Bassline (& 2020 in general): Re-e-wind
What a strange year, as everyone, everywhere has said a million times… Writing-wise, I’d been doing Record Collector magazine since 2014, and uDiscover (the Universal Records online mag) for not much less, & that all just seemed to (understandably) stop dead with the onset of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve polished off my chapter on the work of Simon Morris and the Ceramic Hobs for Palgrave, & that’s about it, so you’re more likely to find me over on Twitter at Sniffy (@philblackpool) / Twitter these days, blurting out the odd sentence. I hence thought it might be time to revisit a very old piece…
Like many, I’ve been working from home for much of the year, and although I’ve occasionally wanted to pull out my own eyeballs, it has generally been very pleasant for a voracious music-lover. I started by catching up on the vast majority of my insane, years-deep second-hand vinyl buy piles, and then chomped through a load of ‘long listen’ stuff I’d had on the backburner forever (including, astonishingly, eventually getting through something like 40 hours of Pan Sonic live sets someone had dumped online). I graded hundreds of releases for sale on Discogs, and revisited umpteen musical thangs extensively, including 90s gabba, Sun Ra, music hall, Schoenberg, dancehall reggae, the acknowledged worst albums ever, happy hardcore, Italian house, bounce and makina (I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve spent checking out youtubes to try to identify a couple of most-wanted bounce and makina tunes), Britpop (!), cosmic disco, and Belgian popcorn. It’s been an extraordinary year, packed with cultural discovery and rediscovery. In amongst this, in no way ashamed of my abject love of Discogs, and already having used and edited it for many years, I read the entire guidelines and decided to go hard on sorting out stuff I care about on there. Seeing they’d finally added various more recent ‘styles’, I’ve spent the last month and a half doing a ridiculous amount of edits on a dozen or so niche genres of importance in recent times (footwork, Jersey Club, yadda yadda). My tweakings around Bassline and UK Funky eventually drew me to the attention of UK Garage legend Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown, a fellow Discogs obsessive not so keen on the editing side of the site, who wondered if I might give him a hand sorting out the mess of his own and his label’s (2Tuf 4U) discographies. His entertaining phonecalls were enough to convince me.
I dug out all my stuff related to Karl’s label to listen to along the way, and found myself noticing how much UKG has been back in the spotlight of late (key, and brilliant, article here: RA: Like A Battle: The Push For UK Garage's Future (residentadvisor.net) ). While by no means unaware of this (I’ve had some lovely promos from Kiwi and the like of late, plus some moodier bits from various El-B worshippers), my status as a confirmed middle-aged semi-retired raver had hidden much of this from me. This leads me onto one of my big philosophical points of recent years: I listened to dance music avidly before I ever went out dancing, and listen to it now in lockdown, and in semi-retirement. There is far too much an emphasis among ever-rejuvenating dance music correspondents on ‘the club’ as the only way to enjoy dance music, but we know that OG disco fans are 60+ and unlikely to be out every weekend these days – is their experience now worthless? Online fans talk up their love of dance music for exercise soundtracks, bedtime calming soundtracks, etc: this is reality. Dance music is as valid to all these people as rock is to people who haven’t been to a gig in 40 years.
The style I felt myself most drawn back to was bassline (largely via Karl’s low-key issue of some DJ Q material). My love of UK Garage and all its offshoots largely stems from how physically removed I have been from it from virtually its entire history. Only my 2000-03 stint in Essex perfectly matched the garage waveform, and that was the 2-step era, quite the opposite of bassline. Despite being largely a northern phenomenon, Blackpool is largely untouched by bassline, being all about punk and bounce to my mind. An instant love for me circa 2007, bassline feels like one of those genres with unfinished business, but remains one I’ve rarely danced to. Cut off in its prime, it is now back, enormously popular, and rightly so, but, due to the vagaries of the digital music world, some of its key material remains tough to access in any decent form.
I originally wrote the piece I have butchered for this one in March 2008, on Myspace (remember that), in reaction to the exciting waves of bassline and UK funky then reinvigorating the world of UKG. It looks a bit embarrassing now, with more writing experience, although I continue to applaud my own willingness to be open about my innocent appreciation of things I love but am not truly part of.
