Loki's Child Page 6

  The driver unrolled a red carpet across the sidewalk, up the stairs, and into the front entrance. He opened the passenger door, and two little girls in Sunday dresses hopped out and skipped up the red carpet, scattering jasmine petals.

  She was dolled up like a silent film star. Her blonde hair was meticulously coifed, her face was painted, there was a fake mole on her left cheek, and she had put blacking between her front teeth to create a gap. She walked down the carpet in a shimmering red dress, an ivory cigarette holder in one gloved hand. A pair of designer sunglasses completed the effect.

  Scotty stood there, gaping like a rube. She stopped and regarded him disdainfully. “What the fuck are you looking at? Get out of my way, cretin.”

  Then she saw me, and her manner changed. Suddenly she had a fake British accent. “Why, hell-o, Blenderman. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. Shall we begin the recording session?”

  I stood there, arms folded, and said nothing.

  “Splendid,” she said, and wafted past me into the studio.

  She walked into the live room, and snapped her fingers at Alpha. “Boy,” she called. “Come here, boy. Fetch me some Perrier water. I can’t drink this filth you call tap water.”

  She turned toward me. “Here,” she said cavalierly, producing a booklet of sheet music from her handbag and dropping it on the floor. “These are the instrumental parts. Have somebody play them.”

  “I thought you wanted to play your own music,” I said.

  “Please,” she said scornfully. “We have people for that. Call some session players. If they’re not here in half an hour, have them killed.”

  I picked up the sheet music off the floor, and read the title. “‘American Filth Pageant’?” I said incredulously.

  “It’s about the materialism and superficiality of our so-called culture. I wrote it while I was in India, learning from the Brahmin masters. It’s going to be very shocking, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  Scotty put his head in his hands and groaned.

  Jasmine looked around. “Did something speak? Blenderman, please tell it that underlings are expected to perform their duties silently and invisibly.”

  I shrugged. “You heard the lady. Set up the studio for”—I shuffled through the sheet music—“string quartet, Rhodes piano, African percussion, and English horn.”

  I got out the directory and called the session players. I told Her Majesty, “We can’t get them here until 2:00.”

  “Fine. Have the underling program the parts into a MIDI sequencer.”

  Scotty glared at her suspiciously. He opened the sequencer in SonoViz and started up the software sampler, which is a type of synthesizer that uses digital recordings of real instruments instead of oscillators. Her Majesty decided she liked the samples. We still had to pay the session players, so I told them to hang around in case they were needed.

  “This is ridiculous!” Scotty protested. “It’ll take hours to program some expression into the MIDI parts, when the session players could do it in one take!”

  “Tell the underling that we are not living in 1940 and the artist wants it to sound modern,” said Jasmine.

  In six hours we had the backing track completed. The session players went home in disgust. Her Majesty was ready to do her vocal.

  The intro was a slow, melancholy waltz. She stepped up to the mic, held the headphones to her ears, and started to sing. It was cringingly off-key, over-enunciated, and dead serious.

  In my loneliness

  I see everything clearly

  I wish that I

  Could bring the world near me

  But these walls

  Will always separate us

  Don’t you realize

  The entire world hates us

  The song went into a four-on-the-floor disco beat. She sang in triplets over it.

  How many children will die from our bombs

  How many years will we let this go on

  We’re destroying the earth to get oil for our cars

  And reaping the anger of children we scarred

  On the chorus, she pushed her voice into a caterwaul.

  Every day it goes on, we’re so oblivious

  The American Filth Pageant

  No one can stop it, until it kills all of us

  The American Filth Pageant

  She dropped character and came into the Padded Cell. “Do you think it needs pitch correction, or should I let it suck out loud?”

  “I always wondered,” I said, “when it’s indistinguishable from the real thing, is it still parody?”

  Jasmine put her hands on her hips. “You’re getting off on this, aren’t you?”

