74

by kamikaze picnic

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1.
08:01
lyrics
2.
01:14
lyrics
3.
02:00
lyrics
4.
01:13
lyrics
5.
01:47
lyrics
6.
01:36
lyrics
7.
00:48
lyrics
8.
03:09
lyrics
9.
00:48
lyrics
10.
02:10
lyrics
11.
05:37
lyrics

credits

released 21 April 2013

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tags: pulp rap New York

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Track Name: the story
Album 74
February 2013
Return to Junk Island: The Juncano

Gentle Ben composed an open letter to Ragwipe with letters he ripped from pamphlets and he delivered it to Jim Journals, who read it in Junk Square. I have a copy here:
"You menace, you disrupter and corrupter of the family structure. We demand your removal from the island. Signed, Gentle Ben.”
Ragwipe was outraged that a rat was living in the nursing home and became articulate, so he called the Peace, claiming the elderly are susceptible to zoonotic illness. Ragwipe was charged with disturbing the Peace and had to perform community service, and the Peace removed Ben from the nursing home to avoid receiving more calls. They netted Gentle Ben and forced him down the drain.
Big Nouns discovered Ben and dragged him to the rat pit.
“You don’t smell right,” one said.
“He’s a real people person,” another remarked.
They gnawed the net off Ben and pushed him into the rat pit, which was a fighting arena where Ben received unfriendly biting.
Gentle Ben’s letter was the first piece of literature written by a rat, but it had little in common with the body of literature that was about to emerge, which was referred to as rat lit. Unlike Gentle Ben, who opposed the ingestion of junk milk concentrate and wrote in a self-conscious, detached style that was typical someone who spent his time in the company of humans, Buck Dodgers left behind simpler, more organic writings that dealt with living in harmony with the land and worshipping the Big Nipper. This style would come to typify the genre of rat lit and influence many rats who came after him. A writing entrusted to Colonel Brosevelt appears here:

