Chapter 29
Chapter 29
Hollywood’s paparazzi ecosystem had its own rules.
First, take photos that make money.
Second, create stories that make money.
Third, if there is no story, make one and sell it anyway.
And right now, two paparazzi were crouched behind the shrubs in the Hollywood Hills.
Their pride did not exactly allow for a profession that involved hiding with cameras, but when it came to paying rent, that hardly mattered.
Some months, a single photo of one celebrity going out covered the rent.
Other months, that one shot never came, and they went hungry.
Today was a good day.
A legend of West Coast hip-hop.
DJ Cabin had opened his garage first thing in the morning.
And not even in a suit, but in casual clothes.
Click-click!
Other paparazzi nearby were also taking pictures when suddenly—
“Yo, you little rats! Get a good shot today! Watch real close where I’m going! Imma make history today, motherfucker!”
Cabin shouted loudly in their direction.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Just keep shooting for now.”
The man snapped his gum and kept hammering the shutter.
Soon after, he started the engine and hurried to tail him.
“Huh? He’s heading toward South Central.”
“Hurry up and follow him.”
If it were a business meeting, somewhere like Soho House in West Hollywood or somewhere along Sunset Boulevard would have been the usual choice.
But if he kept going this way...
“Isn’t that South LA?”
Cabin’s car turned onto Hoover Boulevard.
The expressions of the two paparazzi stiffened.
“From here on out, this is Crips territory, isn’t it?”
“Are we really okay here?”
“We just take the pictures and get out.”
“What if we get shot?”
“Then hit the shutter before you die. At least the photo money will go to your family.”
“Don’t say unlucky shit like that.”
The place he arrived at was HOOVER SOUND Studio.
The place run by Crips OG Big Joe.
A studio recently known for high-profile names like Lil D and Shotgun coming and going.
The paparazzi parked in a street-side space and lifted their telephoto lenses.
Cabin got out of the car.
Then he went inside the building.
“DJ Cabin at HOOVER SOUND Studio?”
That one picture alone was enough for an article.
But they were not satisfied with just the photo.
Again, even the same picture changed in value depending on the story attached to it.
“Why would he come here?”
“Use that useless brain of yours and think.”
“Shut up, John.”
They started contacting industry sources.
Had DJ Cabin ever last come in and out of HOOVER SOUND Studio before?
He had.
Twenty years ago.
Back when Little K, the older brother of the Crips OG, had still been alive.
“HOOVER SOUND Studio was where Cabin worked with Little K.”
“But Little K died twenty years ago, and that unfinished track still hasn’t come out into the world.”
“Which means... no way. Is DJ Cabin trying to come back?”
A retired legend moving again?
After twenty years?
To finish Little K’s unfinished song?
Shit, this is going to blow up.
They immediately contacted the editorial desk.
They sent over the photos along with a short briefing.
A few hours later—
[(Exclusive) DJ Cabin Visits HOOVER SOUND Studio for the First Time Since Retirement. Comeback Possible?]
A speculative article went up.
America tended to be pretty lenient about tabloid-style reporting.
Basically, if it’s wrong, whatever.
—WTF! Cabin went to HOOVER SOUND?
└Isn’t that because of Little K’s unfinished track?
└No way, is he really coming back?
└HOOVER SOUND is the studio where the Crips artists work, isn’t it
└If he went there to finish Little K’s unfinished track, that’s creepy as hell lol
└But why now of all times?
As time passed, the rumors branched off further.
—If Cabin really comes back, isn’t that the biggest issue of the year?
└Little K’s final song is actually coming into the world?
└A twenty-year-old unfinished work is finally getting completed?
Of course, this was all only speculation.
No one actually knew what was happening.
After Cabin left the studio that day, there had been no further sightings and no official announcement either.
And then, on Reddit, one user dug up one of Cabin’s old interviews.
An interview from right after he announced his retirement.
[Q: Do you have any intention of finishing the unfinished track with Little K?]
[A: Absolutely not. No matter who comes. I have no intention of letting anyone else finish that song.]
Reading that firm statement, people began to think:
Maybe DJ Cabin was coming back after twenty years to finish that unfinished track himself.
Jay loaded cargo into the trunk again today.
The rule was not to ask what was inside.
The moment you asked, you became an accomplice.
If you did not know, you were just the delivery guy.
...Why does that distinction matter so much anyway?
If you got caught, it was prison either way.
At best, maybe you got a lighter sentence.
He started the engine.
The side mirror was held on with tape.
From the southern edge of Inglewood to Hawthorne and back, forty minutes round trip.
Jay.
Korean American.
Low-ranking Blood.
His parents had run a laundromat in Inglewood.
During the 1992 LA riots, his father had been the tenant who moved into the spot left behind after the Korean tenants pulled out, because it was cheaper.
