Damn Idol, Episode 5
* * *
The Devil at the Crossroads.
Or the Devil at the Intersection.
At first glance, it sounds like a ridiculous name, but among musicians, it isn’t.
The Devil at the Crossroads first became known to the world through Robert Johnson, who was called the “Father of Rock.”
Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil at a crossroads and gained his guitar skills and rock music.
He even released songs about it. “Cross Road Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues” were those songs.
This had a considerable influence on white people in the past calling rock and blues the Devil’s music.
After Robert Johnson, rumors about the Devil at the Crossroads continued to circulate throughout the music industry.
The most famous of the Beatles’ album covers is the photograph of them crossing a crosswalk.
People would say that it hinted at the Beatles having made a contract with the Devil at the crossroads.
I came across stories like these on YouTube and, naturally, thought they were nothing more than gossip far removed from the truth. Believing in something like the Devil at the Crossroads in the twenty-first century was ridiculous, after all.
But……
When the Devil appeared before my eyes, it was no longer gossip.
[Do you want to live?]
I raised my head at a voice that couldn’t possibly belong to any living creature in this world.
A fragment of the crumpled car was lodged in Dad’s chest.
Mom, blood pouring from her head, was no longer breathing.
[Or do you want them to live?]
At that moment, I instinctively realized that the being standing before me was the Devil.
The Devil waved a hand.
The fragment embedded in Dad’s chest vanished, and his wound healed.
Mom, too, began to breathe again, slowly but surely.
In that unbelievable situation, I maintained an astonishing degree of calm and composure.
It wasn’t my own will.
The Devil had forcibly activated my reason and intellect.
[If you achieve your goal, they will live.]
“Then what about now?”
[They simply haven’t died yet. If I say they’ve been stopped in a state where their deaths have been postponed, will you understand?]
“Then the goal is……”
I couldn’t help imagining murder, terrorism, cults, and so on.
But the Devil’s answer was absurd.
“An album? The album I know?”
Two hundred million album sales.
At first, I thought it was some kind of Devil’s trick.
Why would a being whose existence in this world was difficult to believe care about something as trivial as album sales?
Of course, now I knew why the Devil had set such a condition.
But I didn’t know back then. I knew even less about how difficult a number like two hundred million was.
At that moment, my mouth opened.
“Wait! Let’s negotiate.”
[…….]
“Two hundred million is way too many, humanely speaking. How about one hundred million?”
[…….]
“Or let me count self-purchases!”
[…….]
“If it has to be two hundred million, at least include digital singles! How can you count only physical albums?”
[…….]
“Even Bruno Mars has sold only thirty million physical albums!”
After complaining to the Devil for a while, I realized.
It had all been a ridiculous dream.
* * *
“Ha-ha.”
It was absurd.
After regressing, I often had dreams related to the past.
Naturally, the dream I had most often was my contract with the Devil, the starting point of everything.
But this was the first time I had experienced trying to haggle with the Devil in a dream.
Should I say I had the dream to thank?
The damp, gloomy feeling I’d had before falling asleep last night had disappeared.
Besides, though it had been a ridiculous dream, what I’d said in it did reflect my honest feelings.
If digital singles or mini-albums were counted, selling two hundred million albums wouldn’t have been all that difficult.
Bruno Mars had sold only thirty million physical albums, but if you included his single albums and every track he had produced, the number easily surpassed one hundred million.
But what could I do?
The Devil wasn’t the sort of being one could negotiate with.
Bzzzzzz—
My phone vibrated, and the name [Great-uncle] appeared on the screen.
The call ended after barely ringing a few times. It seemed the man’s patience was about to run out.
“It is about time.”
This Friday—in other words, the day after tomorrow—Great-uncle would try to pick the lock and enter our house.
He would fail because of the special security door lock and go back down to Gwangyang on Sunday evening.
Of course, that wouldn’t be the end of it.
After fifteen days, he would take a few days of leave and stand guard in front of our house for about three days.
Regression didn’t mean that everything proceeded exactly the same way one hundred percent of the time, but this man’s schedule never changed.
Perhaps the dates on which he could take leave were fixed because of circumstances at work.
Normally, I wouldn’t even need to make an effort to avoid Great-uncle.
I wouldn’t be in Korea in the first place.
But this time was different.
I thought I’d have to leave the house from Friday through Sunday to avoid Great-uncle’s visit.
That didn’t mean I planned to spend the time at a motel or at Uncle Hyeonsu’s house, though……
“Hello. Is this a recording studio?”
—Yes, hello. This is LB Studio.
“I’d like to make a reservation. From noon this Friday until midnight Sunday, a full session. Oh, we won’t need drums.”
—From noon Friday until midnight Sunday? You mean sixty hours?
“Yes.”
I planned to live in the studio and create music I could use in this life.
* * *
The music student working part-time at LB Studio looked at the reservation sheet, her eyes lighting up.
Someone had rented the most expensive, highest-end studio for a full sixty-hour session.
There was only one possibility in a case like this.
‘A celebrity!’
Of course, indie musicians also rented studios for long periods to record albums.
But they calculated their sleeping, eating, and resting hours down to the minute and rented the studio on a tight schedule.
The hourly rental fee was expensive, after all.
Celebrities, on the other hand, often included the recording process in music videos or made it into behind-the-scenes footage.
Inevitably, they needed filming equipment to record it, and repeatedly setting up and taking down cameras was quite a hassle.
So they rented the whole studio for several days and left the equipment set up.
Of course, there was also the possibility that a variety show would be filming there, but—
‘There’s no way those broadcasting-station guys paid full price instead of asking for sponsorship, right?’
