Silly Song

New York, Queens, JFK Airport

As evening approached, Deadmau5 and his group had been waiting at the designated meeting place for three hours when Ryan and Joel finally showed up. They looked utterly disheveled. Ryan's hair was a mess, sweat beaded on his forehead, and he was carrying two duffel bags in his left hand and a suitcase in his right. Joel's glasses were nowhere to be seen, and one of his sleeves had somehow been torn off. Both were panting heavily.

"The subway in New York is like a maze. We went the wrong way and got into trouble with some crazy guy on the train..." Ryan gulped down an entire bottle of water.

"I told you never to get into an empty car on the New York subway." Joel pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his sweat.

"Some black kid stole Joel's phone, too," Ryan explained.

"I'd just bought the first-generation iPhone. It could send LOLcats pictures—uh, they're a kind of Internet meme. Never mind that. Thank goodness Ryan was fast enough." Joel patted Ryan on the shoulder.

"He ran for his life, and I chased after him for mine. In the end, even he couldn't keep going, so he gave my phone back." Ryan nodded.

"Then we rushed straight here." Joel checked his watch.

"We're not... too late, are we?" Ryan gave an awkward grin. To save on baggage fees, Joel had booked them flights with Southwest Airlines. The seats were cramped and narrow, but the real problem was that Southwest Airlines didn't fly into JFK Airport. It flew into LaGuardia Airport instead, so the two of them had to hurry over here in a panic. They'd gone the wrong way, which set off a whole chain of mishaps. And the original owner of Ryan's body had lived in this city for nearly a year.

Marvin, Deadmau5's manager, wiped a hand over his face, looking as if he'd just swallowed a fly.

"Are these two really reliable?" He turned and leaned close to Deadmau5 to whisper the question.

Deadmau5 looked a little embarrassed, too. He noticed the heap of luggage they had with them. "So, are you two moving to New York?"

Joel noticed that Deadmau5 and his group had brought almost nothing with them. He suddenly understood, and improvised an excuse. "You know how it is. To give the best possible performance, we usually bring our own equipment."

They clearly didn't have much performing experience. Deadmau5 facepalmed.

"We have an hour to get to the nightclub in Harlem. If the RFK Bridge isn't backed up at this hour, we can still make it on time." Marvin smiled. The next second, his expression changed, and he roared, "But first, you two are hauling all this junk into the van in one minute. Right now!"

·

As luck would have it, the RFK Bridge wasn't backed up, and the driver was decent enough to get them there with fifteen minutes to prepare. Even so, they still couldn't switch out their equipment.

"Ryan, don't you think something's a little strange around here?" Joel looked up from the cables he was fiddling with.

"I noticed. There are a lot of black people at this nightclub." Ryan nodded beside him.

The nightclub was already packed with black people. There were very few white people by comparison.

It was highly unusual. At Ultra Music Festival, black people had been a tiny minority.

It wasn't that black people lacked a talent for making electronic music. In fact, music was practically a racial gift for black people; American music was more or less black music.

In electronic music, house and techno had both been pioneered by black people. There were plenty of black veterans in the scene, too, like Carl Cox. Dr. Dre had even made his first public performance as a DJ. But black people simply didn't like listening to electronic music.

"This is perfectly normal. Black people only play hip-hop at their parties. It's the new racial segregation of the twenty-first century. You can smash a hole in a physical wall with a sledgehammer, but the walls in people's hearts are much harder to tear down. There are so many black people here because we're in Harlem, the black neighborhood in Manhattan." Joel lowered his voice.

"Black Cultural Renaissance?" Ryan remembered Abigail telling him about that.

"Exactly. During the Great Depression, black people made up seventy percent of the population here. That gave rise to a generation of black writers and poets, as well as black theaters. This is where American culture began. Street culture didn't come along until half a century later, and hip-hop came later still."

"Then here's the problem: if black people don't like electronic music, and there are so many black people here..." Ryan had a bad feeling.

"Play it by ear. If they don't like electronic music, we'll switch to hip-hop. It's not like they're going to kick me out!" Joel sounded confident.

Ryan nodded.

