Chapter 009
Chapter 009
“Aight then, drop that shit, cuz!”
The beat dropped.
The 808 shook the floor, and Lil D opened his mouth.
A new track.
Women, money, street swagger.
His flow rode the beat like it was gliding over it, and the crowd reacted.
Heads started nodding, arms went up.
Good.
The reaction to the new song was decent.
No, more than decent.
It was very good.
But this was a live club.
That explosion from J-Rackz’s set wasn’t there.
That splitting, cracking kind of madness that had burst out during the crown freestyle was missing now.
And that was when it happened.
Whi-whi-whi—
The beat cut out.
What the fuck?!
A curse surged up from inside him.
The audience started murmuring, and the movement on the floor began to die down.
One second.
Two seconds.
What the hell are you doing, Shotgun?
But the moment the third second passed—
…Wait.
The beat was gone.
The only thing left onstage was his voice.
Every eye in the crowd was fixed on him.
The new song was about women and money.
A flashy, polished track, the kind of thing that would play well in the majors.
But that was not what this stage needed.
Impact.
The answer he had been searching for all along.
In that silence left behind when the beat dropped out, he suddenly saw it.
He made space for me on purpose.
He had created a space to lay in a freestyle verse.
No beat, just the voice, raw and exposed.
An a cappella freestyle.
Shotgun had read it on the spot.
He had read what this stage needed.
Aight.
He tightened his grip on the mic.
He stripped away the flashy packaging of the new song.
The women, the money, the swagger—he tossed all of it aside.
All that remained was himself, the one who had grown up on Hoover Street.
“My dawg took three to the chest on Hoover.”
The memory of the day his brother went down.
A neighborhood numb to gunshots.
The nights when a splash of Hennessy stood in for mourning.
And then—
“But when my dawg got hit, where was you? You was gone.”
But when my brother got shot, where were you? You weren’t in this neighborhood.
The guy who had rapped that he held this block down 365 days a year—
but when the bullets really started flying, who had actually been standing here?
The instant the last syllable ended—
a piano note came in.
It overlapped with the final breath of the freestyle with not even the width of a hair between them.
…!
A jolt ran up Lil D’s spine.
The beat had returned.
“SHEEEEESH!”
“YO! What the hell is this?! What the hell is this?!”
“On God, this is all-time!”
“SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!”
Lil D drove through the rest of the track.
Verse, hook, drop.
The closer the performance got to the end, the more violently the floor heated up.
In the middle of spitting his verse, he glanced over at Shotgun.
Expressionless.
His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and he was looking only at the monitor and the controller.
That bastard really is…
He had pulled at the audience’s emotions with the freestyle, then guided everything naturally back into the new track.
That was not a structure anyone could create alone.
The final verse ended.
Lil D lowered the hand holding the mic.
Then, in his bare voice, he shouted,
“Who’s the motherfuckin’ king!”
And to that question—who the real king was—
“LIL D! LIL D! LIL D!”
The chant began punching through the ceiling.
Backstage.
Cheers rained down on Lil D the moment he came offstage.
“Lil D! That was insane!”
“On God, all-time!”
“The King of The Vault is still you, Lil D!”
Drenched in sweat, Lil D downed an entire bottle of water in one go.
When he turned his head while catching his breath, he saw Park Geon stepping down from the DJ booth.
“Yo.”
“……”
“If you hadn’t been there, this stage wouldn’t have happened today.”
The rappers and staff gathered around widened their eyes.
Because they had never seen Lil D, who usually lived off his own swagger, talk to someone like that.
“SHOTGUN!”
“You killed it tonight.”
Dustin and Jamal came over.
“You did it! You fucking genius!”
People began crowding into the backstage corridor.
A few of them started hovering around Park Geon and sneaking glances at him.
“Excuse me.”
One of them stepped forward.
“Do you have a moment to talk?”
He wasn’t wearing a chain or any flashy accessories, and his manner was polite.
Strangely so, for this place.
[EASTSIDE SOUND RECORDS]
The man held out a business card.