They call me Buck Dodgers.
I'm a slender-tailed Cloud Rat with prominent whiskers.
I naturalized in the second wave of rat migration and I acclimated with a strata of rat society known as the Cloudrunners.
We stay in the clouds eating junk milk concentrate and we say it comes from the Big Nipper, our guy in the sky.
We slept in the Interior Drains and played in the Gram Canyon until a fellow moved in and peered over the Rim, scratching himself.
He set a trap we call the jawbone and he spread junk milk concentrate on it, which we call jawbait, and if you fall for it you’re a jawbird, flying high in the great beyond.
I've seen friends get caught in that big trap; they became Cloudrunners, racing in freer states of mind.
I was sniffing it when a fiend rushed it and I got to witness how the trigger inside moves the coiled spring to make the plastic teeth embrace.
Jawbone snapped his spinal cord.
The junk milk fiends can’t avoid it.
They're looking for more mystical visions.
It’s pleasant to ponder the orphic mystery - if flying towards the Big Nipper, but not Milk Nasty.
Down here it’s bad.
Ragwipe treats us like vermin but I know I’m not vermin.
They say we’ve got hamster ancestors but the truth is that the Big Nipper poured our souls out of star stuff into these fur jackets.
We piled on Ragwipe’s house one night while he was sleeping in his coffin and crushed his roof.
You should have been there.
He was so scared he didn’t even come out of his coffin.
We snarled at him and gnawed on his coffin but couldn’t touch him.
Then he brought the colorful smoke.
He shot toxic smoke balls from the Rim into the Canyon, and when they landed they cracked open and Ragwipe and his crew leaped like circus clowns, they were so happy.
The blue and white clouds made me rub my eyes.
So, I crawled down through the grate for cover.
Moments later I poked my nose above the grate, and Ragwipe took a picture of me.
He wanted it for his propaganda, to show my wild burning orbs.
His poster says Kill Buck Dodgers, and that means me, the rat with the funny blue hair.
I slid back into the rat hole, went down to the Milk Basin where I fed on gunky chunks of clumpy goop.
A nibble gave me the nippers, a junk shiver shake that shaded my thoughts, and I needed that chunky chew.
For days I wallowed until I tired of it, then I ate the stupor stopper, a plant that grows down here, and I rose ready to ride the last wave.
I figured the chemicals were dissipated and I was feeling invincible, anyway, so I scurried up the hole and saw the fantasy daylight.
I was in the airy light and I had a hankering for playing so I chased friends around the Drain, an activity we call finnin.
I’m always finnin on the inner Gorge.
Like shark fins out of waves, we tore through the Canyon, inviting the sniper to come to us in carnage.
I was on my back and musing on the firmament.
Ragwipe was chipping the limestone Rim, and a man came over with his Realitors outfit and made some threatening gestures.
They must have wanted to kick him out.
He put his pick axe away and had words and the man left but not an hour later - an hour I spent laying about, pondering the wideness of the sky, wondering where up there the Big Nipper might be making the milk - this mongrel comes tearing down the Rim on his go-kart and with a big gas mask on his face, which made me think he was playing costumes at first but he was expelling gas.
I ran, my friends too, rattled.
The billowing chemicals poofed down the Drain, poofed me out of sight.
We went to the groundwaters and if that was a leisurely day, I would have stopped in the catchbasin which can be quite nice.
Objects are caught there, and it’s necessary to push them aside, but it’s the nicest water we have and you can splash everyone who passes by.
He pumped those gas canon rounds right down into the drain and it’s not the nice kind of gas that makes you feel swept to laugh.
It‘s a soul hunting fog, and it turns your mouth into a sputtering boat motor.
No rat wants to face his innards synthetically because there ain‘t no symmetry for the demonized soul.
We went deeper than smoke, through tunnels reaching the untended parts.
However, he sealed the entrance to our underkingdom.
We spent the following days playing a game called "see me, flee me," where each runner has to flee from each other runner and if two players meet again, they face off and fight until one is pinned.
The loser has to sit in the Shallun Drain which is the most frightening.
We run for days anxious and feeding, missing the daylight a little, until that seal was broken and we saw the Colonel’s caring hands undoing Ragwipe’s work.
We carried junk milk concentrate up for the Colonel and he petted us and scratched our ears.
Then his face turned serious as he sniffed and eyed the clump that we bestowed.
He maybe feared it was tainted by gas.
I’d say a week passed and an unfruitful one at that, which is how I like it, when Ragwipe and his cohorts arrived with too many tools to carry being dragged behind them on sleighs attached to their go-karts and these were not little handy tools but bigger construction tools and other things like ropes.
The more creative they become, the worse off we are, so we scattered down the drain as usual and watched them sparking the grate with melting fire and when they could slide through they wrapped their ropes around the remains of the grate and rappelled down.
Leave it to Big Nouns to say the right thing: “Intrusion!”
Ragwipe had a grin on his face and some big chemical guns and
the fumes came at us like bedsheets on clotheslines.
We wanted to run but at the same time stay and watch dumbly at the spectacle this would be.
Most everyone ran except me, I was too curious so I hid in a crevice in the wall.
As Ragwipe descended, he sang "An Ode to Antartica" because Antartica is one of the few rat free zones in the world.