  “You think you’re the first person to pass off trash as music? You’re talking to the master.”

  “Well, Blendie, this record might turn out to be the pinnacle of your career.”

  The next day, she came in with a vintage “Fuzz King” pedal, a practice amp, and a no-name guitar with buzzy pickups, and knocked out a grunge-rock tune called “Method Acting” in one take.

  13. Guest Stars

  by BLENDERMAN

  This harlot, this Lolette van Cleve, she is the Whore of Babylon spoken of in Revelation! She will come riding on the back of a seven-headed beast, bewitching the youth with her lascivious gyrations, and all the nations shall pay obeisance to her!

  —Rev. Ezekiel Mather

  Jasmine sat in a chair with an acoustic guitar, trying to write a song. I checked my email and deleted yet another invitation to join MyFace.

  MyFace is a free personalized privacy invasion service. It encourages you to post random thoughts every five minutes. It integrates with your cell phone and monitors your GPS location. It activates the microphone in your smartphone and monitors your conversations so it can use the information to create targeted advertisements. It uses your webcam to monitor your facial expressions so it can determine your “current mood.” It reads your messages while you type them, so it can collect data on “self-censorship behavior” that robs the company of valuable “content generation.” It integrates with your email and reports all your online activities to your friends. It invites you to “like” things. It installs a prompt on your computer that says, “Do you have something you’d like to share?” It sells your personal information to advertisers, insurance companies, credit rating agencies, background check agencies, and potential employers. It uses facial recognition software to identify you in other people’s photos. It makes it difficult or impossible to opt out of any of these “features.” It periodically changes its privacy settings and makes your private information public without warning. It doesn’t allow you to terminate your account, ever. And it gives the government a back door to all your information, which can be accessed at any time without a warrant.

  In fact, the company is remarkably government-friendly. They’re happy to delete some forms of “hatespeech” but not others, in accordance with the political biases of the ruling party of whatever country you live in. Their curated news feed exhibits the same pattern, promoting some stories and suppressing others. Of course, the company didn’t start behaving this way until after it gained an unprecedented level of control over the way information is promoted and shared on the Internet.

  That’s why I get all my news from the lunatic street preacher on the corner. He has a marginally better grasp of reality.

  Scotty doesn’t even use email or cell phones. When I need him at the studio, I have to send a letter by Pony Express.

  After an hour, Jasmine gave up. “I need three more songs, and I don’t have anything. I just can’t get inspired to be uninspired. Any ideas, Mr. Producer?”

  I said, “You spoofed all the popular genres. Gothrock, rapfunk, angstfolk, stonerdrone, agitpop, loathegrunge… how about cyber-country?”

  “Are you nuts? It’s too much work.”

  “Okay, try to what imagine what pop music will be like 10 years from now.”

  “Exactly the same?”

  “You’re right. How about some guest stars? You can bring in an R&B singer or a rapper. Crossover tunes are huge right now.”

  Jasmine cackled with glee. “I’ll do both. I want a chick R&B singer. The men are too creepy. Who has the whiniest voice?”

  “How about Imelda Sleet? She’s been looking for a comeback opportunity.”

  “She’s that desperate?” said Jasmine.

  I shrugged. “It’s less degrading than doing a lesbo kiss with Lolette van Cleve.”

  “Now we need a rapper.”

  “How about 38 Killa? He’s recording his debut album in Studio G as we speak.”

  Jasmine made a face. “Didn’t he have a song called ‘Ima Make You My Bitch’? And it’s about prison rape?”

  I shrugged. “Gotta push the envelope.”

  “I have a better idea. Mitzi, remember that tape you made?”

  “What tape?”

  “You know, the tape.”

  Mitzi’s eyes got big. “Oh, that tape!”

  “What’s on the tape?” I said suspiciously.

  “You’ll find out,” said Jasmine.

  14. “Real”

  by SCOTTY

  “Today, children,” Jasmine announced in a kindergarten-teacher tone, “we’re going to record a gangsta rap song.”

