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Panzram, Pt. 1

by Reptilian American

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1.
Golden Rule 00:55
I started doing time at 11 years old been doing nothing since just in and out of jail again what you have done to me you also do to others what I have done to you may many others also do to you I have done as I was taught I'm no different from the other you taught me how to live my life and I have lived as you have taught me
2.
Pearls 01:13
I's riding in a boxcar feeling alone out west there was 4 big, burly bums they told me I's a nice boy they told me they'd make me rich then I was trading diamonds for pearls they gave me by force some were wisdom some were cum I left that train a sadder, wiser boy I left that train a sadder, sicker boy I left that boxcar found a loafer's stable them men didn't hold me down they just got me drunk and fucked me
3.
(look at my gun) I am a man who goes around doing people good is there anything that you want? No? You're a good fella --I'm gonna fuck you gimme all you got it's this train riding you, not me stick it in go on, stick it in I'll use my best moral persuasion you boys come on and stick it in soon it'll be time for you to walk it won't hurt me any train isn't rolling fast it might not hurt you much
4.
New Cellie 01:13
I am an experienced wolf I could teach Oscar Wilde all about fucking ass I need a new cellie I wore this one ragged I raped him this morning even though he bled all night I'm so busy working at sodomy I've got no time left to serve our Christ I don't work in this prison because there's no work for me I spend all of my days practicing sodomy our warden's a bigger wolf but I think any day now he'll tell me to go and sin no more
5.
this torture was born in Ohio protected by a big, fine man the garden had roses, everyone was fat the prisoners couldn't speak so they had no complaints I've been past Torquemada's Spain it was crude to the ways I live now the rack! the wheel! the red hot irons! fire's to burn and water's to drown torture and agony are relative things eventually they can only be so bad mankind's been around for thousands of years we fuck the same as aeons ago...
6.
there's a big hospital nearby full of women nurses... I think I'm gonna leave this prison tonight go drinking til I get my fuck on maybe I'll bottle up my feelings in one of them ladies I don't drink this much, I must be a slob it's too late and I'm too drunk to go back to prison tonight it was me that shot at that fucking sheriff I'd have burned everyone in his life they arrested me after I'd spent my bullets and my courage on the car ride home I jacked the deputy's gun I pointed it, but it didn't go off
7.
Size You Up 01:04
come here, sailor! get good and drunk! you're gonna work for me I got this yact, this one right here ain't she a fuckin beaut? now that I've got you on my ship it's time for sodomy... I rob sailors, kill em, too every couple days I steal more fucking booze so now it's back to 25th South Street I'm gonna size you up I got big work and easy pay I got this rope and rocks abound for the trip, about a mile out you too soon shall sink you had life, I took it I'll take everything I have reformed you... I'm gonna size you up you're about my height!
8.
Education 00:17
9.
the underworld code is very simple: never squeal--don't be a rat! all crooks want to believe they got honor cops are the same everyone believes they's principles everyone's always saying how much principles they got the queer part is, not only do they want others to believe this but they also believe it themselves they mistake policy for principle crooks are only straight when their interests align... if it's in my own interest to be straight I'll treat you fucking straight as soon as I need to fuck you I'll fuck you all to hell I've known every kind of cop and crook I know all their tricks inside and out
10.

about

Artist Statement from Reptilian American

I’m generally skeptical of artist statements, as I am of the work they are describing. In my view a work should speak for itself. That said, this album is extreme in its subject matter, and it is told from the point of view of a historical figure.

As far as the timing of the release of this album, well, I wasn’t sure I’d ever release this, actually. I made it on a lark on two very drunken nights of blowing off steam in the spring of 2019. The farm where my wife and I worked was fairly isolated and I was testing out some new studio gear in the back bedroom of our farmhouse (Jimmy Carter stayed in that room once, a few decades prior… unrelated, but true) and this album came about very accidentally. Although I personally enjoyed listening to it, the songs were so graphically violent and angry I didn’t really know why I would bother releasing it.

It is now June of 2020 and we are in the early days of what very well may be looked at in the future as the second American Civil War. Black people are mysteriously committing “suicide” by hanging themselves from trees in public areas around the country. Our president is a proven bigot, and there is a nationwide uprising against police brutality against the black community. Armed far-right groups, the product of decades of paranoid anti-state rhetoric from self-serving, bad-faith actors, are waging the beginnings of a violent insurgent movement. All of this with the spectre of climate change looming dark, and poised to prove deadliest to the most vulnerable of our communities, and specifically those of people of color. In the midst of all this, propelled by a just and righteous anger, we are on the verge of seeing a very real, and potentially very positive shift in the way criminal justice is approached in the United States.

Since the inception of this country, the question of blackness and human rights was a bloody yoke around the former colonies’ neck. Weighed down by this self-imposed burden, forever keeping one foot of the country firmly planted in the brutality of the chattel slavery era, a necessary and just yearning from the other foot toward progress tore this country asunder in 1861. Is it any surprise that the nationwide uprising against the institutional descendents of slave patrols might be enough to have ripped the country apart again?