Ragwipe rapelled to the floor and saw Gentle Ben cowering and asked if he was a lookout.
Ben, the sorry sniveller, shook his head “No” and begged to be saved and must have scored some compassion if you can believe it.
The dignified don’t reap such rewards I guess.
Ragwipe shot gas clusters out of his canon but the bombs started to have a chemical reaction with a bottle of calmatose I snagged.
Those mixed with the junk milk concentrate started to fizz and foam and rise and boil in a furious alchemy.
The ground started to shake.
Ragwipe ran back to the line and secured his harness to it.
Ben ran up to Ragwipe, sniffing and licking.
“Come on you wuss,” Ragwipe said and Ben jumped into his arms.
Ragwipe tugged on the line and he and Ben were lifted to the mouth of the Drain.
I stayed in my crevice, waiting for the shaking to stop, until a thick yellow foam boiled up and forced us all out as it broke the mouth of the Drain open, pulling the ground up towards the sky into a giant flowing juncano.
This is where we get our mythical figure Bach Lava. He had a house that filled with steaming milk and it burned holes in his face. His new head holes embellished his acoustical awareness. The juncano also tore through his fridge so he played it like a musical instrument. When he plugged it in its motor sent electric pulses through the box and they reverberated at different pitches.
Track Name: ripped from pamphlets
Here’s some letters that I ripped from pamphlets
Put them into words to express the rat’s wit
Here’s an open letter, that means for all to read
All see, all want to feel born free
But we’re trapped by our gnarly nature
Waiting for Glob, the Lofty White Laser
Don’t think that I was born with anger
But I made a whole lot with a lot of strangers
Cut thoughts open, curbside writing
Plastic elixirs make night inviting
Penned destruction - the word is my hope for reinvention
For recreation.
Something calls out from a nice, fixed form
I’m chopping up words like grass on the lawn
Maybe my hands are another John Deere
Flexing the power to tear makes fear
On my command let go of your pens
I’m a ticker tape tyrant with a typed up fence
And only if you jump like the cow over moon can you land in my yard
It’s a postcard ruins
=
Ripped from pamphlets
=
Mashup advantage
Track Name: zoonotic
zoonotic illness
=
zoonotic, you got it
=
i know what the deal is
i don't want to feel this
gonna seek out some far out healers
gotta peel back bacteria shields
leave em like bikes with stolen wheels
germs roll through intestinal fields
and it tests my strength like any ordeal
the psychosomatic factor is sordid
i want to wipe out any possible boarded
germs in my system
man let's floor it
flush my system i can afford it
=
zoonotic, you got it
=
what is this disease coming from animals?
my immune system's incompatible
germs all love me - i'm actually edible
with vitamin c i'm sort of fanatical
the germ's in your mouth and your tongue is a catapult
launching at me and living on my heart
i'm falling apart inside in the dark
and i wish i never mixed with animal parts
i'm not designed to accodomate this in my spine
but little zoonotic organisms
they make me listen
as they whisper doom
my greatest fear is to be consumed
==
zoonotic, you got it
=
Track Name: jaws of death
jaw bone
j'all live alone
jaw to the floor
raw to the bone
saw saw saw it off
with a bite so tight that you go soft
and harden up
darting up
to the clouds
runner up
body in a cutting cup
first we're gutted then we're sloughed
man it's tough being bucks
not to emote people stuff
we know that we got to go
but we'd like to take it slow
when it happens we imagine
that it's in a cloud setting
=
jaws of death can cut you up
all our lives we feel stuffed
all emotional and put
all our feelings into what?
i'll be gutted
i'll be cutted
when my soul hit the earth
it was tainted it was mudded
i don't want to be abutted
by a heaven
fall into a weapon
in a world that all imagine
to be wholesome to be whole
what a vessel for my soul
not hot or cold
Track Name: cloud runner
Run to the clouds
=
I run to the clouds
I high five my pals
Glad to be here y'all, catch up get an earful
See what's what, take time, get my bearings
Nothing is better than, nothing comparing
I don't get tired i can play all day
On a cloudy ground. I’m big nipper bound
Bound like cuffs that never lay rough
To big funky clouds
Big fluffy tufts
A white sock stuck in a sun hewn horizon
The amber hamper
Sun spots are dander
A coating of yellow lipstick riding waves
That are known through means scientific
Otherwise rat lit is capturing magic
That we all see on this mythical mattress
Damn i don't even have a cabinet
Nowhere to store stuff, hide, or half ass it
Track Name: kill buck dodgers
Kill buck dodgers
But he's the father of a genre that pushes spiritual commerce
Keep on track in ongoing wars
With rats that ran on a concrete course
From smoke so odd
A chemical nod
Moving through a soul hunting fog
Ain’t no symmetry for my soul
I drop down I’m deeper than smoke
Move through tunnels in unknown parts
Of the under kingdom where day is dark
Thoughts of peace that grow like weeds
In a garden of tumult, hate and havoc
Lie in the grip of a saw toothed ratchet
Never lets go like a spiritual casket
The human magic that makes plastic
Is a patchwork fixed in the blooming panic
I pull letters from text established
Break down
Deconstruct and damage
Word collages from the famished
Living in harmony with the land
Track Name: chunky chew
I need that chunky chew
Gunky chunks of clumpy goop.
A nibble gave me the nippers
A junk shiver shake that shaded my thoughts
I found myself and found myself lost
Put my name on the clouds embossed
Hey, Big Nipper our paths have crossed
Maybe you could take my soul and floss
=
