Chapter 005
Chapter 005
Even after I got home, Big Joe’s voice kept echoing in my ears.
The sooner, the better.
My brain automatically translated those words.
The later it is, the more likely you die.
I pulled the blanket over my head and seriously began composing a will.
To my parents.
Your son was doing finger stretches and then got taken out by a gang…
No, the beat came first, not the will.
I would write the will only if I failed to finish the beat, and if I finished the beat, then maybe I would not need to write one at all.
I shot upright out of bed.
Then I plugged the returned MIDI keyboard into the USB port.
…I have to make this fast!
This was a matter of life and death!
I opened the project file.
The demo I had thrown together on the spot that day in the Crips hideout was still there.
The skeleton already existed, so I just had to put flesh on it.
The problem was—
…How?
I was an amateur who had learned everything on my own.
Intro, verse, hook, bridge, outro.
I knew song structure in theory, but I had never actually completed a full track before.
My workflow had always been the same.
Make one loop, nod to myself and think, Oh, this is pretty good, save it, then go to sleep.
That was it.
I-I don’t even have time for this!
Didn’t people say that when death was staring them in the face, they displayed superhuman strength?
I placed my fingers over the keyboard.
Then I pressed the first key.
The sound flooded my headphones.
The 808 kick struck my eardrums.
At that moment, some switch inside my brain flipped on.
In the verse section, you need to strip out the melody and leave only the drums and bass to create space, so there’s room for the rapper’s voice to ride over it.
I had no idea where knowledge like that was suddenly coming from.
Maybe something I had picked up on YouTube, or maybe something I had read on an FL Studio forum.
My survival instinct was ripping open every drawer in my brain.
At some point, light came through the window.
Night had passed, and morning had arrived.
And on the screen was a full track running three minutes and forty-seven seconds.
…Is it done?
I hit play.
I think it might be okay…
It felt better than my usual stuff, but I couldn’t really tell.
And just then—
[Dustin: Shotgun, let’s grab a beer today. I’ll come pick you up.]
“……”
Once again, refusing was not an option.
If you turned down a gang member’s invitation?
In movies, that usually led straight to a scene involving a car trunk.
Thirty minutes later,
the Ford Mustang pulled up in front of Gohyangmi.
Dustin got out of the driver’s seat, and when the rear door opened, Jamal stepped out.
“Yo! Shotgun!”
Dustin came at me like a bear.
I reflexively took a step back when it looked like he was going in for a hug, but his arms had already wrapped around me.
Jamal walked over.
I checked his back pocket.
The gun grip wasn’t visible.
Didn’t bring it today?
No.
Something was bulging under his jacket.
“Wassup.”
Jamal held out his fist.
I cautiously knocked mine against it.
“Get in.”
Jamal jerked his chin toward the Mustang.
Where are we going?
I wanted to ask, but it felt like I shouldn’t.
The Mustang left Koreatown and headed west.
Toward Venice Beach.
Palm trees flashed past beyond the windows.
After getting out of the car, we bought beer at a nearby convenience store.
Dustin lifted a twenty-four-can case with one hand, while Jamal came out with a hot dog in his mouth.
Dustin handed me a can of beer.
“Yo, drink it up!”
“……”
Look at that vulgar expression.
Normally people said cheers, but these hood gang guys used drink it up—like the toast was a command to finish it off.
…This doesn’t have drugs in it, does it?
Even though he had bought it right in front of me at the convenience store, I still felt suspicious.
Jamal shoved a hot dog toward me.
“Try it. The chili sauce here’s fucking good.”
“……”
An order.
This was about making the hierarchy clear.
I took a bite of the hot dog.
It was piled high with onions, chili sauce, sausage, and cheese, and I had to admit it tasted good.
“Ayyyy, this weather is insane. Not drinking beer on a day like this is a sin.”
Before I knew it, the sun was already half sunk below the horizon.
Streetlights came on one by one, and somewhere in the distance, I could hear someone busking on guitar.
Dustin emptied his fifth can and patted his stomach.
Jamal stretched his legs out over the sand and stared up at the sky.
Honestly,
if you cut out just this moment, it would have looked like nothing more than a peaceful evening with friends drinking beer together.
Peaceful, my ass!
Those two were Crips gang members.
Dustin’s fists could shatter a man’s jaw, and there was still a gun under Jamal’s jacket.
I was basically a hostage right now.
I need to get out of here fast.
I pulled out my phone and checked the time.
The dinner rush at the restaurant would be starting soon.
“…I think I need to go help out at work now.”
Dustin looked disappointed.
“Already? There are still cans left.”
“My parents are waiting.”
