, but Martin is always a standout. Lush, loose and jazzy as hell. This cut is a flawless gem to me.

4. Witness - Yesterday’s Wake

Yesterday’s Wake by Witness & The Family Secret

Awesome & honest rappage with a freakishly talented live band? Hell yes. The Witness & The Family Secret project sounds like it’s going to be a big deal in 2012. Fuck if it “blows up” or not—it’s going to be great music.

5. Phillip Morris - “Why You Have To Go And Break Phillip Morris’ Heart?”

Why You Have To Go And Break Phillip Morris’ Heart? by Phillip Morris

Breakup music from one of the most vivid & intricate rhyme writers around? Hell yes. This is one of the more compelling Phillip Morris tracks, the highlight of a very diverse & ambitious catalog. His balance of personal pain and detached cinema makes for an unsettling feeling I dig. Like a comedy routine you suspect could erupt into either an onstage breakdown or a mass shooting...that kind of feeling.

PEACE OUT EARTH HUMANS, THANKS FOR LISTENING

Godforbid & Thirtyseven - “Big Day for the Little People”

2012-02-22T05:24:00Z

Camped out in Boston at Vault 46, contemplating a long life coming full circle. 2012 will be my most prolific year to date, but it doesn’t even feel like I’m moving at all. I stumbled down bloody from the Blue Ridge Mountains, took a shower and got onto a Greyhound bus...I’ve been in Boston ever since, brainstorming with with the World Around team and writing raps for 18 hours a day.

That’s not entirely true. I’ve been in a very non-local frame of reference these days, so it’s appropriate I’d be making a lyrics video for something I wrote and released in 2007.

Thanks to the team at Radio Free Barbelith and the recent work of Emmy Noether, I’ve been thinking about my decades in a different light lately. Acid trips I had at 16 make a lot more sense now, mistakes I made at 20 still reverberate today, and my past 12 months are a microcosm of Pretty Much Everything.

With that in mind, stay tuned. We’re many sessions deep on unreleased material and as you’ve probably noticed, I’m through with announcing projects. No matter what album you’re curious about: it’s happening.

Thanks for reading, thanks for listening.

Robert Anton Wilson’s Guide to Sex (That Never Happened)

2012-01-15T02:22:00Z

Big thanks to the good people at Boing Boing for doing Robert Anton Wilson Week, which comes as I’ve been re-re-re-reading Quantum Psychology. Synchronicity accelerates. I found this gem in a lost interview that’s packed full of brilliant ideas and one-liners, as per. (For example: “Doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.”)

I wanted to share this passage, though, where RAW details a book idea he never got around to…

Pope Bob’s Unfinished Guide to Human Sexuality

“I have a lot of ideas for books. One of them is The Truth About Sex. I probably will never do this one; that’s why I talk about it so much. I’d like somebody to rip the idea off, so I don’t have to do it. There was a book that was a bestseller, ten or 15 years ago, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But You Were Afraid To Ask Your Doctor, and it was in question and answer form. I thought the author was one of the stupidest people I’d ever read. I decided to do the book correctly. It’d be in question and answer form, but instead of one answer to each question there would be four or five, or maybe even a dozen, all from leading authorities, and all contradicting one another. The idea of the book was to show that the authorities don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. It’s an area full of prejudice.

There’s no real science of sexology yet; it’s all various people expressing their personal prejudices and disguising it as psychology or sociology. So I thought, take a question like, “What causes homosexuality?” and give twelve different answers just to show how much the scientific community really knows; they can’t even agree about a simple thing like that. “What causes heterosexuality,” for that matter? “What is the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm?” I’d get about 24 different opinions on that, in the literature.

The reason I’ll probably never do that book is getting the permissions from all these authors is a Herculean task, which publishers always dump on the writer. And once they found out what they had agreed to, the experts would all be furious because they’d all look like idiots, because they’re all overly dogmatic. They’d be very furious and god knows what they’d do about it. So I hope somebody else does that book and I don’t have to do it.”

