Silly Song

New York, Queens, JFK Airport

As evening approached, Deadmau5 and his crew, who had been waiting at the designated meeting point for three hours, finally saw Ryan and Joel arrive late. The two looked thoroughly disheveled—Ryan's hair was a mess, sweat beaded on his forehead, his left hand clutching two travel bags while his right hand dragged a suitcase. Joel's glasses were missing, one sleeve of his shirt had been torn off somehow, and he was gasping for air.

"The New York subway is like a maze. We went the wrong direction, and then we ran into some lunatic in the car..." Ryan chugged an entire bottle of mineral water in one go.

"I told you, never go into an empty subway car in New York," Joel said, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his sweat.

"And some black kid snatched Joel's phone," Ryan explained.

"I just bought an iPhone—first generation. That phone can send LOLcats pictures. Uh, it's a kind of internet meme. Never mind that. Luckily, Ryan ran fast enough." Joel patted Ryan on the shoulder.

"He ran like hell, and I chased like hell. In the end, even he couldn't keep it up and gave the phone back," Ryan nodded.

"Then we rushed straight here without stopping," Joel checked his watch.

"We're not... too late, are we?" Ryan gave an awkward laugh. To save on baggage fees, Joel had chosen Southwest Airlines. Not only were the seats cramped and narrow, but the key issue was that Southwest didn't land at JFK Airport—they landed at LaGuardia. So the two had to scramble to get here, only to take the wrong direction, setting off a chain reaction of disasters. And this was despite the original owner having lived in this city for nearly a year.

Deadmau5's agent, Marvin, wiped his face with his hand, his expression like he'd just swallowed a fly.

"Are these two really reliable?" He turned, leaning close to Deadmau5, and whispered.

Deadmau5's expression was also a bit awkward. Noticing the piles of luggage the two were carrying, he asked, "So, you're moving to New York?"

Joel realized that Deadmau5's crew had brought almost nothing. It dawned on him, and he hastily made up an excuse: "You know, to get the best performance results, we usually bring our own equipment."

It was clear these two had little performance experience. Deadmau5 facepalmed.

"We've still got 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, then his face instantly twisted into a roar: "That's assuming you two get this pile of junk into the van within one minute. Now. Right. Now!"

By a stroke of luck, the RFK Bridge wasn't congested, and the driver was decent enough to give Ryan and Joel a spare fifteen minutes to prepare, but they still couldn't swap out their equipment.

"Ryan, do you notice something weird around here?" Joel, who had been fiddling with cables, looked up.

"Yeah, this club has a lot of black people," Ryan nodded, standing beside him.

Inside the nightclub, a large crowd of black people had already gathered, with whites being a clear minority.

This was unusual. At the Ultra Music Festival before, black attendees had been the minority.

It wasn't that black people lacked talent for making electronic music—in fact, music was a racial gift for black people, and American music was almost synonymous with black music.

In the realm of electronic music, genres like House and Techno were pioneered by black people, and among them were veterans like Carl Cox in the EDM scene. Even Dr. Dre's first public performance was as a DJ. The thing was, black people simply didn't like listening to electronic music.

"That's completely normal. Black gatherings only play hip-hop. It's what you'd call the 21st-century new racial segregation. Physical walls can be smashed open with a hammer, but the walls in people's hearts are much harder to tear down. The reason there are so many black people here is that we're in Harlem—Manhattan's black enclave," Joel said quietly.

"'Black Cultural Renaissance'?" Ryan recalled Abigail mentioning this topic.

"Exactly. During the Great Depression, black people made up seventy percent of this area. That gave rise to a generation of black writers, poets, and black theaters. This is the birthplace of American culture. Street culture came half a century later, let alone hip-hop."

"So the question is, since black people don't like electronic music, and there are this 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. At worst, they won't kick me out!" Joel was confident.

Ryan nodded.

The initial warm-up performance went smoothly enough. Joel brought out a classic mashup that lit up the venue, and Ryan cut in at the crucial moment, playing Tremor.

