Chapter 63: The Dark Frequency
Saturday, December 26, 2015 – 8:10 PM
The applause for 'Ghost Girl' faded, leaving a void in the room. Michael stood motionless in the center, looking at the floor.
In the booth, T Roc pressed the next button.
The pale blue lights, which had given the stage an ethereal quality, cut off abruptly.
In their place, toxic, hazy green spotlights turned on from the back, silhouetting Michael. The fog machines released a new, denser burst that crawled across the floor like a chemical swamp.
The sound changed. The 'Sodium' beat entered.
It didn't hit hard. It dragged. A muffled, deep kick, and a synth melody that sounded like it was playing underwater. The tape hiss, amplified by the sound system, filled the air with static.
Michael changed his posture instantly. His shoulders dropped. His head tilted. The emotional energy from before disappeared, replaced by a languid, heavy apathy.
From the side of the stage, Sam stepped out of the shadows. He walked crouched, with the heavy Panasonic VHS camera on his shoulder, the red recording light shining in the green darkness.
Michael saw him. He didn't look at the audience. He turned and walked directly toward Sam's camera, turning his back on the thousand people watching him.
He approached until the lens was inches from his face. He grabbed the lens with one hand, stabilizing it.
He muttered the lyrics, his voice deep and processed with a real time bitcrusher effect.
'This is not a wig, it's fucking real...'
'If it was a wig, it would fucking come off right about now (yeah)...'
He was rapping for the camera, deliberately ignoring the crowd. He was recreating the aesthetic of the music video live, creating a bubble of lo fi intimacy in the middle of the massive stage.
'I dyed it black, you like my shirt?...'
'It says Mount Vernon 'cause that's where...'
''Cause that's where I actually live (hometown)...'
Sam, trembling slightly from adrenaline but holding the frame, moved the camera gently, capturing the blur and the grain.
The image of Michael singing to the lens projected into his mind as if he were already watching it on an old screen.
'How in the fuck are you 'bout to say...'
'The way that we do it is not the way?...'
'No, don't you sweat it, you're not in the way...'
'Nothing you do can put an end to my day...'
The crowd, who had been screaming and crying minutes before, changed. They stopped jumping. They stopped screaming.
They entered a trance.
They began to sway slowly, hypnotized by the watery sound and the strange private performance happening in front of them. The atmosphere became dense, narcotic. It was as if the whole room had inhaled the green smoke at the same time.
Saturday, December 26, 2015 – 8:12 PM
Michael stepped away from Sam's camera, breaking the intimate eye contact with the lens. He turned toward the open stage, his movements heavy, dragging his feet as if gravity had suddenly increased.
The atmosphere in the room was dense, almost liquid. The green smoke continued to float low, covering the audience's legs. No one jumped. No one pushed. They were trapped in the sonic web he had woven.
Michael raised the microphone again, his voice dropping to an even deeper and more monotone register for the second verse.
'Cashed as fuck, in my bed I lay...'
'Look at the ceiling and fade away...'
He sang this while tilting his head back, looking at the stage ceiling lights, losing himself in them. It was a literal representation of his mental state during those months of loneliness in his empty house. He wanted to dissolve.
'Stressin' and checkin' on me for a blessin'...'
'But I can't hear nothing, I'm gone for the day...'
The crowd swayed side to side, a dark ocean in calm.
'Sure you can afford that? I get it...'
'Lookin' like a bum, only think I'm holdin' pennies...'
Michael pointed to himself, to his simple clothes. The irony of his secret wealth was a private joke only he enjoyed at that moment.
'Pull out your mortgage, just spend it in a minute...'
He reached the apathetic climax of the song. He walked to the edge of the stage, looking into the darkness beyond the first rows.
'Blame everyone around you for the money you ain't gettin'...'
'Boy, man up to the life you ain't livin'...'
He spat the lines with quiet, almost whispered contempt.
'Times get chillin, sometimes I forgive him...'
'My minds on a rhythm, so get the fuck up when I see you...'
T Roc, in the booth, activated a low pass filter on the beat. The highs disappeared, leaving only the dull rumble of the bass and Michael's voice, as if the music were coming from the other side of a wall or the bottom of a pool.
The effect was disorienting and brilliant. Reality seemed to distort.
'Loose neck, cotton chains bangin' off my body...'
Michael emphasized the next line, the one connecting his past to his present.
'I ain't never goin' back to what I did back in Howell...'
To the audience, it was a reference to any town. To him, it was the Burger Barn. It was poverty. It was fear. He sang with absolute finality.
'Old Bones, new flow... 1 800 DEADBOY...'
The song began to disintegrate. The beat broke, stuttering. Michael's voice dissolved into a digital echo.
'We ain't never goin' back...'
The last note stretched, becoming pure static, white noise that filled the room for a few seconds before cutting off abruptly.
Darkness. Silence.
Michael stood with his back to the audience, looking toward T Roc's booth, his silhouette cut against the blackness. The room was in an absolute trance. He had managed to shift the energy from sadness to narcotic stupor.