#WHALAM

Thanks to the wonders of Teh Internets, this would be pretty easy to accomplish. Rather than being released as a book, it could simply be a website operating under basic “Fair Use” laws to spotlight the monumental ignorance of our species.

Of course, Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes has more than a few similarities to the concept that RAW outlines above, but the big difference is that I’m actively participating in the stupidity. Rather than point fingers and laugh, I am developing my own vast and contradictory Theory of Everything. I aim to demonstrate that science is far too much fun to be left to actual scientists, and furthermore, since we’re all engaged in the creation of fictional belief structures, we should aim considerably higher than mere “plausibility.”

As Klintron explained to me in a dream last night: “What you’re really doing is taking Salvador Dali’s concept of Critical Paranoia and applying it to the whole of modern science.”

Amen.

Lincoln Patriot Bible Center Christmas 2011 Special Spectacular

2011-12-27T07:00:00Z

No Business Like Sperm Business

2011-12-01T02:24:01Z

When my friend told me that the sperm bank rejected him because he was a redhead, I’ll admit it, I laughed at him. Of course, that’s when I still thought he was kidding...once I realized he was serious, I nearly had a cardiac event because I was howling so hard.

The business in question was Cryos International, one of the largest Spooge Repositories in the privatized world. Their founder and media man, who has the curious name Ole Schou, claims that they’re currently sitting on a stock of redhead donors and the only demand for that product comes from Ireland. “There are too many redheads in relation to demand,” says Schou—a quote heard round the world.

Like any catchy story, once you examine the details it all falls apart. Debunking is cheap, though, and my interests lie elsewhere, as always. So let’s get the objectivity out of the way quick: like most news stories in 2011, The Great Ginger Sperm Scandal is 100% bullshit. Despite being picked up by every major news service, there’s basically nothing to it. Everything we read and talk about is cheap lies from dumb publicists, though...hopefully that’s not news to you.

As it turns out Cryos International does want redheads, especially in their United States division—Schou was merely talking about his native Denmark. Naturally, he was quoted out of context by a lazy writer and the claim was sensationalized into catchy headline by a lazy editor, and the fabricated story was repeated, thousands of times over, by lazy websites and newspapers. As Cryos New York spokesmammal Ty Kaliski enthuses: “We want diversity. I want redheads, I want Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, Caucasians...” You can almost hear Kaliski trailing off and half-heartedly adding the afterthought of “Caucasians” even though he knew nobody would believe him.

From the global empire of Cryos to the darkly hilarious scam known as Sperm Direct Limited, one thing that nobody in the sperm business wants at this point is more Caucasian juice. There’s a universal shortage of black and asian donors, and although Uncle Hump is far too wise to stoop to trying to analyze that, feel free to take that little factoid and go hog wild, kids. I present it simply as business advice: whoever figures out how to change that is gonna get rich.

You see, “Fertility Industry” is one of the last Wild West autonomous zones in American capitalism and it has been evolving with terrifying speed. The sheer free market momentum of it all is about to carry us from consumer wonderland straight into sci-fi dystopia territory. In all likelihood, we are already there.

Infinitely Weird

Let’s start with one of the most interesting numbers, the foundational fact that keeps all this money changing hands: 15% of all couples under 50 are infertile. Almost 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, it’s no secret that this is thanks to processed foods, industrial pollution and environmental toxins. (Feel free to argue otherwise in the comments section.) When you look at world population through this lens, you might realize that we’re actually quite lucky that our current numbers are hovering at only seven billion. There is a certain terrible beauty to the self-regulating nature of Nature, even when the blade is aimed directly at you and me.

Why dwell on the past, though? Given the accelerating pace and density of our technological suicide, a 15% infertility rate will be the Good Old Days in a single generation’s time. This is a growth market in the worst possible sense, but make no mistake, the Fertility Industry is strictly catering to the high-end customers. Technically speaking, this shit is expensive. The problem of poverty will be solved by the problem of infertility...call me a heretic or a quack, but them’s the facts, Pilgrims. Better yet, there’s not a single fucking thing you can do about it.