I played the On my mama card.
That was a cheat code in the hood.
“Yeah, family comes first.”
“Shotgun. Be good to ’em while you got ’em.”
“……”
Dustin pulled out his car keys.
Jamal, who had eaten only hot dogs instead of drinking beer, said he would drive.
“I’ll take you—”
“Ah, no! It’s fine! I’ll take the bus! It’s close from here!”
It was not close.
It was forty minutes to Koreatown by bus.
But if I got back into that Mustang, I had no idea where else they might drag me.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, really! Then I’m heading out first!”
I set the half-finished beer can on the bench and stood up.
As naturally as possible.
Not running.
At a walking pace.
And the moment I reached the roadside—
“!”
I ran like hell.
Park Seung-ho and Kim Mi-young came to Los Angeles in 1998.
When the IMF crisis hit Korea, the small company Park Seung-ho worked for went bankrupt, and finding another job was practically impossible.
(Translator’s Note:“IMF Crisis” (1997–1998) - In South Korea, the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis is commonly referred to as the “IMF crisis” because of the country’s IMF bailout. It triggered major layoffs, bankruptcies, and overseas migration.)
After hearing that an older acquaintance was running a restaurant in LA, he boarded a plane with his wife, who was seven months pregnant.
The child in her womb was Park Geon.
They started from the very bottom, with kitchen-assistant work at the smallest restaurant in Koreatown, and ten years later they opened a place of their own.
Its name was Gohyangmi.
It meant a place full of the taste of home, and also a longing for home.
“Honey.”
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t Geon seem a little different these days?”
Kim Mi-young smiled.
“Has Geon ever brought a friend to eat here before? As far as I remember, never once.”
“……”
“It was like that even in elementary school. Whenever I went to classroom observation day, he was always sitting alone, and even during breaks he’d just sit there reading by himself. Whenever I asked the teacher, they always said he studied well but didn’t have any friends.”
Geon had liked being alone ever since he was little.
At school, he ate lunch by himself, and on weekends, he stayed in his room with nothing but his laptop.
When he got into UCLA and they said, Let’s have a celebration party, he replied, Let’s just eat at home.
There were always rows of A’s on his report card, but the line for a friend’s name on the emergency contact form was always blank.
“But don’t you think Geon’s changed a little these days? He went out with friends again today.”
An hour later,
the back door of Gohyangmi flew open.
Park Geon came in, breathing hard.
“Did you have fun?”
“Y-Yes, yes. I’ll put my apron on right away. It’s the dinner rush now, right?”
Just as Park Geon hurriedly grabbed his apron,
Park Seung-ho and Kim Mi-young exchanged glances.
His father spoke first.
“Geon-ah.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to help with serving anymore.”
“…What?”
“We’ll still give you the money, so use that time to go hang out with your friends instead.”
Park Geon blinked.
“N-no, it’s okay.”
No!
My cheat code!
“We already hired another part-timer.”
“……”
“Geon-ah, I’ll be honest with you.”
Kim Mi-young patted her son’s shoulder.
“Seeing you spend time with friends this break makes your mother so proud, you have no idea.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Studying matters too, but friends you don’t make at this age are hard to make later.”
They’re not friends, they’re gang members!
Park Geon’s mouth moved soundlessly.
If he said it out loud, his parents would faint, and if they didn’t faint, they would call the police, and if they called the police, the Crips would retaliate.
“Dad, really, I’m fine. I’ll keep serving. Please.”
Park Seung-ho smiled kindly.
“Geon-ah, my best friend is Black too.”
“No, but seriously…”
That was when Park Yul came over quietly.
“Oppa.”
“What, what is it?”
“When you see Dustin again… tell him I’m sorry.”
“…What?”
“I hid last time and didn’t even say hello. Tell him I’m sorry for being scared of him because of my prejudice.”
Park Geon’s mouth fell open.
“Now that I think about it, he seems like a good person. He came to our restaurant, ate a ton, and paid properly.”
“……”
“He even boosted our sales, tipped thirty percent instead of twenty, and fixed your gear too.”
“……”
Park Geon wanted to cry.
Hoover Sound Studio.
“Wassup, homie.”
“Yo, wassup.”
“You hear about that Asian guy?”
“Shotgun? The one who finished the beat in two days?”
“They said two days. Two.”
“Nah, no way. Judging from the quality, it was the kind of thing that should’ve taken months at minimum.”
“But honestly…”
He swallowed the words that should have followed.
His expression said everything.
I hate to admit it, but that beat was insane.
“But he’s a nobody. No SoundCloud, no Instagram. Where the hell did he even come from?”
“Big Joe brought him in personally.”
