Chapter 27: The Manifesto Wall
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Michael was sitting in his makeshift studio, but he wasn't making music. He was looking at his laptop screen, but not at Ableton, rather at his bank account.
The balance was pathetic. The stress was real.
Rick Doyle's call that morning had been a reality check. August 25th. It was a tangible deadline, a ticking clock that sounded louder than any of his beats. His entire multimillion-dollar future depended on that date, and it was completely out of his control.
And on top of that, there was the noise. The noise of his new fame.
His phone, on the desk next to the laptop, hadn't stopped vibrating. Twitter notifications. New followers on Instagram. Comments on YouTube. The viral success of 'Sodium' was a noisy distraction, a type of success he didn't fully understand.
He felt rushed and stressed. The walls of his father's office seemed to be closing in on him. He felt pulled in three directions at once.
The superficial fame from school. The pressure of the house sale. And the creative paralysis of what song to make next.
He closed his eyes for a moment, blocking out the light from the screen. He took a deep breath. 'Control what you can control.'
The only thing he could control right now was the music.
He summoned the System interface. Cyan light filled his vision, a familiar anchor amidst the chaos. He looked at his balance: 12,459 Impact Points.
It was the only metric that mattered. He remembered how he had gotten most of those points. It wasn't from the 300,000 views of 'Sodium'. It was from the dozens of deep connections those views had brought to 'Ghost Boy' and 'Star Shopping'.
Fame was the funnel. Pain was the product.
He looked at his song inventory. The top two choices kept staring at him, floating in his vision.
'White Iverson'. It was the obvious move. A catchy beat, a laid-back vibe. It was the perfect follow-up to 'Sodium'. It was the commercial route.
He could feel the viral potential. It was what the "industry" would expect.
But then he looked at his IP balance again. Twelve thousand points earned thanks to kids like Chloe and Victor. People who weren't looking for a vibe. They were looking for a mirror.
He decided to ignore the commercial route. He couldn't. It would feel like a betrayal. He needed to be true to those people. To his base. To those who understood the pain.
His gaze settled on the other song. 'crybaby'.
He remembered the guide. The acoustic guitar sample. The lyrics. It wasn't a song. It was a manifesto. It was a declaration of war. It was taking the insult the world threw at them—"crybaby", "sensitive", "weak"—and turning it into a crown.
'This', he thought, a wave of clarity cutting through his stress. 'This is what's next.'
The commercial hit could wait. Fame could wait. It was time to give his tribe an anthem. It was time to build the walls of his cult.
He closed the interface. The decision was made. He turned toward his laptop, his face now hardened by determination.
He opened Ableton. He created a new project and named it: crybaby_v1.
It felt right. This was an important song.
He summoned the System interface and opened the guide for 'crybaby'. It was as simple as he had expected. It contained the lyric file, the emotional imprint ("Melancholic defiance; owning the pain") and, most importantly, the heart of the song: an audio file named sample_guitar.wav.
He dragged the file into an audio track in Ableton. He put on his headphones and hit play.
An acoustic guitar melody, raw and beautiful, filled his ears. It was incredibly melancholic, but it had an edge of determination. It reminded him a lot of the sample in 'Star Shopping', that same sense of lo-fi honesty.
The System had given him the soul of the song. Now he had to build the body.
He spent most of the day building the beat. He opened the System's rhythmic guide. It was a single phrase, cryptic and challenging: "Raw and real drums. Loud. No frills."
This was a new challenge.
His other beats, 'Ghost Boy' and 'Sodium', had been atmospheric. They were beats to get lost in, hazy and full of effects.
But 'crybaby' was an anthem. It needed to hit.
He started with the kick drum. He rummaged through his growing library of free samples. He ignored the digital sounds and the booming 808s. He focused on finding something that sounded... acoustic.
He found a kick from an old funk drum kit. It had a satisfying "click", the sound of a pedal hitting a real leather head. He isolated it and loaded it up.