So, on to the Capitalism part. You may not be able to have kids without birth defects, but you can certainly make money in the meantime. The Fertility Industry is wide open...just don’t dwell on that visual too long. As per Naomi Cahn and Wendy Kramer:

“The United States has almost no rules when it comes to buying or selling sperm. In fact, no one keeps records on how much sperm is bought or sold, so we don’t even know how big the sperm market really is, or how many babies are born each year through donor sperm.”

Cryos International, the Denmark company who can’t get their policy on redheads straight, claims to have been responsible for 18,878 pregnancies since opening their doors back in 1991. Disturbingly, despite have a strict testing and screening process and almost bizarrely high standards, Cryos doesn’t bowl a perfect game. They report a running “Malformation Rate” of 4%, and I hope you’re not visualizing what that euphemism means right now, because that would be gross.

Not nearly as gross as this, though: accidental incest. No, that does not involve tripping and falling...it’s far worse. As headlines go, this one is miracle of story-telling and brevity: One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring. Yup. Naturally, professional commentators were simply shocked but this is about as inevitable as McDonalds offering salads or S&M porn going mainstream.

Most Americans know absolutely nothing about...well, anything, really...but in particular, the Sperm Business. Men don’t just go in, make a deposit and walk out with a check. They get screened and commit to a long-term program, usually weekly deposits for a full year. Only a dipshit could act shocked that a business is monetizing their existing inventory: it’s what they do. So it’s only natural that in California, which has always been ahead of the American curve, children of donor sperm are starting to connect on the internet. That’s kind of heartwarming, but it gets disturbing when they keep connecting and connecting and connecting and you realize you have over 50 half-brothers and half-sisters living in the same state as you. The biggest single group was the source of the headline: exactly 150 actual human beings from a single storage unit of manjuice. Which brings us back to two words that should stay far away from each other: “Accidental Incest.”

As one anonymous Mom put it: “My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason. She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education.”

The Genghis Khan Effect.

Maybe you don’t see it yet. This should help: in 2011, 0.5% of the world’s entire population can be traced directly back to the loins of Genghis Khan. That’s a little over 35 million people, most of them in China.

This is for horrible reasons, of course. There was not a lot of consensual sex behind the Khan dynasty. Regardless of circumstances, though, reproduction is genetic warfare...the messy reality behind the “fitness landscape” the biologists love to wax poetic about. Having 150 offspring is such a massive tactical advantage it’s hard to wrap your head around it, but that anonymous donor has done more to shape the future of California than any Governor or Billionaire fascist in the past century.

And that’s just a glimmer of the insanity that’s on our horizon now. 150 will be small potatoes very shortly. What happens when celebrities start getting in on this action? Imagine the kind of prices that a Brazilian soccer god like Ronaldinho could get for his, uh, product. Imagine the demand/price curve for someone like Ryan Reynolds or Jude Law and you’re starting to see it.

Now, the notion of sexual competition is nothing new. We’re all trying to make ourselves more wealthy and attractive and blah blah blah, but what’s new here is the scale and the technology available. It’s certainly not like human beings are any smarter. Women shop for attractive and physically fit sperm donors, but it’s not like their kids are automatically going to have chiseled abs or some shit: that comes from working out. There’s also the gender crapshoot factor—sure, sperm comes out of a guy, but it produces both sons and daughters. That fact is sadly lost on a lot of people. Then again, their ignorance is your potential profit center. Nothing cuts into your bottom line quite like informed consumers, right?

See, your average Adonis with a genius IQ and clean bill of health can generate a solid load of merchandise every single day. If he makes it out of Harvard by 22, that’s a potential career of 15 to 20 years. Bear that in mind as you read this outstanding Atlantic article, ”All the Single Ladies,” which documents how the economic devastation of the United States has completely changed the sexual politics of both marriage and conception. These trends will converge into something unprecedented: the most dramatic change in human reproduction since our species first emerged from Africa. This shift is going to be far more profound than birth control, because it will involve more children being born by vastly fewer men, a narrowing down of the gene pool that will hit our DNA like a mass extinction, despite the fact we’re slouching towards the 10 billion mark, population-wise.