“…OG did?”
That one sentence changed the mood.
If Big Joe had moved personally, that meant he had seen real value there.
Creak—
The studio door opened.
The air shifted the moment Lil D walked in.
“Yo, Lil D!”
The composers straightened up immediately.
In the South LA underground, Lil D’s name value meant money, and if they wanted to get onto that pipeline, the first step was getting noticed.
Lil D gave only a small jerk of the chin and walked past them.
Then he threw himself down onto the sofa and closed his eyes.
The beat he had gotten from Shotgun was still looping inside his head.
When he first received the file and plugged in his earphones, Lil D had pressed play without thinking much about it.
Just the usual I’ll give it a quick listen kind of mindset.
He had not expected anything from some beat completed in just two days.
But then—
once the four-bar intro passed and the verse section started, the verse began coming out of his mouth on its own.
He had been leaning back in his chair, absentmindedly fiddling with his phone, and at some point, he found himself muttering rhymes as if talking to himself.
The nights he had waited for his brother under the streetlights on Hoover Street.
The alley where he had first heard gunshots at thirteen.
The sound of the front door opening when his mother came home at three in the morning after finishing a double shift.
Scenes like those had begun rising through the spaces in the beat.
Lil D had not been able to take out his earphones for thirty straight minutes.
By the time he had replayed the same beat eight times, he had written an entire verse in his notebook.
It was the first time a verse had ever come out on its own.
Beats like that were rare.
A beat that gave a rapper space.
A beat that opened up exactly the right place for a voice to ride on top of it, and where that empty space itself made you want to say something.
But—
Making good beats and being good at producing are two different things.
Directing a rapper inside a recording booth was a completely different skill.
You had to be able to judge which take was good, which take was bad, where to raise the emotional line, and where to pull it back down.
If you could judge and direct that, then you were a producer.
How good is Shotgun’s producing, really?
When he opened his eyes, Shotgun was already there.
Like last time, he was dressed entirely in black.
“Yo.”
“…Yo.”
Shotgun sat down in front of the mixing console in the control room.
Lil D jerked his chin.
“I’m going in the booth.”
“…Okay.”
He stepped into the recording booth.
Through the glass, he could see Shotgun.
The guy was looking only at the monitor.
Lil D put on the headphones.
Then he stood in front of the mic.
The beat filled his ears.
The kick came in.
The hi-hat started ticking.
And the moment the 808 began crawling across the floor, Lil D opened his mouth.
“Yo—”
He let the verse spill out.
He ran straight through to the second verse without a break.
He suppressed his voice at the hook, then exploded on the drop.
Even the ad-libs were clean.
Done.
He pulled one side of the headphones off his ear and looked through the glass.
The composers gathered in small groups had their mouths hanging open.
I murdered that.
Lil D was confident in the take he had just laid down.
The flow was good, and the delivery was good.
The part in the middle of the verse where he delayed the rhythm by half a beat to build tension had come out so well that even he was surprised.
In the control room beyond the glass,
he waited for Shotgun’s reaction.
“……”
Expressionless.
He was only looking at the monitor.
No nodding.
Not even a twitch of the eyebrow.
No That was good, no Not bad, not even a Do it again.
What the fuck?
Lil D’s brow tightened.
The composers were wearing confused expressions too.
“Yo, you didn’t hear that just now?”
“…I heard it.”
And then he looked back at the monitor.
That was it.
Lil D’s temples began throbbing.
What the hell is this supposed to be?
Whenever Lil D spat a verse in the South LA underground, the people hearing it reacted in one of two ways.
Either they went completely wild, or they were too stunned to say anything.
A blank expression was not one of the options.
“I’m doing it again.”
Lil D pulled the headphones back on.
This time, he put more force into it.
From the very first line, he loaded his voice with power and spat each consonant like he was slicing with a knife.
He pushed the energy up, detonated at the hook, and drove rough and hard all the way through the outro.
Done.
He looked through the glass again.
One composer had taken off his cap and thrown it into the air.
“Damn!”
Another was leaning against the wall, shaking his head from side to side.
That headshake of pure disbelief.
And Shotgun—
“……”
The same blank expression.
Still only looking at the monitor.
His eyes were fixed on the waveform screen, and he never once looked at Lil D.
This bastard.
Lil D clenched his teeth.
He threw open the booth door and stormed into the control room.
“Yo!”
Shotgun looked up stiffly.
“What’s the problem?”
Lil D’s voice rose another notch.
“Speak up! Say it right now. What don’t you like about it? Spit it out!”
Silence fell.
The composers watching held their breath.
“…How many things do you want me to say?”
“!”