#itsallmyworld

[hotelsonfire]

Ikari (And My Fixation With Friction)

Chapter 1

Underground clubs are a strange beast.

This one is like a goth kid threw his girlfriend’s favorite dark purple lipstick all over the walls, and the floor is the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. White tiles with red lights spinning and swirling fluidly. The person in charge of decoration and presentation should have been shot.

Deep, grungy bass riffs out a rhythm that leaves the windows vibrating, while trap hats rip hard over an upbeat drum track. With every whip crack of the snare, a pulse of energy whips through the crowds, individuals swaying with the beats as an out of place gang of men dressed in red and white (The Bones, if my intel was right) rap in syncopation over the track. They finish and are rewarded with some appreciative claps.

Next up is Jennifer Violet (Violent J), Curt Douglas (Dirty Cutlass) and, penultimately, Headless, a local metal band that has recently been on break after touring. Each artist gets three minutes with a custom track or a preset of their choosing, and they are judged after each performs. The winners are announced at the end. I would go last.

I sit in an alcove up in the rafters of the building, a conversation with a friend while on top of a cliff playing through my head. They had mentioned either going down to the water, or up to the top of the cliff. I had merely responded “I like to get high”, then proceeded to light a joint. We sat up on the edge of the cliff and watched the waves crash below. This memory is shaken off as a door slams in The Box, the sound room for the pit that was directly below me.

I survey the people below without fear of being scene. Sitting on the metal frames that suspend the lights, wearing all black in a room that is nearly pitch where I sit, the audience below wouldn’t have a chance of spotting me.

As Violet takes the stage, I begin to get a feel for her set just from her appearance. She wears her white hair swept over one shoulder, a lone streak of red running from root to tip, wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Fuck you”, black skinny jeans, and checkerboard converse. She picks up an acoustic guitar from a stand off stage, then stands in front of the mike. She clear her throat and feigns confidence while introducing herself, then begins to play.

Strumming out a tune with some apprehension, she starts to sing in a voice high and clear. Any judgement drains out of the room, and as people start cheering and clapping along, the song picks up a little. Jennifer becomes more confident as she plays. Meanwhile, off stage, even the promoters and sound crew seem impressed; at one point, the sound guy even turns up the volume on her microphones.

As her song plays, I think of some of tunes I’ve written, in envy of the young girl on stage. Her music feels more matured in stating what it’s trying to say, and yet it doesn’t have any of the elements that I typically listen for. Still, it drags at my focus, and I find myself drawn into the tune. As my focus slips, I see a friend of mine. He’s the drummer of Headless. He’s also currently got his arms wrapped around a blonde girl that was fairly recently dear to my heart.

I feel a pulse of jealousy course through me. I drag my eyes off of the swaying couple, but I can’t shake the feeling of her body resting against mine in the same pose, or the way she smelled of cigarettes and sadness at this time of the evening. Sneaking another glance, I notice when her hips begin grinding against his. The current contents of my stomach lurch, and I decide that it’s time to focus on my lyrics and my upcoming set. If those two are here, then I need to put on a big ass show, I decide. There’s no way I’m letting that shake me.

Trying to recall the lyrics to a certain post chorus, I reach for my bag, only to remember that I’d placed it in the back corner of the green room prior to climbing up the sound room’s access ladder to find out where it went. Once I’d settled, I simply waited for the show to start.

Her song finished, Douglass comes to the stage. As a trap beat flows into the room, I walk across the walkway running to the roof of The Box, then climb down the access ladder. Making my way through the crowd, I pop back stage as Violet slips out of the green room, guitar case in hand.

“Hey, great song!” I say as we approach one another.

“Thanks!” She smiles, a sheen of sweat shining from her skin. “I got a little nervous, but the room seemed to like it.”

“Definitely,” I agree then offer my hand. “David.”

“Jennifer.” She takes my hand and shakes it, smiling. We’re doing that awkward standing lean, where you’re both headed in different directions, but you’re not quite finished interacting with someone.

“Are you sticking around?” I ask.

“Yep!” She jerks her head over her shoulder towards the door. “Just gotta get this baby safely stowed,” she says, hefting her guitar case in the air.

“Alright,” I reply, “I’ll be around.”

“Cool. See you!” She walks down the hall to the door. I walk to the green room to find my bag.

Passing through the door, I walked into a wall of smoke, an earthy, pungence that leaves my head reeling in seconds. The guys from Headless are mid-conversation, one throwing another a beer, my friend, the drummer, setting up coke to be snorted off a small compact mirror, and two guys each smoking large blunts. 

“Oh shit!” they cry in near unison when I emerge from the smokey doorway into the light. 

“Hey guys!” I cough, bending over near the unoccupied chair in the corner where I’d left my things.

“You came out of nowhere!” Daniel, the drummer I’d recognized in the crowd sat at the table, rolling what looked like a one hundred dollar bill into a straw. I pulled my phone, my wallet, a battery and a charging cord from the bag, then sat the bag back down. After a long snort on his part, I turned back and smiled.