"Put your hands up!" Ryan jumped to the beat on stage, raising his hands high.

But no one responded. The club's lights were dim, and Ryan could only vaguely make out patches of "white crescents"—the teeth of the black crowd. The scene was almost eerie...

Ryan had no choice but to retreat behind the DJ booth.

"We'll have to switch tracks now," Joel said, starting to work the decks. The next second, the heavy bass of Tremor was cranked up to a deafening roar that could shatter eardrums.

"Shit!" In his haste, Joel quickly turned the knob down.

All sound in the venue vanished instantly. Everyone present looked at each other in confusion.

"What's going on!" Joel's forehead was sweating, his movements frantic.

"Let me handle it." Ryan took over Joel's spot.

"Then I'll handle the crowd!" Joel took a deep breath, grabbed the microphone nearby, and said, "Uh, our equipment seems to have some issues. We're getting ready to play the hip-hop you all love—boom boom boom, tititaka." Joel waved his arms and did a little beatboxing.

Dead silence from the crowd.

"Well, how about we tell a joke? Ha ha." Joel gave an awkward laugh, like a TV host scrambling for words during a live broadcast technical glitch.

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

"You know why? Everyone calls Him Father, but... no one has ever seen Him, ha ha ha!"

"Uh, let's do another one. You know what Nike and the KKK have in common?"

A huge chorus of boos erupted from the crowd.

"They both make black people run faster!"

"Misunderstanding! That kid has mental issues! We just got the report! I swear, no offense intended whatsoever!"

From the doorway came the sound of Marvin negotiating with the club staff.

"Wuwuwu..." Joel dabbed at his tears with a tissue, accidentally brushing against the bruise around his eye and hissing in pain. If Ryan hadn't pulled him away in time back there, and if they'd been in Brooklyn or the Bronx instead of Manhattan's Harlem, Joel would probably have been riddled with bullets by now.

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

Ryan, meanwhile, was on the phone asking about flights back to Nashville tomorrow. The three-day gig originally scheduled in New York was over.

After a while, Ryan walked out of the room alone. As he closed the door, he could still hear Marvin's roar from inside.

"Idiot! You ruined everything!"

Ryan crossed the corridor and returned to the backstage area of the nightclub. He needed to find the right moment, without pissing off the Black men, to retrieve the EDM equipment he'd left by the side. That was Joel's most expensive possession—more expensive than his car.

The EDM performance had been canceled outright. The nightclub had now turned into a sea of Hip-hop music, and Ryan spotted several Black female dancers on stage doing the twerk.

The club had also become a dance hall. Ryan saw plenty of people doing a peculiar swaying dance that originated in Harlem—feet planted, upper body convulsing like they'd been electrocuted, flailing wildly. This was called the Harlem shake.

In that instant, a long-lost, intense sense of déjà vu struck again. The bass drum beats reaching Ryan's ears seemed layered with reverb and delay, the brass notes cutting through the heavy bass with striking clarity.

"Con los teroristas Ta Ta Ta Ta And do the Harlem Shake!"

Along with the melody, a string of video clips surfaced in his mind. Unlike the Tremor MV from before, this time a series of fragmented scenes pieced together. The settings were very everyday—people going to class, working, working out, cooking, eating—and then, in the next second, these same people suddenly appeared in all kinds of bizarre costumes, convulsing and flailing to the rhythm of the Harlem shake, pulling off all sorts of ridiculous moves.

It was like those prank videos on YouTube. But unlike other prank videos, these were constantly being imitated, and after being imitated, they spread again—like a virus endlessly replicating, spreading, and replicating within a collective.

Commonly known as viral spread.

Ryan thought of the LOLcat memes Joel had been collecting.

Even though it was a silly song, it had the potential to develop into an Internet meme, Ryan mused.

Choosing a silly song was for quick fame, to serve the plot. The next one would be the crowd-favorite Progressive House, and a fairly famous one at that.