But he knew he couldn't leave them asleep. The calm was over.
He turned slowly toward the crowd. Sweat shone on his forehead. With a deliberate movement, he took off his sunglasses and threw them to the stage floor.
His eyes, now visible, shone with a new intensity.
The narcotic phase was over. The violence was about to begin.
Saturday, December 26, 2015 – 8:14 PM
The last echo of static from 'Sodium' died, leaving a sudden void in the air of the Observatory.
Michael remained with his back to the audience, looking toward the elevated booth where T Roc watched him with the intensity of a gunner waiting for the order to fire.
Sweat ran down his back, sticking the t shirt to his body under the hoodie. He could feel the heat of the spotlights on his neck. The room was silent, suspended in the narcotic trance he had just created.
Michael nodded once, a sharp, abrupt movement.
He turned on his heels. Slow. Deliberate.
He walked to the edge of the stage, stepping out of the shadows and into the raw light of the work spotlights.
He brought his hand to his face. With a slow, almost theatrical movement, he took off his sunglasses.
His eyes, which had been hidden during the first twenty minutes of the show, swept the crowd. They shone with a new intensity, an electricity that had nothing to do with the sadness or apathy of the previous songs.
He raised the hand holding the glasses and opened it. The sunglasses fell to the stage floor with a plastic clack.
He wasn't hiding anymore.
He brought the microphone to his mouth. His voice, without effects, without reverb, sounded dry and cutting.
"Okay," he said. "Enough sadness. Enough calm."
The crowd murmured, feeling the shift in the room's barometric pressure. They were waking up.
"Are you awake?" asked Michael, in a conversational tone.
There were some scattered shouts, a half hearted roar.
Michael frowned. Not enough.
He took another step toward the edge, leaning over the void.
"I ASKED IF YOU ARE AWAKE!" he screamed, his voice breaking into a roar that made the sound technicians jump.
The response was immediate. The crowd roared back, an animal, primitive sound. The energy shot from zero to a hundred in a second.
Michael smiled. A predatory smile.
"Good," he said. "Then..."
He raised his arm and pointed to the center of the floor, where he could see the glow of Jake's white t shirt amidst the dark mass. He made a circular gesture with his finger, as if stirring up a hurricane.
"Open the fucking circle."
The order was obeyed instantly. People started pushing, backing away, creating an empty space in the center of the floor. An eye of the storm.
Michael turned to T Roc and brought his hand down as if dropping a guillotine.
T Roc hit the sampler.
An air horn cut through the atmosphere, sharp, strident, repeated three times. Bwee bwee bwee!
White and red strobe lights exploded, flashing at a seizure inducing speed. The world became a series of violent, disconnected photographs.
The trance was broken. Violence was here.
Saturday, December 26, 2015 – 8:15 PM
The air horn faded, swallowed by the sound that came after.
The 808 bass of 'Paris' didn't start; it erupted.
It was a physical impact, a low frequency shockwave that hit the thousand people in the chest at the same time. The Observatory's subwoofers, pushed to the limit by T Roc's saturated mix, roared with dirty, delicious distortion.
The white and red strobe lights flashed at a maddening speed, turning the room into a series of frozen frames of chaos.
Michael didn't wait. He jumped.
He landed on the edge of the stage just as the beat dropped, screaming the first line with a ferocity that tore his throat.
'Tell me what you know 'bout a motherfucker out the bottom!'
The narcotic apathy of 'Sodium' had evaporated in a fraction of a second. The boy mumbling about being in bed had disappeared. In his place was a hunched, aggressive figure, spitting words like bullets.
'With a gold grill gleamin', makin' all these hoes problems!'
Down on the floor, the reaction was instant and violent.
The empty space Michael had ordered open collapsed in on itself. People ran toward the center, crashing into a mass of bodies, sweat, and adrenaline.
The mosh pit had formed.
Michael saw Jake at the epicenter. His friend had lost his cap, his t shirt was soaked, and he had a wild, manic grin on his face. Jake launched himself at a guy twice his size, bouncing off and laughing. Beside him, Nate acted like a human icebreaker, protecting the perimeter of the circle, pushing people back into the chaos with his long arms.
'Stalker, creepin' out the fuckin' dungeon!'
'Switchblade on 'em, hit the guts like a pumpkin, dumpin'!'
Michael fed off that energy. He moved from side to side on the stage, unable to stand still. He pointed at the crowd, directing the violence.
'Thirty rounds off the clip, off rip!'
'Too thick with the stick, bet I won't miss!'
Sam, on the side of the stage, had the VHS camera glued to his eye, recording the audience. The image in his viewfinder must have been a nightmare of blurred motion and red lights, exactly what Michael wanted.
Leo, in the pit, had stopped trying to compose artistic photos. Now he just held the camera above his head, shooting blindly into the tide of people threatening to overflow the security barrier.
'Lil $lick real sick, don't talk shit!'
'Whip, whip, like a brick scale on fish!'