The opening set went fairly smoothly. Joel brought out a classic mashup to fire up the crowd, and Ryan jumped in at the key moment with Tremor.

"Hands up!" Ryan jumped to the beat onstage, raising both hands.

But nobody responded. The nightclub was dim, and Ryan could only make out a sea of "white crescents"—the black people's teeth. The sight was downright eerie...

Ryan had no choice but to return to the DJ booth.

"We can only switch tracks now." Joel started working the turntables. The next second, Tremor's bass suddenly blasted out, loud enough to burst eardrums.

"Shit!" In a panic, Joel quickly turned the knob down.

All the sound in the club vanished at once. Everyone looked at one another in confusion.

"What the hell happened?" Joel's forehead glistened with sweat, and his hands fumbled.

"Let me." Ryan took over from Joel.

"Then I'll work the crowd!" Joel took a deep breath and picked up the microphone beside him.

"Uh, we're having a little trouble with our equipment. We're getting ready to play your favorite hip-hop. Boom boom boom, tititaka." Joel gestured wildly as he launched into a beatbox routine.

The crowd remained dead silent.

"Why don't we tell a joke instead? Haha." Joel gave an awkward laugh, like a TV host desperately filling the air when the broadcast ran into technical problems.

"I can prove that God is black!" Joel said.

"Do you know why? Everyone calls him Father, but... no one's ever seen him. Hahaha!"

"Uh, here's another one. Do you know what Nike and the KKK have in common?"

The crowd erupted in boos.

"They both make black people run faster!"

·

"It's a misunderstanding! That kid's intellectually disabled! I just got the report! I swear I didn't mean to offend anyone!"

Marvin's voice came from the entrance as he argued with the nightclub staff.

"Boo-hoo..." Joel wiped away his tears with a tissue, accidentally touching the bruise around his eye. He sucked in a sharp breath from the pain. Ryan had luckily dragged him away as soon as things kicked off. And fortunately, they were in Harlem, Manhattan. If they'd been in a place like Brooklyn or the Bronx, Joel might have already been shot full of holes.

Deadmau5 lay sprawled on the couch, staring at the ceiling with hollow eyes.

Ryan was on the phone asking about flights back to Nashville the next day. That was the end of their three-day run of shows in New York.

A while later, Ryan walked out of the room alone. As he closed the door, he could still hear Marvin roaring.

"Idiot! You screwed everything up!"

Ryan crossed the hallway and returned to the area behind the nightclub's stage. He needed to find the right moment to retrieve the electronic music equipment from the sidelines without angering the black crowd. It was Joel's most expensive possession—worth more than his car.

The electronic music show had been canceled outright. The nightclub had now become a sea of hip-hop, and Ryan saw several black female dancers performing the Twerk onstage.

The nightclub had turned into a dance hall, too. Ryan saw plenty of people doing a distinctive swaying dance that had originated in Harlem. They kept their legs planted while their upper bodies jerked around as if they were being electrocuted. It was called the Harlem shake.

In an instant, a powerful sense of déjà vu came over him again. The low drumbeats reaching Ryan's ears seemed to have reverb and delay effects applied, and brass instruments rang out sharply over the heavy bass.

"Con los teroristas (with the terrorists)

Ta Ta Ta Ta

And do the Harlem Shake!"

A string of video images appeared in his mind along with the melody. They were completely different from the Tremor MV. This time, a huge number of clips were stitched together. The scenes were all everyday settings. In one moment, people were doing ordinary things—attending class, going to school, working at the office, exercising, cooking, eating, and so on. The next, they were suddenly dressed in all kinds of bizarre costumes, jerking around as if electrocuted to the rhythm of the Harlem shake and doing all sorts of ridiculous moves.

It was like a prank video on YouTube. But unlike other prank videos, these were constantly being imitated, then spreading even further through the imitations. It was like a virus repeatedly copying and spreading through a community, over and over again.

In other words, viral spread.

Ryan thought of the LOLcats memes Joel was collecting.

It may be a stupid song, but it has the potential to become an Internet meme, Ryan thought.

Choosing a stupid song was a way to get famous fast and serve the plot. The next one was the beloved Progressive House, and it was pretty well-known.