Keep thinking I’m wrong, by all means. I have no illusions about convincing you. There’s no solace in truth, especially if you’re older than 21 and worth less than a million dollars. Just keep it in the back of your mind, eat more veggies & fish oil and work out a little bit harder. And oh yeah...stay away from wi-fi signals, too.

The Human Brain is a Piece of Shit

2011-11-25T22:09:00Z

As I slowly finish off my epic manuscript Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes, I have been given a newfound appreciation for how fundamentally science has failed our species. While most writing on the human brain touts our wetware as a miracle machine, that’s just breathless ad copy for highbrow suckers...a cheap emotional high. Did you know you have more connections in your brain then there are stars in the Universe? Nevermind the fact there’s no way to quantify “stars in the Universe,” the real question is: how many of those connections are you going to use in a few hours when you’re masturbating to some Hentai while instant messaging your friends about the TV show that’s on in the background? At least a couple thousand, right?

The reality, of course, is too grim to be stated plainly. Your brain is a barely functional piece of shit, a lump of cellular improv and genetic duct tape. As a navigational tool, it creates a remarkably adequate simulation of external reality—at least good enough to keep you alive until you can reproduce with someone you shouldn’t. That much is undeniably impressive, but it’s all downhill from there. As a sense organ, it mostly tunes out every single piece of data your billions of sensory cells try to send you. Worst of all, as a “mind” it behaves like a deranged parasite, alternating between self-deception and self-destruction and leaving even the best of us baffled by our own actions, daily.

So there’s that. Entire books have been written on the “neuroscience” of sex, and they are front to back fiction. There’s great demand for “popular science” books about the amazing brain but that’s because there’s a great deal of stupid people. Fortunately, I don’t write for them...I write for you, the spooky brilliant and dangerously sexy future mutants of tomorrow.

DEATH TO NEURO-REALISM

To be clear, don’t think I’m hating on science. No, homey, never that. I have footnotes and studies backing up every single page of my forthcoming book, believe me, I love science. My beef is all these poodles using it wrong. Let me recap for the slowfaces who may lurk among us: The purpose of Science is to belittle the human ego, confound easy understanding and obliterate every hypothesis that it touches. There is no solace in science...if there is, you are most assuredly Doing It Wrong.

This is especially true when chimp “journalists” turn their anemic attention towards the human brain. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that literally everything that’s been published in the past decade on that subject is pure horseshit. Again, I’m not talking about the precise experimental language of the actual studies getting published in Nature—although plenty of those are horseshit, too. I’m talking about a modern mythology based on such fragile data that it essentially amounts to a secular religious belief. Today there is a pervasive myth that the human brain has hardwired areas for specific purposes, which is built on the larger myth that we understand fuck all about our brains in the first place. I will unpack that sentence in detail, starting immediately.

There’s a lot of data about the human brain. Neurology is advancing by leaps and bounds, don’t misconstrue me. Scientists speak precisely because once you generalize results, you lose any value that your findings have. Today, the most that can be said about current neuroscience is scientists have observed correlations between a specific stimulus and specific measurements of human brain activity. This is not “Semantics.” This is discernment. There are fundamental problems with this shallow puddle of a worldview, and they’re clear enough to become obvious to Non-Nerd types once you lay them out.

Irrational Faith. Despite advances in neuroscience testing and measurement technology, we still have no proof that our instrumentation is actually showing us something important. To abuse a metaphor, pop sci neurojournalism is about how the human computer system works but the assumption is that we have access to what’s really going on. Even if we did, we don’t know how to confirm that. Brain readings are new and visually compelling but they’re not answers. An fMRI scan doesn’t mean we can fathom the operating system of consciousness. For all we know, we’re measuring the exhaust system of the computer.