The most notable misstep in my original piece was the presumption that bassline would become the latest enormous chart sensation. Like happy hardcore before it, the ball was, in reality, fumbled. Instead of hoped-for freaky innovation, the producers also opted, as many in years gone by, for smoothed-out commerciality (in unholy alliance with low-grade grime crossovers), although the main adversarial issues seem to have been police crackdowns and the London-centric ‘cool police’. Although I was long aware of such problems with Niche in Sheffield (the genre’s spiritual home), it appears that the police interference had a devastating effect across the board ( Banned From Sheffield: How Jamie Duggan fought for bassline… And won (ukf.com) ). This largely explains why many of the bassline producers gravitated towards the largely wack bass house/house & bass style so beloved of teenyboppers in recent years. Thank heavens that era is now largely over.
Niche reputedly specialised in an arguably unholy mixture of dated late 90s speed garage and ‘bassline house’ (think ‘Let Me Show You’ by Camisra, and MK’s ‘organ house’), way past their sell-by date (I still only really like a handful of Shaun Banger Scott bits in this style, one single 2009 Brummie CD EP, and one Virgo remix). Ultimately, though, this experiment unexpectedly created something magical. The crucial element here is the 4/4 beat. While undoubtedly skippy, the vast majority of the material favoured had a firm 4/4 beat, always favoured across all key scenes in the north of England from northern soul onwards. When they ran out of tunes to rinse, in time-honoured fashion, they made their own. Long, rumbling walls of bass, organs, and hoppy-skippy beats, with raggafied samples and gunshots over the top. Popular in Birmingham as well (pretty much the centre of a vinyl glut at the time, and now notable in the popularity of DJs such as Chris Lorenzo and Hannah Wants), B-side titles hinted of coke overload. Disenfranchised by London’s movement away from the holy 4/4 (despite a slight revival in the early noughties), and via messenger services and the like, northern producers began to exchange a new hybrid in the mid-00s which took these speed garage and bassline house influences and updated them with current R’n’B bootlegs, with influences from grime (regional grime producers were key here) and, most notably, with rococo basslines. Its most obvious comparison point was Sticky’s garage productions, concurrent with the early grime era. Southern producers such as Agent X, Delinquent (who featured Gemma Fox on their magical 2006 ‘Boxers’), and Dexplicit (Fox again, 2005’s ‘Might Be’) ran with that, and the north lapped it up. Key early pointers also included DJ Narrows’ superb 2001 4/4 tune ‘Saved Soul’, and early 00s DND work (Artwork, later part of dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man). A notable increase in output came in 2006, and 2007-9 were the genre’s original glory years. And the bulk of producers and up-&-comings delivering serious anthems to the scene came not from London and the south-east, but from Leeds (T2, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), Bradford (TS7), Manchester (Murkz, Burgaboy, Subzero), Nottingham (Virgo, IllMana), Leicester (JTJ, H20, FB & Zibba), and Wolverhampton (EJ, TRC, Brett Maverick). EJ’s Ejucation mix series (all up on Soundcloud) is a good place to start, beginning as the bassline house began to be overtaken by the pure bassline numbers.
Distribution for serious UK garage music has often been woeful, with only high street compilations & the chart singles (‘Heartbroken’ by T2, ‘What’s It Gonna Be’ by H20, etc) making it all over the country, and this helped stymie the true development of bassline, although vinyl prices, dreadful video promos, and the leap to digital in some ways didn’t help. Years on, as an incorrigible vinyl fanatic, I still only have handful of bassline 12”s. Yes, you can now access this stuff the world over via Youtube etc, but decent, high-quality copies of full-length tunes (they are often hacked about to great effect, but in a way which obscures the original intentions, in the mix) are not always the easiest to come by, although the classic producers are increasingly putting out digital compilations of their original work. Material that would, for previous genres, be fiended after, is lost to being just more online links. At the time, I looked high and low for 12”s, succeeding only rarely, largely on the flip of UK Funky releases. The (mixtape) audience, going by comments online, were often extremely young, are probably now still only in their mid-twenties, and are seemingly happy enough with this chaotic model. Bassline originally, as all rave genres, largely ran off mixtape boxsets, and a 2007 ‘Pure Bass – Fantasy’ box from Stoke remains my key document of that era: seven bassline CDs, with many tracks repeated, but packed to the gills, with most tracks only lasting a minute or two in the mix. As with all rave mixes, it has taken me years to suss the majority of the track IDs. In the Resident Advisor piece linked above, DJ Q (from Huddersfield) talks about thousands of lost bassline tunes, the bad side of the digital revolution. My recent Discogs ferreting suggests more bassline tunes than one might imagine did make some sort of decent release, but too many only made white labels, promo CDs for commercial releases (before being snipped from the main release), mix CDRs, or Youtube’s grainy depths. Classics such as TS7 featuring Bianca’s ‘Seems Like’ appear to never have had any decent release whatsoever, despite TS7 going on to be a big name in bass-oriented house, and Bianca Gerald having kept at the vocal turns ever since.