The lyrics were arrogant, violent, a power fantasy. But Michael's delivery made it feel real. He wasn't acting like a gangster; he was acting like the embodiment of teenage frustration.
And then, the bridge of the verse arrived. The chant moment.
Michael stopped in the center, raising the microphone toward the ceiling.
'Suicide, night time, no, we don't fight crime, oh!'
The crowd screamed the response, a collective howl that almost drowned out the sound system.
'It's the Grey59 with the real red eyes, and we dyin' inside, ooh!'
That line. "We dyin' inside". It was the moment of connection amidst the chaos. The kids slamming into each other in the pit sang that part with heartbreaking sincerity. Physical violence was just a way to exorcise internal pain.
'Bodies in fluoride, let the rope untie, just crucify me!'
'Yung Christ wrists sliced, couple hoes on ice, singin', "RIP"!'
The verse ended with a final scream from Michael, his voice breaking into a distorted shriek.
The beat kept pounding, relentless. The room was an oven. The air was unbreathable.
Michael panted, sweat dripping from his nose to the stage floor. He felt electric. Dangerous.
He looked at the crowd, moving as a single living, furious entity. He had turned a concert into a riot. And he still had half the song left.
He prepared for the second verse. The evolution verse. The demon verse.
Saturday, December 26, 2015 – 8:18 PM
The chorus ended, but the rest was an illusion. The 'Paris' beat gave no quarter. The 808 kept pounding, a sonic jackhammer keeping the crowd in a state of frenzy.
Michael, soaked in sweat, chest heaving, prepared for the second verse. The Ruby da Cherry verse. The evolution verse.
He crouched at the edge of the stage, looking directly into the eyes of the kids in the front row, who were crushed against the barrier.
'Ruby was a motherfucking reject...'
He spat the line, pointing to his chest with his thumb. 'Me. I am the reject.'
He thought of the 15 year old Michael who arrived in this universe, alone and scared. He thought of the "Zombie" in history class.
'Then I cut my wrists, and now I motherfucking bleed checks...'
The irony of the line gave him a twisted smile. His pain, his trauma, was literally turning into checks. Into Impact Points. Into Ethereum money. He was bleeding success.
He jumped up and ran to the other side of the stage.
'Still broke after all the motherfucking weed gets rolled...'
That was the truth.
He had millions on paper, but in his pocket, he still counted dollars for gas. The authenticity of his situation gave his voice a weight no rich rapper could fake.
'Hoes askin' if I see a ghost, tell 'em, "No / I just seep smoke when the weed blown"...'
On the side, Sam was still recording with the VHS camera. Michael lunged toward him, screaming into the grainy lens, the machine smoke enveloping them both. The image Sam was capturing —Michael's face distorted by rage and low resolution— would be iconic.
'She choke from the deep throat, three feet of rope, lethal...'
'Slay the fuckin' sheep, so evil, I'ma hang myself...'
The crowd screamed every word with him. It was a collective exorcism.
'And then I get to see home, Ruby a fucking demon...'
"See home". The line hit him. His home no longer existed. He had become a demon to survive here.
'Ruby got a cult now, hoes tryna bolt down...'
Michael looked at the sea of people. His cult. They were there. He had built this from scratch.
'Ruby the result of a reject from a small town...'
'Turned into a demon, I'm evolved now...'
His voice became deeper, more guttural. T Roc, sensing the energy shift, turned up the distortion on the vocal channel.
'Loud growl, $now Leopard on the prowl (Ayy)...'
Michael started jumping, and the room jumped with him. The floor of the Observatory shook.
'Stay the fuck back, ho, slay the whole pack, ho...'
'Paint the globe black, ho (Ayy)...'
It was a promise of world domination.
'Soon I will shed this skin, turn to the devil...'
'Then I'll never reminisce (Ayy)...'
The last line. 'Never reminisce'. It was the biggest lie he had told. He remembered everything. Every day. But in this moment, under the strobe lights, he could pretend he didn't.
The beat reached the outro.
'Ayy, ayy, ayy, ayy!'
Michael screamed the final ad libs, throwing the microphone into the air and catching it, his body convulsing with residual energy.
T Roc cut the sound abruptly.
The sudden silence was deafening, filled only a second later by the gasps of a thousand people and then, a roar of approval.
Michael stood in the center, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His hoodie was soaked. His throat hurt. He felt alive.
He looked toward the pit. Jake and Nate were emerging from the mosh pit, clothes disheveled, shining with sweat, laughing like madmen. Jake gave him a thumbs up.
The dark phase was over. They had survived hell.
Michael straightened up.
He pushed his hair back. The aggression faded from his face, replaced by the confidence of a king who has just won a battle.
"Okay," he said into the mic, his breathing resonating in the speakers.
The red emergency lights went out. A warm, golden glow began to illuminate the stage.
"We got the rage out," said Michael.
"Now... who wants to fly?"
The synth intro of 'White Iverson' began to play. The changing of the guard was complete.