Retroactive Mechanics. Stimulus, Response...it’s only simple in theory. Despite all their own breathless poetry about how complex the human brain is, curiously, most theories of consciousness still boil down to ”When we do this, a light goes on over here.” Thus, Broca’s area becomes “the language center of the brain,” despite dozens of cases where patients without that area could speak and read just fine in their native tongues. The conceit here, stated clinically, is that the specific stimulus in our experiment was the source of the EM activity being measured. Again, this sounds like nit-picking but it’s critically important to honest science. Correlation does not imply causality. Nearly all written work about the neuroscience not only reverses that, but takes it one step further: correlation, they glibly assert, is proof unto itself.

Neuro-Fundamentalism. The biggest unspoken assumption, of course, is that the human brain is us—that you, me and everybody we know is driven and dominated by that single organ. If only it was that simple.

GETTING USED TO NO ANSWERS

Journalists latch on to narratives, not actual findings, which are too subtle for headlines and too complex for their readership. Subsequently, scientists use these popular narratives to explain their work and seek more funding, and thus do lazy mistakes become institutionalized problems. I’m sure many of you reading this have noticed the tonal similarities between coverage of neuroscence and genetics—just like every Time headline in the 90’s was about how “Who You Are” is determined mechanically by Gene X, Y and Z, the past decade of neurofads have been about the brain controlling us mechanically thanks to area X, Y and Z. We have a lot more similar mistakes in our future, assuming we survive another two generations of over seven billion hungry omnivore killing machines.

There is no working model of the human brain. That’s what real scientists mean when they talk about Neurology being in a “pre-paradigm state.” Until that gets fixed, the science will have nothing to offer us but surprising results and bad metaphors.

More on the way...meanwhile, be good to each other.

Fixing Underground Hip Hop

2011-11-24T01:34:00Z

thanks to f. stokes for the nudge

I’m not going to complain—that’s too easy. No need for a laundry list of details or worse, some disgruntled manifesto: underground hip hop is broken as fuck, I know it, you know it, no further explanation needed. This is not about what’s wrong, this is about dreaming something better.

But First: When you’re a part of the problem, you rationalize what you’re doing as necessary, practical, “just business.” It’s dumb business. Failing business. Getting opening acts to sell tickets, printing up flyers that look like promo for porno flicks...people pretend this is all necessary but it’s not. That corpse you’re milking yields less and less blood every week, and eventually it’s going to run dry. Meanwhile...

If You Can’t Find It, Found It

Bars are, for the most part, terrible places to be. Obnoxiously crowded and stupid expensive. The sound system has never been set up right and it’s always too loud. So why do artists keep presenting their blood and guts in these fast food environments? I’ve played shows in beauty salons, backyards and basements and had a great time doing it—there’s not a “tour circuit” for this yet, but there will be soon.

How many shows can you play for a room full of dudes before it’s time to kill yourself in a hotel room? Why don’t more women come to rap shows? That one is easy: because they don’t want to be there. They don’t enjoy themselves, they don’t feel safe and they don’t have fun.

We need more than “Alternative Hip Hop,” and definitely more than another coffee shop for spoken word navel-gazing. We need an alternate Universe, a great & secret show, a Truth & Beauty circuit full of fresh fruit, fine foods and exotic tea from fictional continents. We need daytime shows, midnight gigs on anonymous rooftops, costume concerts and a nationwide revival of Acid Tests from coast to burning coast. We need all four alleged “Elements of Hip Hop” in the same building again—most of all, we need parties worth going to, parties worth putting down your fucking phones for and actually living.

We’re taking all the wrong concepts for granted. Are battles really helping anyone aside from battle promoters? If hip hop is about communication, why do so many sets seem like some guy practicing his rhymes in his room? Why are we still doing “A&R Showcases” in 2011 when everyone knows that labels stopped doing artist development in the 1980s? If you pause to introduce “a song for the ladies” what are you saying about the rest of your catalog?

