About Us


There is a good chance you found us accidentally by using the word “taint” in your search (If you found us on purpose, you deserve our accolades). Of course, we don’t know what you were looking for, but you stumbled on a damn cool project. Look around; let us help send you on a musical journey. Here you will find a number of album reviews from the strange and extreme to the tame and mainstream. Our reviewers are a bunch of obsessive miscreants. Most of us are avid music collectors and have been involved in the music world for decades. A couple of us have been in or are still in bands.

There are no rules on Tickle Your Taint Blog. Our reviewers might make you laugh, or piss you off; both results are legitimate. One reviewer might write a glowing review of an album; another might tear it apart. We may have a new review every week, or we could end up with one every six months. This blog exists as a social experiment to build community among a diverse group of music maniacs – our reviewers and hopefully you.


Tuesday, September 27, 2022

The Feral Hog of the Sandhills

After Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo


By Jack Rafferty


 

when the last of the bison were slaughtered

the hides were piled thousands high

in anticipation to be sold

but prices crashed, and the hides were left to rot

 

the ropes that held the hides frayed

and were chewed by vermin

the old flesh scattered

dispersed to become the land

 

then the crows came

thousands of them

their harsh voices filled the air

for thirty miles

 

people built a town

if it could be called that

upon the foundation of old rot

small and ragged

 

they would bury their dead

without care or ceremony

by a lone mesquite tree

in the sandhills

 

one day

a massive hog arrived 

it exhumed the graves

and devoured three bodies

 

the locals, appalled by this beast

gathered their guns

they fired into its matted fur

and to their horror it did not falter

 

it did not die

nor did it stop feasting on the bodies

at its slow, methodical pace

silent except for the gnashing

 

it ate its fill unbothered by the bullets

and trudged into the night

like some unholy spirit

bloody and fattened on dead flesh

 

a month later an ox killed a mule skinner

the hog returned

accompanied by crows

bloated herald of decay

 

the crows attended to it

like some fat monarch

plucking ticks from its rank flesh

the people called it Devil Pig

 

people soon began to believe

that when the hog departed

it walked into Hell

through a tunnel in the riverbank

 

when it left

the crows remained

the cacophony of their collective voice

drove people to madness

 

the crows stayed as envoys

a reminder to those occupying 

this land born from death

that death is the only true warden here  


Monday, September 5, 2022

Coal Mining Women (Rounder Records 1997)

 


By SoDak


The most productive hours of our days we spend working, jobs which are generally alienating, painful, and demoralizing. By the time we finish our shifts, we are exhausted, too tired to accomplish anything significant. Lacking any other means of survival, we sell our labor power to earn wages to purchase those things we need to survive, including plenty of items to entertain/distract us. The owners, seeking to maximize profits and expand production, regulate the pace of work and control the process in order to squeeze as much surplus from us as possible. Our misery generates their profits. The days and years disappear, as our minds and bodies are destroyed, while we continue to dream of retirement, simply to escape from the daily drudgery. 

The compilation record Coal Mining Women is an important historical document, detailing the exploitation that takes place under capitalism and the struggles of working people against the coal companies. It consists of twenty songs, sung by folksingers who grew up in coal country such as Hazel Dickens, Phyllis Boyens, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Florence Reece, and Reel World String Band. The songs give me chills every time I listen to them. Gunning’s “Dreadful Memories” recounts the poverty and starvation experienced by miners, as the Kentucky coal company hired “gun thugs” to threaten workers who dared to organize. It is a live recording, when she was quite old. Her voice is weathered, yet tender and defiant. I really wish Gunning’s song “I Hate the Capitalist System” was included on this compilation, as it would have fit in perfectly, describing the stark inequality that capitalist growth creates. Boyens’s “Lawrence Jones” notes that there is “one man dead on that Harlan County line” due to the violence employed by the coal company. On “Black Lung,” Dickens provides a haunting account of how this disease destroyed the lives of so many workers, digging coal underground. Companies simply turned their backs on the workers, replacing those who were sick and those who died with new workers. She sings, 


You ain’t even covered in their medical plans

And your life depends on the favors of man

Down in the poor house on starvation’s plan

Where pride is a stranger and doomed is a man

His soul full of coal dust till his body’s decayed

And everyone but black lung’s done turned him away

Black lung, black lung, oh your hand’s icy cold

As you reach for my life and you torture my soul

Cold as that water hole down in that dark cave

Where I spent my life’s blood diggin’ my own grave

Down at the graveyard the boss man came

With his little bunch of flowers, dear God what a shame

Take back those flowers, don’t you sing no sad songs

The die has been cast now, a good man is gone.


Death is ever present throughout these songs, especially those that are focused on mining accidents, such as Dickens’s “The Mannington Mine Disaster.” These songs are written so we do not forget how capitalist companies cut corners, creating unsafe conditions to reduce production costs. Here social murder is embedded throughout the existing economic system. Additionally, as Gunning explains, these mining operations are destroying the beauty of the mountains and poisoning the water. 

The songs on Coal Mining Women also speak to mobilization, resistance, protest, and revolution. It is clear what is at stake. As Gunning sings on “Come All You Coal Miners,”


l was born in old Kentucky, in a coal camp born and bred,

I know all about the pinto beans, bulldog gravy and cornbread,

And I know how the coal miners work and slave in the coal mines every day

For a dollar in the company store, for that is all they pay.


Coal mining is the most dangerous work in our land today

With plenty of dirty, slaving work, and very little pay.

Coal miner, won’t you wake up, and open your eyes and see

What the dirty capitalist system is doing to you and me.


They take your very life blood, they take our children’s lives

They take fathers away from children, and husbands away from wives.

Oh miner, won’t you organize wherever you may be

And make this a land of freedom for workers like you and me.


Dickens, on “They’ll Never Keep Us Down,” celebrates the solidarity of a radical labor movement, pointing out that all improvements in wages and quality of life have been fought for, challenging the interests of the bosses. Within this song, there is a recognition that this struggle is a constant one, given the exploitive system predicated upon capital accumulation. This point is important to keep in mind, especially as coal companies attempt to convince workers that they have the same interests. The question remains, “which side are you on”: that of the capitalist or the rest of humanity?