Just as Park Geon was about to take it,
Lil D’s voice came from behind him.
“Isn’t this the place where two of their signed rappers terminated their contracts and left at the same time last year? Because they were holding back royalties.”
The man’s face turned white.
“T-that was a misunderstanding and—”
“A misunderstanding? Isn’t this some label that’s never managed to chart even one single, getting ahead of itself and reaching everywhere it can?”
The man took a step back.
Dustin was glaring at him, and Jamal already had one hand inside his jacket.
“A-ah, I’m only interested in the music, purely in musical terms—”
“Purely?”
Lil D slapped the card against the man’s chest.
“If you want to do music purely, then settle your unpaid royalties first.”
The man fled in a panic without even taking his card back.
“Shotgun.”
Park Geon raised his head stiffly.
“Flies like that are gonna start swarming around you now.”
Dustin asked,
“Yo, but Lil D. How did you know that no-name label had held back royalties?”
Lil D raised his middle finger toward the corridor the man had disappeared down and said,
“The stench of the gutter’s gotta be pretty damn strong for me to smell it that far. Bullshit.”
“……”
“Shotgun, you know we’re different, right? OG has never once delayed a producer’s settlement. He pays the advance in full, gives up publishing shares, and it’s all clean money that goes on the books.”
(Translator’s Note:Settlement refers to proper payment/accounting for artists or producers)
What bullshit!
Clean money, my ass!
You shoved dirty money at me to launder it through me!
“OG’s strict about that kind of thing. He never mixes label income with street money.”
Jamal nodded beside them.
“What OG hates most is giving people something to use against him. That’s why he even has an accountant.”
…What? A gang has an accountant?
Park Geon’s eyes shook behind his sunglasses.
Then that four thousand dollars I got… was clean money too?
Up until now, he had been certain it was dirty money and hadn’t touched it.
That money he’d been too scared to deposit, too scared the FBI might trace, and had just kept sitting there in cash—
…I could have used it?
Just as a cheer started rising inside him—
Wait.
If it wasn’t money laundering, that meant they had really invested in my skill?
Four thousand dollars.
On me, when I didn’t have a single credit to my name.
Sincerely.
Then that means their expectations are actually huge!
The mistake during the DJing tonight, pressing the wrong button and all the rest—
one misunderstanding was piling on top of another like a snowball rolling downhill…
I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be happy about this or not.
“Ayyyyyyy!”
The hideout was packed with people.
Among a sea of Black faces I didn’t know, shoulder slaps, arm locks, and fist bumps were flying at me from all directions.
“On God, tonight’s set was all-time!”
“The fools who didn’t show up tonight are gonna regret it like hell!”
In one corner, someone brought out Hennessy.
Somebody shoved it into my hand.
I didn’t want to drink, but if I refused, it felt like I might get collectively stomped to death.
So I forced down a gulp, and my esophagus burst into flames!
“AYYY! Shotgun! You’re killing that in one shot?!”
“Crack open another bottle!”
That was when Big Joe appeared.
Maybe he had been moving separately from the VIP section, because he got back to the hideout a little later than the others.
The noisy room dropped by a level.
Big Joe lit his cigar.
Then, after blowing out a long stream of smoke, he looked at Lil D.
“You took your crown back.”
And then—
Big Joe’s gaze came to me.
“Shotgun.”
Big Joe took another drag on the cigar, then exhaled toward the ceiling.
“You were very good tonight.”
“……”
The gang guys around us started making a huge fuss again.
The congratulations kept going for a while, and then—
“Wait…”
Someone off to one side, looking at his phone, spoke in a trembling voice.
At first it got buried under the noise.
“Wait, wait, wait!”
At that second shout, several people turned their heads.
“Look at this.”
He held up his phone screen.
One of the gang members beside him leaned in, looked at it, and recoiled in shock.
“Yo! B.I.G just dropped a Lil D diss track! Looks like he dissed him over tonight’s performance at The Vault!”
“…What?! It’s only been three hours!”