  “You, a gangsta rapper?” said Blenderman. “Aren’t you a bit lacking in the prison tattoos and bullet wounds department?”

  “Watch and learn.”

  The band recorded half an hour of jamming. It was just random noise, like a nu-metal band attempting free jazz. Jasmine selected a few bars and had me loop them, one loop for the verses and one for the choruses. The result was tone-deaf and vaguely menacing.

  Jasmine handed me a cassette. “Here’s the t
ape I mentioned. See if you can isolate the voices.”

  I patched a cassette deck into the SonoViz, and selected a spectral editing program that can isolate just about anything.

  The cassette started with traffic noise. Then I heard two voices. I had a creeping sense of deja vu.

  A few years ago, when I was an intern at a certain studio in Queens, I engineered my first and last “gangsta rap” session. The client, a guy with prison tattoos known as “Murderous Q,” wasn’t happy with the mix. He accused me of stretching out the billable hours, and threatened to “fill my cap.” I walked out and never came back. Q didn’t pay his bill, so the owner withheld the master tape. A few weeks later, three members of Q’s “posse” broke into the studio, held the owner at gunpoint, and cleaned out the place. One of the thugs brought his six-year-old daughter with him. Couldn’t find a babysitter.

  It was the angry tone of men on the edge of violence that was so familiar. The two guys on the tape were arguing about something. The argument became heated. Then I heard gunshots, very loud and distorted. It sounded like a large-caliber handgun and a semi-automatic rifle. That was it.

  “Oh, that was just lovely,” said Blenderman. “Where did you get it, the FBI’s yard sale?”

  “We lived in South Central Los Angeles for a while,” said Jasmine. “One night, these two drug dealers had a little conference in the parking lot of our apartment building. Mitzi was going through an Audio Vérité phase, and she put a mic in the window and recorded the whole thing. We called the cops, but they never showed up. The next morning, the ambulance came and hauled away two corpses. There was blood all over the place.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I want you to turn this into a vocal track. Chop it up and put it to the beat.”

  “Holy shit,” I said in awe.

  “Can you do it?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  I chopped up the “vocals” like a Cuisinart. I used every trick in the book to make the edits sound natural: time-stretching, pitch-shift envelopes, micro-edits, and crossfades. We nicknamed the guys “2 Hard” and “X-Pimp.”

  I’ve heard some amazing rappers, turntablists, and sampling artists in the underground, and even occasionally on NoisyVid. But most of the hip-hop the major labels shove down our throats is vile, stereotyped, unmusical garbage. If you’re white, it makes you want to join the Klan, and if you’re black it makes you want to smack some self-respect into those minstrel-show sellouts.

  By the end of the day, we had created a song. It went like this:

  Where my motherfuckin shit nigga?

  I ain’t got yo shit nigga

  (4x)

  I ain’t got shit to sell, I’m losin money every day

  You understand me?

  Can’t help you G

  You understand me?

  Can’t help you G

  Fuckin ho, you tryin to play me

  Who you callin a ho, prison bitch?

  Hard-ass niggaz rippin yo ass in half

  In HALF, muthafucka

  Hard-ass niggaz rippin yo ass in half

  In HALF, muthafucka

  Chorus:

  Right now, bitch, RIGHT NOW!

  You gon’ die nigga! UNGH!

  (Loud gunfire)

  Thanks to my editing work, the ersatz vocals had better rhythm and flow than the typical mumblyfuck bullshit that passes for rap these days. I was laughing so hard, I thought I was going to pass out. I said, “We could seriously pass this off as a real song!”

  Jasmine gave me a wolfish grin. “They’re always bragging about how hardcore they are. This is hardcore. What other song has two guys actually killing each other?”

  “What are you gonna call it?”

  “‘Where My Shit, Nigga?’,” Jasmine answered without hesitation. “We’ll find actors to play 2 Hard and X-Pimp for the video. I’m gonna make gangsta rap my bitch.”