Rather than even pretending to deal with the perceived problems in rap - the pervasive and contagious mental illness of homophobia, misogyny & causal violence - maybe the trick is simply designing performance spaces that render all that impossible. It’s easy to talk about shooting faggots in a bar, but in a public park, surrounded by art and nature, that same emcee is reduced to his true form: a scared child having a small tantrum. Zoning laws prohibit letting animals loose in public spaces, but as the poet Richard Bruce Cheney famously observed, laws are made to be broken.

Ideas are made to be stolen, too. Can we take toga parties back from fraternities if we let them keep the Ritalin snorting and shitty beer? Can we make speed dating into something inspirational and good? Can we create a Speakeasy system for stoners and perform hip hop for hashish heads on comfortable couches? Does rap sound better in venues with a strict No Shoes policy? Can we convert mere stages into Sacred Space?

There is a huge audience for what I’m babbling about here. I’m not saying hip hop needs more Art, but I am saying Art needs more hip hop. I’m also saying our lives are starved for surrealism. The human soul, no matter how numbed up and weighed down, craves magic. It’s not hip hop’s job to provide that...but it could be. The power of language is infinite and there’s a whole generation of emcees with open minds ready to reclaim that ocean. It’s always been yours and you’ve always been free.

And oh yeah: stop cuffing the mic.

Tell me how right/wrong/awesome I am: YoHumpJones@gmail.com

New Music: “The Patience”

2011-11-23T21:11:00Z

The Patience by Humpasaur Jones

BEAT, RECORDING, MIXING by Louis Mackey
RAPPAGE courtesy of Humpasaur Jones
ARTWORK by Memetic Supply Co

hump jones, back to scoop more fries
and get paid like the liars at the new york times
which is every single writer for the new york times
but hey, we all shovel shit in the food court line, right?
white collar, blue collar, two dollar confidence jobs
...nobody stays honest for long
it’s not a concept when your wallet is gone
then it’s promises, pawn shops and property laws
hump jones, politics, press the flesh
drunk shows, college kids, fresh connects
front row awesomeness, wrecked the set
and you cut throats copied quick to get respect
your act is hurting, you lack a certain edge
all you got is average zombie rapping for the working dead
yeah kid, I can see that you think you’re the shit
I just happen to disagree with every inch of my dick

world around sound, and we build to suit
skills and truth, the foundation that fills the room
world around sound, we build and we break
cuz we’re still willing to make all the illest mistakes

yeah, I got a couple million names to kill the game with
so I can fail a hundred thousand times and still be famous
for my skills, my commitment, and my innovation
plus my psychedelic fully illustrated filthy statements
you make threats, I make bets, that makes sense
I see people waste breath and it’s cheap as hate sex
...but me? nah, me, I’d rather sleep with great friends
and take some pain meds, been a freak since grade ten
hump jones, time to define my goals
and unfold the finest in mind control
on a budget plan...I’m just doing it because I can
I love my fans more than any fan can understand
...do I even need to explain
that repetition is the rhythm of the media game?
and that’s the main reason that I keep repeating my name?
and I place so much faith in my team, it’s insane…

world around sound, and we build to suit
skills and truth, the foundation that fills the room
world around sound, we build and we break
cuz we’re still willing to make all the illest mistakes

Been a Long Time Gone

2011-11-17T09:11:00Z

“Where you been, Uncle Hump?” For once, the answer is simple: waking up.

Few things are more dangerous than believing your own hype, especially when you lack any of the real-world skills required to actually live up to the legend. I can rap, write and fuck, and up until 2011, that was really about it. Not much of a resume, you know what I mean?

So what changed? Well, here’s a thousand words, for starters…

I would be hard pressed to say if my heart was broken open, or my head. Based on my experience, though, it definitely felt like everything began and ended in my chest. Heartache is certainly nothing new to me, but the intensity of it was. Smug neurologist types discount the very existence of heartache—Carl Zimmer dismisses it as “brainache.” Despite my disagreement, he might easily be right, and it doesn’t matter either way. I don’t need to convince anyone reading this that kind of pain is real. You know.