Then, the snare. He needed it to sound like it was being hit in a real room, not on a computer. He started layering sounds.
He combined three different snare samples: one for the sharp hit (the crack), one for the body (the thud), and one with a slight room reverb to give it space.
Now, the hi-hats. This is where most novice producers sounded robotic. Michael wanted to program the drums to sound raw and real.
He turned off quantization, the function that makes every note fall perfectly in time. He wanted a human, imperfect swing.
He looped the track and took out his small MIDI keyboard. Instead of drawing the notes, he started playing them live with his fingers, drumming out the rhythm.
He tried again and again. His first attempts were sloppy.
"No. Too fast." Delete.
"Shit. Skipped a beat." Delete.
It took him nearly an hour to record an eight-bar loop that felt "right". The hi-hats were slightly ahead of the beat in some spots and behind in others, giving it that nervous, imperfect energy he was looking for.
Finally, the 808 bass. This is where most failed. The 808 and the acoustic kick would clash and create a muddy mess.
Michael, thanks to hours of YouTube tutorials, already knew the trick. He applied "sidechaining". He linked the 808 to the kick, creating a simple rule: every time the kick hit, the volume of the 808 would drop for a fraction of a second.
The result was instant. The acoustic kick now hit clean and hard, and the 808 bass rumbled in the spaces in between, giving the song incredible weight.
He looped the beautiful acoustic guitar with his powerful new beat.
The sad, lonely melody now had a backbone. An aggressive backbone.
It was the perfect contradiction. It was a ballad and a rap anthem at the same time. It was the sound of someone crying, but ready to fight.
He leaned back, listening to the loop over and over. The technical part was almost done. He had built the perfect foundation for a war cry.
Now came the hardest part. The vocals.
Michael leaned back, listening to the loop. The musical base was ready. It was perfect. The melancholy of the acoustic guitar clashed with the aggression of the drums. It was the exact sound of melancholic defiance.
He went to his closet-booth, closed the door. The space was small and smelled of old sheets. He turned on the LED light he had taped to the wall and stood in front of his AT2020 microphone. He put on his headphones.
He did a sound check. "Check, check. Yeah." His voice sounded clean. He was ready. He opened the text file with the lyrics.
He pressed the spacebar. The beat started.
'She said I'm a crybaby, I can't be up lately...'
'Girl, you drive me crazy, AMG Mercedes...'
He sang the first lines. His voice came out smooth, melodic, very similar to the tone he used on 'Star Shopping'.
He stopped the recording. Listened to it. And frowned.
No. It was wrong.
It sounded... sad. It sounded like he was truly lamenting being a 'crybaby'. But the song wasn't a lament.
It was an anthem. It was owning an insult. He was supposed to sound proud of it, or at least, indifferent and defiant.
His version sounded weak. Pathetic.
'Shit', he thought. He deleted the take.
He took a deep breath. 'Okay, more energy. More aggressive.'
He recorded again. This time, he put more force into his voice, almost rapping, mimicking the energy of 'Sodium'.
'She said I'm a crybaby, I can't be up lately...'
'Girl, you drive me crazy, AMG Mercedes...'
He stopped again. Listened. It was worse. Now he sounded like an angry child throwing a tantrum. It clashed completely with the melancholy of the guitar. It sounded forced, fake.
'Ghost Boy' was about loneliness. That was easy, it was his daily reality. 'Star Shopping' was about longing for his lost home. That was also easy, it was his constant pain.
But 'crybaby' was an anthem of defiance. It was about being called a "crybaby" and responding with a "fuck you". It was an energy that, at that moment, Michael couldn't find.
He was too distracted. The pressure of the house sale weighed on him. The constant buzz of his new social media notifications made him feel exposed. The fame of 'Sodium' had him confused about what his fans wanted.
He didn't feel defiant. He felt... stressed.
He tried again. And again. For over an hour, he tried to record the vocals. And failed. Repeatedly.