Then i rose ready to ride the last wave
One more bite and I might get saved
Track Name: wideness of the sky ft understudy, chaz kangas
Maybe the sky is big
Maybe the earth is small
I’m behind tiny eyes
Eyelids are cellar walls
Look up without a fear
Want to get out of here
Live in my headspace
A place that is never clear
Look how the clouds float
Without attachments
Lost in the wideness
How can I try this?
Maybe I’m unstuck and don't even know this
Up against myself
Trapped in my interest
=
I think the sky might be a little too big
It might be that the sky's just a little oversized
Track Name: stupor stopper
wait, un-inebriate
un or re-alter the altered state
put me back in my normalcy
then we'll be back and all agree
stop my stupor but do it sooner
keep the cool world on the cooler
i don't want to recall how this was
stop the stupor and kill the buzz
Track Name: cherry bombs (bonus)
people get involved
people get appalled
when they find out
what their partner's hiding
people get enraged when the one they're engaged to
keeps a secret - your partner played you
from your relationship he strayed
now you've gotta lie in the bed he made
maybe self pity could make you soften
it happens often
i would guess
in any case it's a lot stress
coming your way coming down the pike
do web search and find out
just the kind of pornography he likes
not like you, you're so nice
funny how you wound up with that type
that's alright back on the horse
love in your heart and you're on the course
meet new dude oh you're screwed
this one can't stop eating food
he's upfront it's what you want
he's got sickness that's apparent
he wants mommy that's a parent
you can rescue that's exactly how he gets you
and nets you
and then you stick around
4-5 years
full of ideas
maybe you could help him build a career
have no fear oh wait shambles
he forgot to mention that he gambles
now when you're on the phone you ramble
it seems that your family felt
all along you needed help
not your lovers
that's a cover
what you're hiding from your self
is the thing that leaves the welt
find the causes of your hurting
look inside where you're inserting
bad beliefs
human needs are crying out
and you're the theif
stop stealing from your heart
=
i'm throwing cherry bombs
Track Name: dear room (bonus)
dear room,
you're too small
i don't want to live in you
=
what's up room?
whatcha doing?
why you gotta be like that?
small and all?
making me want to be living in a better place
where a lady might want to be in lace
bad room
driving away the better half
go ahead and laugh, jealousy
you just want me to yourself
guess what?
if i ever come into wealth, i'm leaving you
i don't care all about the time we share
we can be together in spirit but physically it's over
i don't want to hear it
i'm moving on to bigger better places like the jeffersons
how can i live with a half assed closet?
chair against the bed
bed against the air conditioner
and everything is wedged
=
i don't want to be with you
i want a nice apartment
maybe something uptown
something with a door man
=
hey room what's new?
someone wants to see you
yeah, lucky dog, your gonna have a visitor
let's get ready! you can look really good
yeah i really mean it. let me get the broom
now doesn't that feel nice to be swept
how about a vacuum? now your rug is clean
isn't this exciting? let me get the mop
you're squeaky clean! yes i have to stop
time for the toothpaste! this won't hurt at all
you've got a hundred little holes in the wall
now you look great! really you're amazing
let's think positive about the situation
one good thing is your modestly priced
oh, ding dong. here comes mr right
put a smile on. make him feel good
hold in the creaks when he walks on the wood
=
wow room, we've been waiting for three days
i don't think he likes you. how could he be busy?
maybe if your window caught sun rays
instead of just looking at a big brick building
he would want to be with you
maybe not forever, maybe nothing serious
not that he would buy you
but i could see him signing for at least one year
then i could finally get fudge out of here
do you remember when i thought i could sublet
how i said i'd have a little a cash on the side
facts are facts and you're not a cash cow
i was disappointed. we can laugh about it now
that's fine. i don't really need you to produce
we just gotta find a renter so i get cut loose
why can't you be more like the other rooms
in the building next door that was built after the war
=
guess what? looks like you got what you want
i waited til june but i can't even leave
sure the lease is up but i can't pay the fee
of a nice new place with a broker or without
so i'm really stuck, gonna have to live in squalor
in a building with neighbors who seem to like roaches and mice
how is this my life?
one thing i can say is the location is convenient
never really scared to come home late at night
but the heater starts banging when i try be asleep
and i hear garbage trucks late at night on the street
when they pull up they go beep beep beep beep beep beep crunch crunch x3
and there's nothing i can do to improve the situation
i can't redecorate i need a renovation
=
maybe we should just say that bygones are bygones
i wish i was gone but i'm stuck for the long haul
so i had to file a complaint
want to make my landlord lower the rent but he ain't
doing it doing it doing it...well...
looks like he was charging more than he should've been charging me
for a stabilized apartment
he got a letter in the mail from the city
he told me to leave and i said wait a minute
we should make a deal
you lower my rent - i'll withdraw the complaints
then i can tolerate all with chipping paint
that lands on my head cause it's right above my bed
and he said don't worry cause it doesn't have lead
and i was like fine - it happens all the time
but as long as i'm not dying too fast i won't whine