If you wanted an intensely personal, unfiltered account of what's going on around town, you could sit in your bedroom and look for posts tagged "Chapel Hill" on Web sites like blogspot, wordpress or livejournal.

If you wanted a similar account of town life -- at least town life after midnight -- but set to verse and laid over tight beats, your curiosity would be more effectively sated by a listen or two to local rapper Juan Huevos.

"Most of my songs are like journal entries," said Huevos, aka Jon Gregory, 28, butcher, party animal and part of the local music scene since 1999 as a member of such groups as Pink Motor Monsters and Living Dead. "I'm revealing my personal, innermost thoughts in such a way that everyone can look at them."

Huevos and his writing partner Jake Dead (also a former member of Living Dead) now perform under the name Diamond Studs. They will be at Local 506 on Saturday.

Gregory makes music for the town he both loves and hates, and, he admits, is terrified to leave.

"I rap a lot about the Chapel Hill experience," he said, "the incestuous nature of things, the drugs, the bars, the town. I rap about stuff that people who live here can really understand."

More people, perhaps, than would admit it. There is a price for dissolving the barrier between public and private life. Most people aren't willing to pay that price for any reason, but part of what makes Gregory's music compelling is that he is.

"Everything that I'm writing in these songs is really coming out of me," he said. "It's like deep, personal, private stuff. Rappers are always talking about how real they keep it. But, in a way, I keep it realer than most."

The meanings of some songs are self-evident, especially the cruder ones like "Incest" and "View More Pics." Other songs are harder to decipher. "The Ballad of Tammy Clispen," for example, which on first listen sounds like a ribald account of a summer romance, is actually about Gregory's battle with testicular cancer, confronting one's own mortality, and the depression that often follows such an endeavor.

However, despite their difference -- in subject, if not tone or vocabulary -- it makes sense that songs like "View More Pics" and "Tammy Clispen" appear on the same album (the self-released "MC People Magazine"). While one is essentially a joke song and the other betrays the artist's deepest insecurities about death and masculinity, each is more or less an unadulterated view into Gregory's brain, albeit at different points in time.

That's the only way he knows how to make music. As he says at the end of another song ("Lost Honey"), over some pre-recorded drunken ramblings, "I don't know. This is what goes on inside my head."


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