The hand pouring Hennessy stopped, and every mouth that had been talking snapped shut.
“Blood-affiliated B.I.G? The one active in the major scene?!”
The major scene.
Not underground, but major.
A guy whose name charted, whose streams on Spotify hit into the millions, had just dropped a diss track aimed at Lil D.
“Shit, a major rapper dissed an underground rapper?”
“Well, B.I.G’s Blood. His side and ours never got along.”
“…This is gonna turn into something huge.”
Lil D ground his teeth.
“That bastard… me and him got personal bad blood too. But for him to drop a diss track in only three hours…”
Diss tracks didn’t go through a formal release process.
You went into the studio, recorded it, slapped on a rough mix, and dumped it straight onto SoundCloud or YouTube.
Just like Kendrick Lamar had dropped a Drake diss in four hours, in this scene the speed of a diss was how you seized the initiative.
(Kendrick Lamar (born 1987) - American rapper referenced in the thread as an example of rapid-response diss-track release culture.)
(Drake (born 1986) - Canadian rapper referenced in the thread alongside Kendrick Lamar in discussion of fast-moving diss-track culture.)
But B.I.G did it in three hours? No wonder he’s a major rapper.
That meant he was a genius.
“Enough. Play it.”
Big Joe said it low.
The diss track started playing through the speakers.
Boom, boom-boom. Screech—
The beat itself was aggressive.
A vicious trap beat with the 808 clawing across the floor.
B.I.G’s voice rode over it.
“Lil Dunk came back like he never left.”
Lil D came crawling back to the underground like he’d never left.
“But what he drop? Nothin’. No single, no tape, no check.”
But what did he drop? Nothing. No single, no tape, no check.
“……!”
“Had a year to prove it, couldn’t even chart a ringtone.”
He had a whole year to prove himself and still couldn’t chart a ringtone.
“Talkin’ major but you still on a local microphone.”
Talking big about going major, but you’re still holding a local mic.
The veins in Lil D’s eyes stood out.
Whether B.I.G knew it or not, he kept chewing through him.
“And that boy next to you, who even is he?”
And that guy standing next to you—who even is he?
“Asian makin’ beats now? Yo Chang, go fix a machine.”
An Asian making beats now? Yo, Chinese boy, go fix a machine.
…Why am I suddenly in this?
For a long time in the United States, Asians had been consumed through the stereotype of being “the race that’s good with machines.”
Phone-repair shops, laundromats, nail salons.
That was what B.I.G was invoking.
And on top of that came the bonus package of lumping every Asian into being Chinese.
A few of the lines that followed dragged me into it too.
Hip-hop was our culture, born from the hood and the streets, so why were they bowing their heads to an Asian—that was the angle.
“……”
“……”
Silence settled over the room.
It was Jamal who tore it apart.
Click!
He pulled out his gun from inside his jacket.
“This is a declaration of war. There’s more than enough reason to answer in blood.”
…What?
A few of the other gang members around him started touching their waists too.
The mood was heating up fast.
Then they started pulling out their phones and calling people.
Telling them to gather up immediately.
That was when—
“Sit.”
Big Joe’s declaration.
Jamal froze.
The hand holding the gun was still hanging in the air.
“I said sit.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing.
Only B.I.G’s diss track, still not yet finished, refused to keep silent.
And then I had a sudden thought.
Am I marked by the Bloods now too?
Including the Crips.
Now the Bloods too.
The muscles in my face stiffened.
They had already been stiff before, but now they locked up like cement.
And then—
Twitch, twitch, twitch.
Now even my fingers had started trembling.
The stress hit me all at once, and it felt like my fingers were going into spasms.
This had happened a few times when I was preparing for entrance exams too.
Twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch.
…It kept getting worse.
Tap, tap, tap…
Big Joe dropped the cigar that had been between his lips.
Shotgun, expressionless behind his sunglasses, fingers twitching.
As if he were calculating a rhythm.
No way.
And B.I.G’s diss track wasn’t even over yet.
…That bastard is already preparing a reply diss track.