T2 hit biggest, with ‘Heartbroken’, a gorgeous, smashed-vocal garage dub so popular that it even inspired a Jersey Club refix. His catalogue was immediately deep, although I get the impression he has stopped adding to it. One complaint about bassline, including some of the T2 work, regards the untutored vocals, which can sometimes be rather flat, and certainly lacking in dynamics compared to the dazzling US vocalists featured on some earlier UK garage pieces (I refer here, as always, to TJ Cases’ remarkable ‘Do It Again’). I kinda like that - it shows amateur enthusiasm not far removed from punk, and most obviously links to lover’s rock, as does the production at times: it gives a feeling of melancholy entirely suited to the vocals. Other bassline heroes include TS7, who briefly brought to the fore sassy female garage MC T Dot. His productions also include ‘Smile’, one of my very favourite bassline tracks, full of that Simon Reynolds-quoted 'weird energy’ possessed by DJ Hype & co in the early nineties. Male bassline vocalists such as Ideal also remain unfairly forgotten, although some of the female vocalists have gone on to work in related genres since bassline’s peak.
Paleface, an ex-member of London garage rap crew Stonecold GX, runs Northern Line Records (FB, TRC, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), something of a quality mark for bassline productions, while also making highly successful UK Funky tunes as part of Crazy Cousinz, and later progressing into commercial house territory. He chronicled much of bassline’s high-water mark (including being married to Kyla, since sampled by Drake). Wolverhampton-based Northern Line signing TRC proved particularly adaptable, spewing out a legion of original tunes and remixes before retreating for a while to grime. Leeds’ Nastee Boi was a favourite of mine at the time, with his pitch-black gangsta bassline tunes, but pushed on towards a mixture of underwhelming R’n’B vocal cuts and nursery grime toons. Wittyboy started similarly punishingly but also went smoother, unbalancing the classic bassline rough and smooth combination.
Now that the dubiously poisonous rep of Niche has been dispatched, the key bassline acts have returned to their key battleground, and the genre seems in full throttle again. Much of the new material seems a little one-dimensional to me: producers invariably big up Bristol’s My Nu Leng as, I suppose, a bridge from bro-step to 4/4. Everything, as acknowledged by the DJs, is huge drops and nothing much else. It still sounds pretty hot though – not the updated lover’s rock of a decade ago, but worth supporting. Bassline is NOT finished!
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ejucated immigrant
((AUTHOR’S NOTE: @eene-fangirl For the Fanfiction Weekend Challenge! I should probably wait to post this for Rolf Appreciation Month, but there’s a lot of Jonny backstory/headcanons in here, so I thought it would count. Basically, it’s a poem from Rolf’s POV but it’s technically about Jonny, or rather, Jonny was my muse for this.
I haven’t written a poem in Rolf’s ‘’voice’’ since 2014 but believe it or not, that one little line that Edd says in ‘’A Case of Ed’’ inspired the poem (you know, the one), and as I was reading Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, it produced said result. A turnip for your thoughts? I don’t normally write Rolf like this, it’s actually more like Rolf emulating Ntozake Shange for those familiar with her style. As an Indian Immigrant girl who’s considered suicide, that book changed my life, she’s my idol. Hence, the poem is written in ebonics and all lower case to pay homage to Shange (and I consciously dropped third person redundancies, it wasn’t a mistake). Three non-EEnE characters are briefly mentioned: the first one is Vanessa, my friend who’s half African-American and half Haitian. The second one is Ice, who belongs to my friend, Dani. Ice, in her world, is a black and white cat who becomes Double D’s pet. Rolf fears him because he’s not only black and white, but he shares the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement by pure coincidence. Dani didn’t plan this, as she created Ice before she met me but she liked the idea of giving Rolf a reason to fear the cat, and so we came up with that story together. The third one is Dr. Feelgood who was my therapist, it’s not her real name, it was an affectionate nickname I coined for her in my years battling Bipolar Disorder Type 3.