“I’m sure it seems that way. Y’all are up next.” I stepped out. Unsure of how long they’d been here, or even if they knew where they were, Headless definitely seemed like they each had things they needed to address. Though they were somewhat successful, they were each also going through their own struggles, and each of them thought that they could handle it on their own. Which is merely human, to be fair, but they weren’t helping each other. Their set should be interesting.

On stage, Douglass is laying down a fast lyrical rap that rapidly swept through imagery and contextual information like he had been born to perform that style. I got a small twinge of sadness at the thought that I’d missed the better part of his set as he stepped off stage. I greeted him and shook his hand and told him what a great job he’d done. He responded with a calm composure, the casual press of someone who was aware of their talents and hadn’t blown his ego up because of it.

Headless passed me as they walked to the stage. Whatever I’d seen in the green room was replaced with calm determination and steady focus. Maybe they were serious about music, and not just seeing it as an excuse to live the life of a “rockstar”.

They push a drum set in from off stage, wheel on some amps and grab their instruments. A sample track starts and the room dims. They have a timed light set up.

“Nice touch,” I mutterfrom off stage. Danny catches me watching and winks. An eerie ringing fills the air and the beer thrower stepped up as the lights flashed. The vocalist begins whispering into the microphone, growing louder, until he is shouting:

The rotting corpse of your relation to everyone The smell sickens the bittersweet within What brought you to this point?   Can you relate for me whatever happened to you?

My blood runs cold. That’s my song. I wrote those lines. They are literally ripping me off at my own show. The fucking nerve.

I wait out their song - my song - and smile at them as they come back through the curtains.

“So you guys follow @hotelsonfire, huh?” I smile at them. They glance around at each other and snort. “What?”

“I said, so you follow my blog, huh? Those were my lyrics, dude.”

Danny pushes through the guys holding a bass drum.

“Dude, what the hell? Why would you steal my words?”

He blinks and says “What are you talking about?”

“The lyrics to your song! I wrote those words.”

“No, we wrote those.”

I pause and squint at him. “There’s no way in hell that you wrote those exact lines.”

He sets his drums down and and begins walking to his car. Knowing he’s not going to abandon his kit, I follow him to the vehicle. He opens up the glovebox and pulls out a notebook. There, written across the page, are my words. All of them. And even worse, in the upper right corner, there’s a date from 2010, a solid year before I even wrote the lyrics.

“Dude, what the fuck?!” I literally do not believe that they wrote this word for word, before I did, so they must have just chosen a date before I wrote and published the lyrics. Unfortunately for me, they’re just going to keep up the act. I already know this. Better for me to focus, the battle isn’t over.

I turn and walk back to the green room as the stage is cleared. I grab my change of clothing from my bag and quickly swap wardrobe, then go to wait at the wings of the stage. With my hood up, I don’t notice until I take the stage that Headless is watching from the wings, and a few of them don’t look as indifferent after noticing that “HotelsOnFire” is written on the banner behind me. The Sign-up sheet only allowed legal names on it. These acts were supposed to be small time, and my guess was that Headless hadn’t done any research about the competition.

A click track with snaps on the down beat began playing, and a horn came on in the background of the song. The music built, adding more instruments, until the drums gave three open cymbal hits and a snare, and the whole song slid into a groove. Then the groove settled and the vocals began. I sang:

“You walk like you out match me ten to one. You throw me your best line, but girls just want to have fun. Your attitude is sure respectful, but I don’t appreciate when you invalidate the things I’ve done”

I began stalking around the stage as the lyrics build, and make eye contact with nearly everyone in the crowd. As we build to the chorus, my eyes lock with Danny and my ex-girlfriend, Lynn, holding each other tight. Without breaking eye contact, I sing “This is weak”. The audience is dancing swaying and grooving a bit. The folks in the front bobbing their heads is helping to encourage me. The chorus wraps to a close, with an extra bar of drums and piano chords to add effect to the chill. The room is transfixed.

I sweap through the second chorus and I’m running around the room. Through the bridge, then through the final chorus, I’m dancing across the stage, and through my microphone. At one point, I turn around just put my head against the wall. I begin to speak and the music drifts into the outro.

“You guys enjoying yourselves?” I get a cheer and scattered claps back.

“Cool. If this has been a meaningful experience to you, I want you to chant with me. If this has NOT been a meaningful experience, I absolutely urge you to chant with me so that you can have one. And if you don’t want to have a meaningful experience, then this song is for you.” I turn around, and see nothing but open faces, curious for my next remark.

“You’re gonna say “This is weak. This is old. This won’t work.”

The crowd complied.

“This is weak, this is stale, this won’t help!”

My friends are shouting.

“1... 2... 1, 2, 3, Shout!”

The people I thought I was close to are shouting. The people that betrayed me are singing. The sight of my ex singing along to my song is bittersweet, but there’s more than enough other mixed emotions that I’m focused on handling first.

The strange whistles in the background of the music give the room a feel as if we were inside a forest, with the wind whistling and strange small creatures running about. I’m bobbing my head as I step up onto a riser, and spread my arms in front of the crowd. Feeling the flow of the song, I adlib a line into the end.

“I’m delighted to say that we can be apart!”

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Cited

Nothing But A Weight

The 27th