They had settled in Inglewood instead of Koreatown because there were apartments there that cost less than half the rent of Koreatown.
All the poor kids in the neighborhood had been Black.
Jay had been the only East Asian kid.
So he got beaten a lot, and to fit in, he had first had to learn how Black kids greeted each other.
That was when I first heard hip-hop.
Music played from a Bluetooth speaker while they sat on the hood of a car.
Jay had liked that music.
So he started hanging around the older neighborhood guys, and one day he realized he was running errands, and another day he realized he was loading things into trunks.
There had been no dramatic initiation.
He had just seeped into it that way.
“Hoo...”
He parked behind a gas station in Hawthorne and unloaded the cargo.
Then he sent a message.
[Arrived]
That was the end of it.
Drop the goods off, then go back with the trunk empty.
A forty-minute round-trip side job.
The pay was fifty dollars.
On the way back, while stopped at a light, he turned on the speaker and played a beat.
A beat by asd1236.
No profile picture.
No bio.
Only a two-digit follower count.
The kick came in lopsided.
A placement that deliberately dodged the downbeat.
Over it, a distorted synth rode in like the sound of metal being scraped.
...Even hearing it again, this is insane.
The first time he had heard it, goosebumps had run over his whole body.
The other Bloods had cursed it out, but it sounded different to Jay’s ears.
More than anything, he had understood all those vague feedback comments that had been sent to B.I.G and Slipknot.
Round, the middle is kind of that, a different dark color, and so on.
This person... how do I put it... it feels like they hear music almost like it’s a painting.
He pulled the car over to the roadside.
He had no recording equipment.
Just the microphone built into his smartphone.
He listened to the beat through his earphones and spat into the phone.
The cramped driver’s seat became a recording booth.
The verse point came.
His mouth opened on its own.
“...”
He had started muttering freestyle to himself when he was sixteen.
He spat whatever came out, and if he liked it, he wrote it down in the Notes app on his phone.
That was all.
Because hip-hop belongs to Black people.
An East Asian guy stepping into that?
White Eminem in 8 Mile had managed it, but he was not Eminem.
(Translator’s Note: 8 Mile — A 2002 film strongly associated with the early career mythology of Eminem. It centers on a white rapper trying to earn recognition in Detroit’s predominantly Black hip-hop scene.)
So only the places where he freestyled changed.
In the bathroom, in the delivery car, late at night while walking home alone after locking up the laundromat.
But now, for the first time, he was trying to let someone else hear his rap.
Because asd1236 was anonymous.
That fact gave him a strange sort of courage.
That was the kind of content it was.
The lyrics he had just spat.
This is nerve-wracking...
He pressed the stop button on the recording.
He did not listen back.
If he listened back, he would hear the wack parts, and then he would not be able to send it.
The send screen was open on the phone.
He had to enter a rap name.
Then one moment suddenly flashed through his mind.
—Jay, what’s your rap name gonna be?
—Trunkman?
—Delivery Boy!
“...”
Slowly, he typed.
[Delivery Man]
The studio door opened.
“Yo.”
Lil D.
It had been a long time since even I had seen him, but there was a resolute determination in his eyes.
They said he’d been shut up in the studio all this time, working hard on the album by himself...
I did not know what the trigger had been, but I guess that really was true.
He seemed like a different person somehow.
That was the kind of aura he had.
Like someone staking his life on this album.
...Staking his life on it? That’s me!
“Ayyyy, the zombie’s been resurrected!”
“Shut up, Dustin.”
Lil D snapped back and headed straight for the recording booth.
The glass door shut, he put on the headphones, and nodded through the glass.
The beat started.
Boom, boom-boom—
Lil D opened his mouth.
“!”
It was different from the very first line.
Something was there that definitely had not been there before.
Something?
I do not know either.
Anyway, something.
Wow, this is Lil D?
When I had listened to the Blood rappers’ demos before, honestly, I had thought the Blood side was better in terms of pure rap skill.
But right now?
He’s better than B.I.G.
No.
He’s even better than Slipknot.
What the hell had happened in that time?
I was genuinely shocked.
Of course, because the location was what it was, my face stayed locked in its usual expressionless state.
That part simply could not be helped.
And then the verse ended.
The booth went quiet.
“L-Lil D, is that really you? Your rap got way better.”
“Did you have some kind of awakening or something? Or drugs?”
“Yoooo, that closed-door training really meant something!”
“You went up a whole level!”
“That was fucking killer just now, Lil D!”
The reactions of the composers watching from behind echoed exactly what I was feeling.
“...”
Lil D lowered his headphones.
Then he stared straight at me through the glass.
... ?
Why was he doing that?
Ah, wait. Was he expecting that?