As a closing thought, much apologies for the length, also tumblr’s going to mess up the format.))
‘’ejucated immigrant’’
dear gods,
i be 14 wit skin as rough as treebark & hands dat look old
i waz the dark skined immigrant wanting to bathe in bleach
Brown Black / Blue Black / Amber Beige / Bister Brick Bronze / Chestnut Chocolate Cinnamin
Copper / Drab / Dust / Ginger / Fawn / Ochre / Coffe Colourd Caramel
Tawny / Terra-Cotta / Henna / Sepia / Umbre
lookin in the thesurus eddward wit two ds give me when i come to dis country
everything spell Brown but nothing spell White
White sound nice like pearl like snow like milk like golden skined white skined light skined
honey dipped / lemon kissed / but begging for ivory / fair frosted silvery ashen boy jimmy
your white hands on my brown skin
i waz the dark skined immigrant botherin to drag you round
you stand there like a closed mouth statue & you insult my way of life
think you know everythin / rolf just some ignorant third world peasant or somethin
but we be livin dis way longer than the foundin of your land
your country young my country old
numbers & poppy / it just to give you illegitimately born breeds of donkeys
somethin to hee-haw over / science say there no gods either but who know dat
you cannot contain lightning bugs in a jar
i waz the dark skined immigrant dreamin of shakin the mr presidents hand
the former mr president wit eyes like a tired old man & Brown his Brown like a mud bath
it really too bad you know / rolf like your former president
dat black man who dont check dixtionaries for validation of his blackness
he not so bad / he waz sympathetic to the plight of the immigrant but his hands tied
not blame him / he not god he not have all the power in the world to fix dis weather
dis cloud dat hang over your land & who the hell is perfect?
it really such a shame / i dream to see the Hill / see the pearly house painted white the place where he live meet him shake his large brown hand / one brown hand to another
cept i not black / rolf not have to be / not pass / rolf european he is white not bloodless
he not pass he not be white enough for your country
cept i be white on the inside look coloured on the out but i aint no coloured
under my skin i am more than a colour
whoever herd of white passing for person of colour
but suddenly i get to dis country & i be treated no different than jonny
so alls i got is coloured dreams
poor grate nano lived & died on silly dreams / well they not exist
there be only reality & reality not kind to the dark skined indigenous immigrant
no one know what i supposed to be / take a wild guess
indian pakistani mexican romani rolf herd it all & none suppose right
they only looking at my face / the outside the outside not matter
cuz i waz the dark skined immigrant not italian not irish but the other kinds
& no one will see unless rolf cut open his veins & bleed
a Wood Nymph have my colour & if i check off the box dat say caucasian i get a funny look
from the lady sittin behind the counter wit the yellow nail polish & beaded eyeglass
spose if jonny do the same they wont believe him neither
jonny be good
yous see him dancin / wearin his stomach out / dark skined bare feet / swayin his hips
& grate thin arms but he not care dat he gots splinters in his fingertips
his nails turnin all black & blue & those chapped lips look like eyes starin out atchu
the gods make dis child the way he is
wit skinted knees & all & elbows pointed outwards readin you like a map
always wit the label on the left side
but he bootiful & he know it / beauty sometime come in the empty coffee can
not in the paper lillies or plastic pearls
you cant make a silk purse from a sows ear / even if dat ear be made of wood
of wood widda crayon drawn smile
jonnys mother the madwoman in the attic
rolf be certain jonny the wood boy some kind of elf from the passage of Valhöll
the mother of the Tree Sprite she not like rolf / well she not like any child it seems
weepy jimmy-boy & rolf invited to jonny-boys abode for a meeting of the Urban Rangers
& tho his mother never says so we feel she not like us very well
she never ast us to stay for lunch
even tho rolf personally would not eat a morsel of what these people eat
& we always been so polite to her but still she build walls
rolf believe she jealous of us becuz jonny likes us
she come out to the parlour / barefoot / flowers in her wild tangled mess of black raven hair
like yoko ono & wearing a long paisley skirt / she bootiful in an earthy sort of way
but she has a wild look in her eyes like a tigress