So: It began as a heartache without apparent cause and deepened and persisted until I fell asleep exhausted. When I woke up the next morning feeling exactly the same, I realized something was up. What followed is something I am still at a loss to describe. I was definitely in states I can only compare to bad trips and insanely powerful drugs. I consistently had the sense that my experience was being guided by Something Else, yet I cannot recall ever actually interacting with the Other.

Incoherent story short, I was basically forced to confront myself as I actually am...for six days.

In the bewilderment after all this finally subsided, I was reminded of a cold December morning in St. Johnsbury, Vermont back when I was in the third grade. Some enterprising Evangelist had dumped hundreds, maybe even thousands, of those little Jack T. Chick comic books. I remember them being scattered all over the place, and I remember sitting down and reading THIS WAS YOUR LIFE from cover to cover. Even then, it was absurd to me that God would individually watch movies of every human being’s life, but the imagery was powerfully simple enough to stick with me ever since.

That comic, ridiculous as it all was, is basically what happened to me. I have never been through anything remotely like it.

As I’ve covered before here, science is brutal stuff. Men and women in starchy white coats will do things like torture mice in order to observe whether or not other mice have a physical reaction to seeing the agony of their fellow prisoners. (They do, of course...yet another experiment that could have been avoided altogether by simply asking any child.)

Since that experiment was initially performed in 2006, it’s been replicated in nearly a hundred metal rooms around the world...you know, just to be sure. Just to be thorough, just to be objective, and just to fine tune the findings and figure out what the physical mechanisms at work were. The answers led to mirror neurons, vagus nerves, and the puzzle pieces that make up the Science of Heartache. And it’s not much.

Latin is a dead language in every possible sense. Rome burned to the ground like it deserved to and the great Empire tongue became the secret code of celibates and pedophiles for a thousand years...today, it’s deader still, weaponized by the grim cult of Science into a system for rendering our common sense experience into unreadable jargon. Thus does “heartache” become “stress cardiomyopathy,” for instance.

Modern superstitious primitives are given magic formulas to ward away the terror of the unknown: as lots of “rational” guys have explained to me over the years, love is just a matter of chemicals, see, and...well, you may already know, all too well, where that empty line of thinking leads young men. So I question the wisdom in laying out the chain of causality here, especially when it’s built on such fragile and fleeting data points. Whether you believe in cortisol or oxytocin, Artemis or Isis, the throbbing physical pain of heartache burns the brain empty. When you’re sobbing on a sofa, Science does you about as much good as one of your parents giving you an awkward speech over the phone about “other fish in the sea.”

I’m fortunate to have a large and strange international network, and I’ve been told this experience is nothing new. I have been given detailed, eloquent explanations of what happened as a Kundalini event, as a Saturn Return phenomena, and a miraculously simple matter of bioelectricity and some disputed properties of my DNA. My critical and cynical brain will only accept all this as mere primate guesswork, Anthropology at best. I’m a dick like that...and thank Ganesh for that much.

Skeptic I may be, but the rawness of it all left me shaken. It feels like a giant punctuation mark separating my life before and...well, whatever the hell is going on in my head now. I joke about being a Recovering Asshole but the fact is, I’ve been fairly lost since this occurred. I don’t know what happened to me. I also don’t know how to honor what I was given and I don’t know how to integrate what I learned. I can at least promise to keep y’all posted.

I do know that I was living inside my head altogether too much. In breaking open my heart, I felt firsthand how much information is swimming through my veins. I was tuning out most of my body and I suspect I’m hard at work forging those same shackles again. My ego has an immune system of its own, and it has been raging to regain control of the circus. 2012 will be, as promised by every charlatan I’ve spat in the lying face of, a powerfully strange year of personal transformation. Amen.

Pema Chodron: ‎"Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things.”

Contacticus Rex: YoHumpJones@gmail.com