Following what I had learned last time, I nodded once.
Still expressionless.
Exactly once.
But Lil D’s reaction was strange.
It was not the face of someone satisfied.
His eyes still looked like they were waiting for something more.
He was staring at me through the glass as if to bore a hole through me.
W-what.
I nodded.
That means it was okay.
That had worked before.
But Lil D’s gaze still did not leave my face.
Like a puppy desperately waiting for a treat.
Of course, the irony was that this puppy belonged to the Crips.
The longer the eye contact dragged on, the more my confusion swelled.
I started worrying that if this kept going, he might suddenly burst out of the booth again like before and start yelling, asking what the problem was.
The moment that thought struck me—
Thumb—
I raised my thumb.
Just like I had with J-Rackz.
“OHHHH, FUCK!”
Lil D hurled off his headphones.
Then he clenched both fists tightly.
“YES! YESSS!”
He started circling around inside the booth by himself.
Like someone who could not contain his emotions.
Now and then, a huge smile flashed across his face.
...So he can smile like that too.
“Ayyy! You did it, Lil D!”
Dustin shouted beside me.
It startled me.
“Did you see that?! Did you just see that?! A thumbs-up! A thumbs-up!”
Jamal nodded too and muttered as if to himself,
“No cap.”
The studio exploded.
The composers bumped shoulders, and the sound of people running out the door to spread the news echoed down the hallway.
And in the middle of all that commotion, suddenly—
“!”
...another FEEL struck me.
I think the song Lil D just did would sound good with a feature on it.
Lil D’s groove was emotional, and it had that sort of swaying, slack quality, like someone addicted to fentanyl.
(Translator’s Note: Fentanyl — A highly potent synthetic opioid first developed in 1959 by Paul Janssen. In the text it is used figuratively to describe an extremely slack, narcotic-sounding groove, not as a literal statement.)
Mumble mumble mumble.
An addictive groove that clung to the listener’s ear.
But for the feature, I thought it would be better to have a clearer delivery style in contrast with that.
If Lil D was water, then the feature should be stone.
A stream is beautiful even on its own. But if one rock sits in it, the sound changes. What had been a gentle ripple starts splashing instead.
What am I even saying.
I am not really sure what I mean, but anyway, that was it.
I started considering possible candidates in my head.
But unlike the FEEL that had hit me, no suitable rapper immediately came to mind.
A rapper whose strength is delivery... there has to be one somewhere...
Let me think about it a little more.
Epic Distribution headquarters.
One of the top five major distributors in the industry.
“This is the first time we’ve had a meeting with a brand-new label, right?”
Inside the elevator, Epic’s A&R director, Anderson, spoke to the colleague beside him.
“I heard the VP personally set this meeting up.”
“They say there’s a guy named Big Joe behind it. Crips OG.”
“...Ah.”
Julia, the development manager, nodded.
She understood immediately.
“The artist is Lil D. He briefly hit No. 4 on Billboard with [DRIVE], but honestly a lot of people said that was mostly because of the hype around the diss battle.”
“Even so, I think that proves the potential is there. Oh, and I heard the executive producer on Lil D’s new album is Shotgun?”
Mark said that while flipping through the documents.
“Yeah, I guess today we finally get to see Shotgun in person.”
“I’m curious what kind of presence he’ll have.”
The elevator stopped, and the conference room door opened.
Three people were already seated inside.
Big Joe.
He was wearing a suit.
One elbow rested on the table, and he sat back in a relaxed pose.
Lil D.
Dressed casually, wearing his cap backwards.
He had been idly fiddling with his phone, but looked up when the Epic team entered.
And beside him—
“...”
Mark’s eyes stopped.
Julia’s steps slowed too.
Sunglasses.
Expressionless face.
Straight-line mouth.
A Cuban link chain hung around his neck, and he was wearing a boxy T-shirt.
A fashion style truly fitting for a hip-hop producer.
Th-that’s Shotgun?
Wow... even among gangsters he’s expressionless. His aura is no joke.
The meeting began.
They first talked about the album.
That Lil D’s full-length album would be the first project of LK Records, that the final track list had not yet been confirmed but a full album of at least six tracks was planned, and other things like the concept of the album and the current state of production.
“Oh, right.”
While taking notes, Mark asked,
“And for the detailed contract terms, legal review will be necessary. Do you happen to have outside counsel or—”
At that moment, Shotgun suddenly stood up.
What was this? The meeting was not even over yet. Why was he suddenly standing? Was he seriously about to leave?
“...?”
Then he walked over to the coat rack at the back.
He took the blazer hanging there.
Then he put the jacket on over his boxy T-shirt.
The shoulder line fit perfectly.
And then he sat back down.
“I’m the legal counsel.”
“...”
“We can continue.”
“...!”