a violently insane expression like a german vampire dat make rolf think of bertha mason
she looms over her son like a dark older sister becuz they look so alike
altho her skin much darker / a deep chocolate brown / her complexion remind rolf of vanessa maybe she is haitian / she like the demon in nanas stories the one we all have widdin us
who comes out when we try too hard to be good children
she look at white as snow jimmy & myself like she disprove
either she not like us the uniforms or both
rolf forget tho these hippies wit their anti-establishment
they think every uniform represents what jonny calls ‘’the Man’’ & dats what it is rolf think
she not want jonny in the organisation
becuz she think it goes against their opposition to social norms
rolf could tell she wanted to ast us to leave / she not like jonny spending so much time wit us
becuz then he not at home meditating wit her or whatever it is they do
jonnys family is strange / they not eat meat & walk around shoeless
rolf has been called a gypsy by the children at school but flower child jonny seem to rolf more of a gypsy if there ever waz such a thing
he is almost ethereal / his family must be from a clan of faeries the kind nana warns rolf about but brown-skinned jonny seem harmless enough
i watch his mama put a daisy in the pocket of his jeans
i not know if his daddy be white or black but what difference does dat make
rolf understand it is important for a child to love their family no matter their faults
i know The Giving Tree still love his mother
even if she would prefer him to leave the Urban Rangers
of us three jimmy be the whitest of white jonny the blackest of black & i somewhere in between
but any one of us can walk into a puerto rican bar & start speakin spanish
& no one would know what we are
race too complicated & people too narrow minded / want everything boxed in
one day we waz layin on dat grassy knoll / jonny & i
where the trees whisper to us & we whisper back
cuz you know the boy talk to trees & i listen to his voice / & i be lookin at our hands you see
cuz we waz layin inches apart a flower between us & i tuck it behind his ear
then i look & see my skin only one shade lighter than his
tho the sun make me browner than i really be
out in the sun for hours & hours plowing & plowing the fields
by sundown i roasted coffee bean brown / as black as the inside of a chimney
& if i stumble into town any passing stranger would think i waz Black i mean African
id have to stay out of the sun for days to get my old colour black lest i wander round wit only the whites of my eyes
visible on my sun burnt dyed rust brown brown skin
& hair so course youd suppose it come off a horses ass
lookin more like an American Indian than a White
i holdin the back of my hand up to jonnys now
how bout dat two brown hands one dark & one light but whos to say i not be a dark white & he not a light skined brown
dont you dare tell me what i am & am not
bitch dis aint no south africa where yous all can reassign us based on what you think
i aint no sandra laing but sometime i wouldnt mind bein black if it meant for you to leave me be
in fact ill gladly be whatever you want me to be but i am what i am
not black enough for black not white enough for white so what am i?
dont box me into Black & White / cuz in dis world brother dat not exist
im sorry as hell but i gettin real tired of bein called
an illegal / an alien / a wop / a gypsy / a guinea / a brownie whatever you want to call us
all your bigoted slurs clumping us together like we one & the same
dat fine but papers or no papers not define who i am
so uncle sam can take it & shove it
welcome to america!
i be having a long love affair wit your country & people
i also be having a war wit em
mama told me there are limits for dark skined immigrants stuck in dis light skined first world
we come over the border wit all the rest of them
wit all them people from central & south america
wit all them refugees from africa & asia
guess what we blend right in we look no different
look just like any other brown faced ‘’illegal alien’’
border patrol take one look at us & think we just like the rest
cuz yesterdays europeans are todays mexicans & middle easterners
coloured Sons of Shepherds gots few chances
what it like to be bilingual / to speak in two tounge
ah but to be fluent in one & not the other tryin to find any definishun in the dixtionary
in which i drop third person redunduncies cuz i only one person not three
& i only speak two language
you speak spanish?
no habla inglés
you speak english?
i dont speak spanish
one day the hat & head as one edd boy say oh rolf! youre so unejucated!
