"In the seventies, Disco was hugely popular in the United States. House music was born in Chicago, and Techno emerged in Detroit. White people liked it, Black people liked it even more—except for one group: rock fans."
"They deliberately equated Disco with gay Black men and began to resist it. In the late seventies, the MLB's Chicago White Sox held a promotional event: people could get 98 cents off their tickets if they turned in Disco records. During the break, Chicago radio talk-show host Steve Dahl would set off explosives among all the records people had handed in."
"The White Sox had expected twenty thousand people to attend the event. In fact, fifty thousand showed up before the game even started, and several thousand more climbed over the barriers and rushed in after it began. Records flew from the stands like raindrops. When the explosions went off, thousands of people charged onto the field, and the White Sox had no choice but to cancel the game."
"After that, Disco became taboo. You know, society was still rather conservative back then. Magazines, television stations, and newspapers didn't willingly touch on sensitive topics, and radio stations refused to play Disco. In a single night, Disco disappeared from the United States, becoming a niche interest for a small group of people."
"The rock fans back then probably never imagined that Disco's demise wouldn't keep rock music in the mainstream. Instead, it gave Hip-hop music a chance to grow. They deserved it." Joel was still indignant about what had happened.
"Fortunately, Disco music began to develop in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. The British were the ones who popularized concepts like nightclubs and raves. Later, the House of Commons passed the Public Order Act, which stated that 'playing a repetitive musical beat outdoors to more than 20 people is considered a disturbance of public order.' Violators would be fined or imprisoned..."
"Maybe we'll live to see the day Electronic music makes a comeback in the United States!" Joel exclaimed, carried away by the topic.
Ryan watched a young woman nearby, dancing wildly and tossing her head around. Just moments ago, he had seen her swallow several small pills commonly known as Molly.
It was past midnight, and the lights were growing dimmer. Ryan furrowed his brow and called over one of the club's security guards, pointing at someone nearby who was using a flashy "popcorn" canister. The guard immediately stopped them.
Tennessee was a red state, and the rules here were fairly strict. At the very least, you couldn't do that in public. In a private booth, though, it was a different story—a bit like covering your ears and pretending no one could hear you.
Joel set his empty glass on the table. "The final hour of the show is the main event."
He had Ryan take out the USB drive. It held the finished version of "Termor." Over the past three hours, Ryan had listened to plenty of popular Electronic music, and now he could clearly hear how Termor differed from those songs. It had simple—almost rudimentary—sections and more prominent, thumping bass drums. What's more, the Termor he had now still didn't sound as good as the version in his mind, which left Ryan worried that the "audience" would accept it.
He and Joel returned to the DJ booth. As the intro began to play, Ryan saw several men and women on the dance floor turn toward the booth almost instinctively.
During the interlude, the sounds began to build, and the crowd gradually adjusted, moving past their initial confusion. Then, as the track entered its build-up and the Riser effect kicked in, Ryan could clearly feel the tension gathering...
3, 2, 1. Go!
In an instant, the lead sound and every other part struck together, filling the room with a massive wall of sound. The pent-up energy burst forth like water pouring through a floodgate! A tremendous amount of reverb and the volume cranked all the way up battered the audience's eardrums. Paired with a simple, catchy melody, it was enough to shake them to their core!
Joel started screaming beside Ryan. Ryan thought everyone else on the dance floor would react the same way, but instead, he found them all frozen in place, completely motionless.
Then, the next second, everyone snapped out of it as if waking from a dream. In that moment, everyone in the nightclub felt as though they stood at the pinnacle of life, as if they owned the whole world.
Then came the post-release lull. The second interlude stripped away all the heavy beats, returning to the most basic melody, but hinting that a new storm was about to break.
After the two climaxes, the music entered its outro, and Joel began mixing into another EDM track.
A few seconds later, a middle-aged man who had been sitting in a booth stood up. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a bottle in his hand, he swayed as he pulled out two green bills and tossed them over.
The middle-aged man shouted his demand: play that last song again.
Seeing this, the manager hurried over, picked up the bills from the floor, tucked them into his own pocket, then stood up and gestured for Joel to do as the man asked.
Over the next hour, "Termor" was played more than ten times in a row. Ryan watched everyone closely. Men and women, young and old—all of them seemed to have been put under some kind of "frenzy spell." Their faces turned wild, and they even stopped paying attention to the people of the opposite sex around them.
Ryan guessed it was the combined effect of the drugs and the electrifying music.
"Get the crowd going! Dance, kid. Don't just stand there like a log," Joel reminded him.
Joel had completely let loose by now, pumping his fist in the air and tossing his head around. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead and neck.
Ryan, on the other hand, was a little shy. He stood stiffly, feeling sure that in his previous life he hadn't gone clubbing very often.
At two in the morning, the nightclub began clearing out. Men and women who had found new companions left in pairs. Joel and Ryan sat on a sofa, with the sharply dressed club manager on one side of Joel and a promoter with connections to beautiful women on the other.
"Joel, where did you find that music? Compared with tonight, those 'original songs' you keep talking about are a pile of shit!" The manager's eyes lit up. "Look at those customers just now—they were all going crazy! The bartender said sales in that last hour were three times higher than usual!"
Joel only shook his head, making no claim to the credit. He pointed to Ryan beside him. "That song came from this kid's inspiration!"
Only then did the manager and the promoter take a proper look at Ryan, who was now sitting with two girls beside him. They were both part of the club's hype crew, and had noticed him earlier when he was at the DJ booth.
"I thought he was your cousin or something, here to see what it was like," the manager said. Then he called Ryan over, took two bills from his breast pocket, and handed them to him.
"This is your extra pay for tonight," the manager said.
Ryan looked at the two green bills in his hand. As he marveled at how smoothly he'd earned his first bit of money from music, he pulled one out and handed it to Joel beside him.
"Keep it. I get paid regularly here," Joel said, not taking it.
Then the promoter took out a portable camera and snapped a group photo of them.
"Young man, what's this song called?" asked the promoter, a tattoo under his eye. Then he pointed to the Myspace page on the laptop in front of him. It turned out he had recorded the live performance earlier and uploaded the video to the social network. Several people had already left comments asking what the song was called.
Seeing this, Ryan couldn't help remembering what Joel had once said about promoting music online.
Times were changing, and technology was advancing. If he could take advantage of social media, maybe he could get noticed quickly...
As he was thinking, the girl from the hype crew who had been sitting beside him earlier, dressed in a fitted long dress, leaned over toward him.
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