  15. Lame Dog

  by SCOTTY

  A fascist, emotion-controlling elite monitors lesser species for “wrongfeel” and “badthink.” Repeat offenders are “re-educated” by means of a “magic beam” that eliminates all non-approved emotions. A chilling dystopian tale about the ultimate abuse of power.

  —Chicago Sun-Times review of “The Shiny Happy Unicorns Movie”

  There was no session today, so I wandered around the building and unobtrusively ducked into a few sessions. Kasugi Studios does a wide range of music and sound-for-picture. I like to pick up new techniques whenever I can, in the vain hope of breaking out of the pop ghetto someday.

  Studio A had an orchestral session for “The Prez,” a television drama about a heroic liberal President who rules with the wisdom of Solomon and his heroic liberal staff who are ever so much smarter and braver than ordinary people, with overwrought music. It takes place in Magical Feelings Land.

  There was a pop-jazz singer in B, and an alt-rock band in C. In D, they were doing a voiceover for “Backstab!”, the new reality show about office politics where the goal is to get your co-workers fired.

  Studio E had a mixing session for “Dwozzle and Friends,” an environmentalist cartoon show about a talking hedgehog who leads a pack of militant forest creatures in acts of industrial sabotage. It also features Aardy the Ambiguous Aardvark, who teaches kids about alternative lifestyles. It goes up against “Drag Racing Dino-Bots” on XTV (Xtreme Television).

  The same production company is responsible for “Shiny Happy Unicorns,” a cartoon about flying unicorns who do away with anger and sadness by zapping people with rainbow laser beams. It’s sponsored by the makers of Placidol® and new Children’s Placidol®, with fun unicorn shapes that taste like candy!

  The mind controllers figured out a long time ago that cartoons are a direct line to kids’ emotions before their personalities are formed. For the right price, you can get any message you want into a cartoon. The Smurfs? Simple woodland volk menaced by a greedy hook-nosed sorcerer. The Flintstones? Cavemen and dinosaurs living side-by-side. G.I. Joe? Wars where nobody ever gets killed. Teletubbies? Imbecilic, androgynous creatures who obey mechanical voices issuing from loudspeakers and worship a giant baby head that lives in the sky, in a world of unchanging repetition where the only things that exhibit free will are household appliances. And the shows for grown-ups are even worse.

  In Studio F, a retired Senator was reading his autobiography, which takes place in an opposite parallel universe. In G, they were doing something with MIDI that I didn’t want to know about.

  Finally, I got to Studio H and found something interesting. An audiophile jazz label was restoring some old blues recordings. I collect that kind of music, so I asked if I could sit in.

  The label president, Jon Chevsky, was pleased to meet me. “You do good work,” he said. “I’ve heard a few pre-masters before Vlad got his hands on them.”

  “Thanks,” I said in surprise.

  “This is Clarence Tibbs,” he said, indicating a tall, elderly black man who sat in an office chair, looking around with a doubtful expression on his face. “He’s the last surviving relative.”

  I shook Clarence’s hand. “I’m Scotty. Who’s the artist?”

  “Augustus Jenkins,” Clarence growled.

  I gave a start. “You mean—Lame Dog Jenkins?”

  Clarence winced a bit. “Yeah.”

  “I only ever found one record by him, and the seller couldn’t tell me where it came from.”

  “He only made one record,” said Clarence.

  Chevsky said, “This guy came to me with a box of unreleased recordings from the ’50s. We took the 1/4” mono tapes to a transfer house and made a digital copy, and we’re going to see if we can salvage some kind of useable sound out of them.”

  “This is amazing,” I said. “I always wondered what happened to Jenkins.”

  Clarence shook his head. “It’s not a pleasant story.”

  Chevsky looked at his watch. “They promised to send over one of the mastering guys, but he hasn’t shown. Are you free?”