i think my ears deseeve me but i know what i herd
i wish to strike his milk honey cheeks full of nonsense
& say to him i am the ejucated immigrant you be warned about
dont talk to me bout ejucashun
i sale cross the oshun
i wash up on your shore
i lern another language
it wasnt easy
what you know bout ejucashun
all you know come from books & theories
at least i know where i stand
you are a child & i am old old old my hands notted thick wit veins like the roots of a tree
you say i sound angry / yea i angry but not as angry as you
cuz there nothing they fear more than a minority who knows what up
i used to be fraid but not no more
i used to fear the plainclothes agents in Black & White uniform
of immigration & customes enforecement / of ICE police
of eddwards Black & White cat name Ice on ICE
he must be making fool out of me to call a domesticated beast after homeland security
a cat in uniform because the gods make him so not by choice
like there be some purpose to it / i waz the dark skined immigrant you made fun of
i see what they do to the undocumented immigrant on the telly
but now i not be fraid / becuz you cant touch me
so the grapefruit widda red ugly mouth & bleached hair sit in office now
damming all them people from ‘’shithole countries’’ / just as well but we here to stay
it not what i ast for but no use fighting it
& i will gladly pull the bookmarks from my english dixtionary
the one double d edd boy give me
no longer will i bathe in bleach / only use to washing dishes & floors
i not some bloody floor
‘’immigrant’’
at least i can spell dat / i look it up in the dixtionary
websters dixtionary / who the hell is webster?
but now it marked up used copy wit yellow post it notes
i use it a lot to lern your tounge
i not smart but i sho as hell not unejucated / papa can tell me dat
i be in your country in first place to reseeve ‘’best ejucashun’’ like grate nano wanted
grate nano waz an adventurer / a dreamer wit big goals
he travell far & wide seeking fame & fortune
when he a very young boy immigrants from every cesspool in western & eastern europe set sale for The North / it waz always grate nanos dream to travel North
everyone say he more insane than a bovine wit mad cows disease
there no room in dis life for dreams they tell him / he prove our village wrong
when rolf eight years of age grate nano briefly left the Old Country to set sale for america
everyone say he be too old / he never too old for dreams
he wanted to find dat American Dream he hear so often about
spoken wit fondness by the tinkers who visit our land
he returned from his valiant voyage wit stories about what he seen
in the North he said everyone has cars & money & television & running water
no one listen / The North the North they say dat is all you ever talk about
he waz a man who dreamed of a new life for his family & so he decided to send for us
& make a better life for ourselves after the plagues of the land had haunted our family for years
grate nano promised us america he said youll soon be eating apple pie from off a china plate
white picket fence / coca cola / santa clause / marilyn monroe / empire state building
it sound like a fairytale he spun a legend dat the streets waz paved wit gold
& we believed him for shining in grate nanos eye waz a dream & so here we are
rest his soul he wanted so much to buy us light & sun & clean wind of the oshun
‘’immigrant’’ waz a new word for rolf when he first come here
did not know after hearing the stories from grate nano dat he would soon be one himself
rolf not know what dat mean & still really dont
the dixtionary definishun say \ ˈi-mə-grənt \ noun. a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence
\ ˈi-mə-ˌgrāt \ verb. [to go or remove into; in, into, and migrate, to remove.]
to come into a new country, region, or environment in order to settle there: opposed to emigrate.
oh sorry dat definishun not say we unclean people / flea invested vermin
sickly serpents who not speak english / greaser / sheenie
contagions of american society / incredibly dirty tramps fresh off the boat
so pervasive / such nonwhite filth / staring back at pitch black faces
not blonde haired & blue eyed / nonwhite skin only fit for dirt & waste work
mama papa kiss me goodbye i going to haiti
but it is what rolf is now it part of his identity just as much as the colour of his skin
just as much as bein a pagan / just as much as bein a male
just as much as bein the Son of a Shepherd
now rolf a new man living in the New World
i am an immigrant
sometime i wish i waz shug avery / bootiful fictional dark skin harlem singer
half man half woman / wit my large glittering masculine thighs i make an animal of men
maybe i have the courtesan complex
so i ast dr feelgood what my diag-nonsense
& she say poor soul you suffer from Stressed Shepherd Syndrome
okay so we all crazy in one way or another / it alright for some
of a mannequin in tears / of personal prejudices
im an unejucated farm boy from No Mans Land
im a poet who write in english
neisatnaf i isatnaf ne / ttim tetrejh dem gnyalp re lesgnel og gem tolrof nuh
rettenremmos i sirb ne mos rav ed / gem etlatrof nuh dro retsem nadrovh
etted tal eddejks rofrovh? / enneh lit gem trekided gej og enneh teksnø etrejh ttim
senneh enenyoø ås gej etted tla eddejks rofrovh
& this is for Sons of Shepherds who have considered suicide
fin
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