The Batlord

Aside from being a mad phat jam the KMK song "Freeworld" is low key something that should give hope for a better world. Punk and hardcore for years have been shouting angry liberal screeds at each other that no one else would ever want to listen to, musically or ideologically, but "Freeworld" is a song meant to communicate a positive worldview that emphasizes a desire for a peace worth attaining and treasuring rather than simply a desire for busting heads. But this message is lost on just about anyone who wouldn't be caught dead at The Gathering. It's not even the specific message that's important as it provides no plan for change or intellectual advancement to put the gears of your mind in motion. It's just a chill song to make you feel happy with blunt in hand.

However, the aspect of the song and the group that I want to concentrate on is what it means for people mocked by anyone who knows anything really about them as morons with nothing to say and who wouldn't have anything to say if they tried (and they actually do at times). On this track you get lines like...

Or on another song, "Bong Tokin' Alcoholics" (love you guys), they claim...

Are they lyrical geniuses? Maybe not. They're not terrible as far as I'm concerned but that's neither here nor there. The Kottonmouth Kings are self-proclaimed juggalos, low class trash who just like to get high and apparently rep Marx or some ****. Why is that important when you have more socialist rhetoric with more substance than you could ever possibly want to read? Because most of the people who write that **** are intellectual giants who are mostly read by middle class college snobs who probably spit on the same working class they claim to fight for simply because they view them as ignorant and socially backward clods who must be led by the nose like children. It's not even just them. How many middle and upper class people in general do you think sneer at the rednecks and white trash of the world? Most of them at least to some extent? They don't even have to actively deride them. They just have to look at them, look at their own nice house, and feel better about themselves that there are people they can positively compare themselves to, especially when they're all on meth and beating their wives and actually agreeing to be on Cops without having their faces blurred. Even on this site I see it. How many times have just about anyone who's commented on juggalos and the Insane Clown Posse mocked them for being ignorant, low class trash? I know I do it with glee. And it's nothing but condescending, classist, nouveau aristocratic garbage that probably does more to damage class relations than any amount of wealth disparity.

Yet here are the Kottonmouth Kings declaring socialist views even though they quite likely have never read Chomsky or *insert socialist dude* and don't have particularly in-depth opinions on the minutiae of pinko leftist commie doctrine. These are the working class schlubs who truly matter though. Those college kids can talk amongst themselves as much as they want but nobody ****ing cares and they never will while they make no attempt to disseminate their political beliefs to a working class who would probably have no idea what they're even talking about. It's Daddy X, Johnny Richter, D-Loc, and all past and present members who represent the underclass who need to be reached the most if we want to have any chance at building a grassroots movement to enact meaningful change. It's the juggalos of the world, the trailer trash, the ratchet blacks, the barrio beaners who must be the backbone of a revolution or even just a unified, peaceful, political movement that can force politicians to listen to the undercurrents of the trod-upon.

So many people, again myself included, have considered these people to be sheep who will always leave the fate of the world to the elites despite the fact that the latter care little for the former, but the Kings are proof that such schmucks can be reached and possibly even radicalized. And if stoned moppets can appreciate the glory of a classless society where private ownership is as reviled as ditch weed then maybe the rest of their ilk can as well. Even those who aren't even starving to death in 1916 Russia.

To get to that point though where the smarty socialists can shake hands with the masses of disenfranchised poor we have to stop ****ting on them. Seriously. I'm gonna try to stop using terms like "redneck" and "white trash" because they only exist to demonize the lower class and make the rest of us feel better about ourselves. We're all brothers, bro. We all want a world where we can "fly away all across the skies, look at life through the view of an eagle's eyes", where it's possible to "sail away go under the sea, find the truth about the mysteries of the deep", and of course to "roam the earth as a free man on a planet with no borders explorin' our lands".

Man, I don't even know how much I believe in this socialist utopianism, but I guess I've come to the point where if I don't give just a little bit of faith to the human race's ability to do something, anything other than what we're doing now that the only option is to be swept under the waves of nihilism and despair. Nothing to lose I suppose. I mean if we can't do that then why even talk about socialism? If the masses can't be reached then why not just give in to capitalism and let the oligarchs run our lives for us? It's not like we can do it for ourselves in such a world. **** it, let's go for broke and bring back fascism. At least Hitler admitted to our faces that we're leaches with no worth to society besides being near useless cogs in a machine whose purpose is to find those worthy of crushing those beneath them.

**** that I guess. Imma bump "Freeworld" a few more times and crack open another cheap Clubtails to make the Kottonmouth Kings proud of me.

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