For most people out there, I imagine that it is surprising, and possibly beyond belief, at least for now. The lens of history is long, but when pulled back, the intricacies of the past, at least those that survive, are able to be viewed in their context better than when they are lived in. Whatever lens views our lived-in present as history, I hope they teach it better than we were taught ours.

##

With that context in mind, I am releasing this album on today, June 19th, 2020, which happens to be my birthday, as well as, more importantly, Juneteenth--a day marking the tardy liberation of southern slaves who didn’t gain freedom from the emancipation proclamation because their chain keepers no longer considered themselves subject to the laws of the United States.

After much rumination, I’ve decided that I do want to release this album, but that it needs to stand for something other than what it is on the surface; what it is on the surface being a point-of-view diary of murder and sodomy from the perspective of notorious American serial killer Carl Panzram.

This album is, at its core, a lament of, and a polemic against the brutality of the American carceral system as it currently exists. Our prison-industrial complex, itself one of the many descendents of American chattel slavery, continues to disproportionately brutalize our black American brothers and sisters. It truly seems to me that not a one of us can be fully free in a society that would do this to any of its members, though many of us, because of skin color, wealth, or other extenuating circumstances are allowed to forget this fact for varying amounts of time before the truth inevitably gobsmacks us as it is currently doing.

There are entire doctoral dissertations and careers made on the subject of how to best reform or abolish the American penal system. I make no claim to being either an expert or someone personally and disproportionately impacted by the devastating consequences of American punishment. My own interaction with the law has been expunged, and I’m personally of no responsibility to ever let anyone know about it. That is a privilege many others in this country, a vast proportion black, do not share.

In a time when many allies are marching with black people of all ages across the United States, attempting to overthrow a seemingly immovable and rigged system that does not hesitate to engage in severe, violent repression, I find myself quarantined and unable to contribute my physical body to this cause. I feel guilt, but can’t lie and say that I’m not somewhat relieved to not be in danger of dealing with the legal trouble, cost, or the life-threatening (and life-altering) consequences of rioting police officers' injudicious use of ‘less lethal’ rounds on those who are expressing their first amendment rights around the nation.

It seems civically negligent for myself to release any music unrelated to the ongoing protests right now, when I didn’t have any plans or machinery or financial imperative in motion to otherwise do so this spring. With that in mind, I am releasing this album, Panzram, Pt. 1, with a hope that you will listen to it and consider donating some money to the ongoing fight for prison reform in return. This album is the strongest self-contained work of art that I’ve released in my life to date, and the vitriolic hatred captured in these ten tracks does offer (to me, at least) a dark sense of catharsis for the total and uncompromising rage that I feel in my impotence to affect the social atrocities that occur daily in this country and around the world. If you were looking, here’s your soundtrack for the summer of hate that is barreling towards us all.

All proceeds from this album will, for life, be donated to the ongoing battle for true and lasting prison reform in the United States. While this is an ambitious goal against an amorphous foe, there are many good organizations currently fighting this war. Reptilian American will promote which organization is getting the money at any given time, and receipts will be saved and publicly provided. The initial organization that all proceeds will benefit is Just Detention International (they are in no way affiliated with me and do not necessarily condone or condemn the R.A. project), a “health and human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.” I’ve provided links to the organization at the bottom of the essay if you wish to read about their mission or to donate directly. As they say, “Rape is not part of the penalty.” For now, all online album sales will be donated to JDI and if I can ever pull together a live band for this album (this was a solo project), those proceeds will be donated, as well. Likewise for merch, etc.

As for how I landed on this particular institution, well, the album’s source material, Panzram’s own words, goes into graphic and numerous accounts of the man’s feelings on rape and sodomy--those feelings being that he absolutely loved rape others in the way that he was raped as a boy and a young man. I hope that I’ve in no way glorified the crimes of Carl Panzram, a violent criminal who was also racist in the way of the times he lived (while I don’t wish to gloss over his racism, I believe it is somewhat reductive to look at his story with a focus on his racism, as he was a poor and very socially powerless member of society [though still white and afforded degrees of privilege absolutely not afforded his black contemporaries]--A contemporary of Panzram’s whose racism is much more illuminating in explaining the times in which they lived, for instance, is U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a thorough bastard in his own right, though ultimately less interesting fodder for an album of extreme music), and it feels somewhat gross to even mention him in an essay explaining why I am donating to a prison reform organization in the wake of mass Black Lives Matter protests, but I’m a musician, and not a philosopher, and I do believe this album makes a coherent statement, though it needed some clarification around the light under which it should be viewed.

-Reptilian American, June 2020


Ps, I’m working on another essay more fully outlining the connections between Panzram’s story and the need for criminal justice reform, but for now I wanted to release this statement while I have the higher than average page engagement for my birthday in hopes that this will reach more people.

“Is it unnatural that I should have absorbed these things and have become what I am today, a treacherous, degenerate, brutal, human savage, devoid of all decent feeling…without conscience, morals, pity, sympathy, principle or any single good trait? Why am I what I am?”
-Carl Panzram

justdetention.org

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released June 19, 2020

A.M. Rodriguez, Carl Panzram

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