'Speedin' down the highway, lookin' at the street lights...'
'Geekin' on a Friday, I can never sleep right...'
His voice sounded tired, but not the cool, narcotic kind. It sounded literally exhausted from work and lack of sleep. There was no art in it, only fatigue.
'Knowin' I hurt you, I don't deserve you...'
'I shoulda curved you, I know I'm the worst, boo...'
He tried to sing the heartbreak lines, but they sounded hollow. He wasn't thinking about a girl. He was thinking about Rick Doyle and court deadlines.
'But I could be cool too, and you got them dance moves...'
'And I got this vibe, I swear it's perfect to ride to...'
He couldn't force the vibe. It simply wasn't there.
'I wanna die too, we all wanna die too...'
This line. He sang it with his usual sadness. But again, it sounded like a complaint, not the declaration of nihilistic camaraderie it was supposed to be.
'I got this vibe, I swear she love gettin' high too...'
'I love gettin' high too, I wanna hide you...'
'How did I find you? I'll be inside, I'm makin' music to cry to...'
'I'm making music to cry to, yes', he thought bitterly. 'But this song isn't for that.'
He reached the chorus, his last hope.
'Oh, it's a lonely world, I know...'
'Gon' get a lonely girl, that's fo' sho'...'
'Oh, I'm a lonely boy, she made a lonely boy, yeah, I know...'
It was the same. It was his default mode. The 'Star Shopping' mode. The 'Ghost Boy' mode. It was sad, it was melancholic.
But it wasn't 'crybaby'.
With a grunt of frustration, he hit the spacebar, cutting the music. The silence was a relief. He took off the headphones and threw them onto the desk. He stepped out of the closet-booth and slumped into his chair, staring at the wall. It wasn't working.
He replayed the last take, listening with a critical eye.
'She said I'm a crybaby, I can't be up lately...'
His voice was there. It was on pitch. And it was sad. It sounded like 'Star Shopping' but with louder drums. It was weak.
'No', he thought, hitting the spacebar. 'Shit. Still not working.'
There was the problem. The song wasn't 'Ghost Boy'. It wasn't 'Star Shopping'. Those songs were about loneliness and longing. They were passive.
'crybaby' was a defiant anthem. It was owning an insult. It was supposed to sound like a "fuck you", not a "please don't hurt me".
His version sounded like he was about to cry. Not like he was ready to fight.
His voice sounded weak, sad, but not defiant. He couldn't find the right tone. He couldn't find the emotion.
He leaned back in the creaking chair. Why couldn't he find that energy? At school, when people stared at him, he felt that cold anger. Why couldn't he channel it here?
He closed his eyes. His mind, instead of focusing on the music, drifted.
He thought about the new fame from 'Sodium'. The comments, the views. 'What do they want to hear? The sound of 'Sodium'? The pain of 'Star Shopping'? This new energy? What if they hate this?'
He was thinking about the expectations of an audience that barely existed.
Then, his mind jumped to Rick Doyle's call. August 25th. The house sale. The bureaucracy. The Ethereum plan. The stress of that deadline was a constant hum in the back of his head, drowning out everything else.
He was too scattered. He was thinking about fan expectations, about court paperwork, about cryptocurrency prices. He wasn't thinking about the song.
'I can't force this emotion', he realized. 'I can't pretend I'm angry when I'm actually... stressed and confused.'
He realized it wasn't going to happen. Not tonight. Keeping at it would only make him hate the song.
With a sigh of pure frustration, he saved the Ableton project.
crybaby_v1_beat_ready.
He abandoned the project for the moment. He turned off the monitors. He turned off the Focusrite interface, the little red light fading away.
He felt completely blocked.
He got up from the chair and left the studio, closing the door behind him. The music could wait.
He went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge. He sat on the back porch in the darkness, smoking a cigarette, drinking the beer. The silence of the night was a relief.
'Tomorrow', he thought. 'Or next week. Just... not now.'