In other words, this rental was for a celebrity.
‘Who’s coming?’
If possible, she hoped it would be an idol.
One of the male idols she liked.
Of course, the odds of that were low.
Idols these days filmed a lot of concept music videos, so recording scenes were rare.
Besides, if it were an idol, they probably wouldn’t have rented instruments separately.
Still, one never knew.
Maybe she’d get to see her idols smiling brightly as they played guitar.
And so, just as noon arrived on Friday amid the part-time worker’s anticipation, the studio door opened.
An appointment kept with perfect punctuality.
But unlike what she had expected, the visitor was a single boy.
The boy stared for quite some time at the posters attached beside the studio entrance, then approached the desk.
“Hello.”
“Are you Han Sion, the person who reserved Studio A?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He looked quite young.
Nineteen, maybe twenty?
Yet there was a peculiar air about him that kept him from seeming merely young.
He seemed gloomy, but there was also something almost obsessive about him—a feeling that gray would suit him.
At the same time, he had a pale, handsome face.
‘An aspiring singer? An idol trainee?’
After filling out the rental agreement, she asked whether he needed help setting up the studio. The boy shook his head.
“I’ll do it myself.”
“Some of the equipment might be a little difficult to operate…… We’ve also had some new equipment installed.”
“I’ll let you know if I need help.”
She didn’t quite trust him, but there was something about his atmosphere that made it difficult to say anything more.
The boy went into the studio, and the part-time worker returned to her duties.
There was more work than usual, probably because it was Friday.
How much time had passed?
The part-time worker suddenly thought she should monitor the sound from Studio A.
She wasn’t eavesdropping. It was a clause in the rental agreement.
The studio equipment wasn’t cheap, after all.
Normally, they checked in when renters behaved suspiciously, but this time it was out of pure goodwill.
The equipment in Studio A was state-of-the-art and had quite a few complicated features, so he might have been struggling with it.
The sound she heard when she monitored the room was……
“……?!”
It was guitar playing unlike anything she had ever heard, even from her professors.
It was sharp and irritable.
But that didn’t make it unpleasant to listen to. It seemed to draw the soul right out of a person.
Technically, there were certainly aspects that left something to be desired.
He frequently made mistakes while picking or sliding, and there were moments when his pitch was unstable.
But the feeling was insane.
A sense of feel that didn’t care in the slightest about minor mistakes.
It was beyond anything she had ever heard.
It was enough to make her wonder whether this was what Keith Richards had sounded like when he was still unknown.
‘What on earth does someone his age have to be doing to play like that……?’
At that moment, the playing abruptly stopped, and the boy’s voice came through the monitoring headset.
—Ah, damn it. This isn’t working at all.
The music student and part-time worker listened to the genius boy grumbling and thought:
Should I drop out of school……?
* * *
Whenever a new cycle began, I needed time to tune my body.
In my previous life, I had been the vocalist of a band that sold seventy million physical albums.
Naturally, I was a good singer.
But not now.
That didn’t mean I was bad, but I was woefully inadequate by my own standards.
Contrary to what people thought, the vocal cords were muscles that needed training, and it took time to tune one’s tone.
People said vocal tone was innate, but that didn’t mean it was an area that could never be changed.
In about a year, I could produce a sound I liked. In about two years, I could reach my peak.
Playing instruments, however, required far more time and effort than that.
When I challenged myself as a producer, I had been an outstanding pianist and an excellent guitarist.
When I formed a band as an instrumentalist, I had been an exceptional bassist.
Honestly, with the exception of drums—for a skinny Asian guy to play drums wasn’t exactly popular—I could play most instruments at the highest level.
But not now.
I knew everything in my head, but there were too many parts where my body couldn’t keep up.
I had tried playing the piano once, but stopped because I made too many mistouches. Playing the guitar made me feel miserable because I seemed to be struggling just to produce a sound.
“Damn it. This is garbage.”
I knew it was a problem that time would solve, but I got angry every time.
I could feel my regression all too keenly: no matter how many amazing things I built up, they could all collapse in an instant.
Of course, there were fields that required no practice at all.
Composition was one of them.
Composition wasn’t live performance, so a single take wasn’t important.
All I needed was one good take out of a hundred performances.
Besides, once you had accumulated as much experience as I had, you could maintain the same feel whenever you wanted, so you could record in sections and combine them.
If even that wasn’t enough, you could input the notes using a computer program.
These days, more people composed with VSTs—virtual instruments—rather than actual instruments, anyway.
So I was a composer who could create hit songs whenever I wanted.
I had released and succeeded with countless original songs.
I had hardly ever made K-pop idol music, but I was confident.
There were differences in genre in music, but not differences in quality.
All I had to do was make a good song and hire an arranger who was skilled at idol music.
With that in mind, I began setting up the equipment for composition.
I had already decided what song I would make first.
Whenever a new cycle began, I always wrote a song as a reflection on the cycle that had just ended.
It was a kind of memorial service.
I was the only person who remembered the previous cycle, so I felt I had to leave at least one song behind in the world.
After finishing all the setup, I fell into thought as I stared at the composition program’s blinking screen.
How could I summarize my previous life?
The Perfect Band?
The Funky Player?
Every phrase that came to mind sounded childish.
The rhetoric used to express talent was usually childish, but “Funky Player” was a bit……
The members of GOTM had all been cheerful, easygoing guys without any rough edges. At the same time, they had been filled with passion for music.
I had gathered people like that, but it was also true that people like them had liked me.
At that moment, a good word came to mind.
Pros.
No, the plural form would be better.
This was the first song I had written in this life.