Chapter 22
People say modern people are drowning in a flood of excessive information. There is so much to see that they end up failing to properly see what they should.
To use YouTube as an example, approximately 576,000 hours of video were uploaded every day as of 2017. Converted into years, that amounts to sixty-six years, meaning it would take sixty-six years to watch everything uploaded to YouTube in a single day.
So people have no choice but to rely on algorithms. When would they ever have time to search through every video? Typical YouTube users watch whatever the mysterious algorithm catches and reels onto their timelines, while ignoring everything else.
And then, something drifted down in front of them through the algorithm.
A song called ‘Nothing Here’.
He was someone who enjoyed music as a hobby. He had only recently started learning guitar, and he was the kind of person who had begun savoring the process of learning to play songs little by little.
‘What should I watch today…’
While rummaging through videos to learn guitar, he chose one featuring a young girl holding a black Fender.
He clicked the video because it covered a song he liked and offered tips on playing it. After watching it, he was shocked for the first time.
‘No way… How can she play this well at that age?’
At a glance, she looked to be around middle-school or high-school age. But the techniques pouring from her hands were so fluid that even he, despite having played for only about six months, could tell. It was good enough that he could have believed someone else was playing for her.
And when he listened to the original song she had uploaded to the channel… he was shocked for the second time.
It began with the sound of a guitar using a tone with just a touch of drive. Bends and whammy-bar effects were mixed together, creating a pitch that constantly writhed and fluctuated.
Like a steadily moving metronome, that sound led the listener into some kind of factory.
There, he was a young child bound in chains. The chains restricted his freedom and forced him to act. The unbroken, repetitive notes created a kind of trance.
A life like a machine that moved according to orders.
Come when told to come, go when told to go. Move his hands when told to move them, work when told to work.
Time passed.
He could not measure how quickly it was flowing… but he could tell that it was flowing.
But the work he did remained unchanged.
As time flowed, he would continue forever, for as long as it lasted, doing as he was told and living as he was told to live.
He would never be able to escape that kind of life.
Then, at one point.
He raised his head and looked at the ceiling. The fluorescent lamp that glowed a daylight white. The lamp he had thought would always stand guard there had, at some point, lost its light.
He looked around.
He suddenly remembered that the things he recalled had grown smaller than he had thought.
He realized that even the face of the supervisor who had terrified him had grown old.
He realized that the chain once fastened around his ankle was gone, too.
He realized that the things that had bound him to this place were ‘no longer there.’
And so, he moved forward.
Toward a place where no one could hold him back anymore,
a place with nothing but freedom lying ahead.
The melody of freedom was rough, but not clumsy. A performance like a flame built toward the climax in the latter half.
“This is…!”
It was an instrumental piece over six minutes long, with no lyrics at all and every instrument except the guitar programmed in MIDI… Yet he did not feel bored for even a moment while listening to it.
If anything, he grew thirsty.
What happens next?
Does the liberated one keep the music going?
What could be waiting at the end?
With goosebumps covering his entire body, he pressed the next-song button. But it did not move. That was where the playlist ended.
‘Why?’
He wanted to hear more, but there were no more songs.
He pressed the back button and looked once more at the owner of the channel. He could not see her face, but she was a pretty girl with a petite build. She wore an Adidas jacket and had slightly slender, small hands.
Could someone like this really have made this kind of music?
With a slightly trembling hand, he copied the video's link.
Then he sent it through KakaoTalk to his close friends and acquaintances.
You have to listen to this at least once.
I think I found the song of my life.
He acted that way, but there were other people, too.
[@이지현 You have to listen to this http://www.you~~~ ]
Some people tagged others,
[Recommendation> This song is really good.]
while others wrote posts.
Their actions varied, but in the end, they all had the same motive.
They could not keep it to themselves.
They wanted to let other people hear the song.
* * *
He had thought the first song had turned out well. He had worked on it with a sensibility different from before. As soon as the melody came to him, he had recorded it in one stroke, finishing the MIDI programming in just a single day.
He had also been curious about other people's reactions. What kind of response would the first song he had made receive? Would people actually like it? Wasn't it pretty good, at least by his standards?
But he had not expected this much.
There were quite a lot of comments. Around a hundred, perhaps. The view count had already passed twenty thousand, and it was continuing to climb a little every time he refreshed the page.
[I listened to it ten times as soon as I heard it yesterday ㅠㅠ]
[Give me the next song]
[I'm not someone who usually does this, but I recommended it to other people…]
ㄴ [Me too ㅠㅠㅠ]
If this was the response to his first song, it had to be quite a success.
Myeongjeon ran a hand through his hair, then searched YouTube for the songs he had made in his previous life. He had never uploaded them, but he had not managed the copyrights particularly strictly, either. It seemed possible that someone might have uploaded one…
[Search results: None]
…It did not exist at all. Well, he had been disappointed by the critics' evaluations in the first place, so he had never even signed a copyright contract. Those songs were probably sleeping on CDs purchased by a few of his friends.
If you looked at it that way, the view count had gone from zero… Since zero could not be used in a calculation, let's call it one. From one to twenty thousand. Thinking of it as growth exceeding twenty thousand times, Myeongjeon felt his shoulders puff up with pride.
And there was one more achievement.
[Session inquiry.]
I’m emailing after seeing the post saying that you do sessions on the White Room YouTube channel.
Your guitar tone is so good that I wanted to ask if you could do a little session work on my song. Would that be possible?
If you can, I’ll email again with details such as the pay, whether it’s online or offline, and the schedule.
Please reply.
Thank you.
Judging by the way they had skipped the important details and vaguely pushed them off to a subsequent email, they were either a student who knew little about session work, or someone who thought I knew nothing about sessions and was trying to lowball me and squeeze some work out of me…
There was a good chance it was one of those two, but a request was a request. He could add it to his portfolio and make money, too. Two hundred thousand won for an online session and around three hundred thousand won per session offline should do. That was a fair price.
[What are you doing?]
While he was fiddling around on the computer, a KakaoTalk message came in. The sender was Choi Iseo. Myeongjeon thought for a moment, then sent a short reply.
[Managing my YouTube channel]
[You do YouTube too?]
[Yeah]
Marveling at his own adaptability for having even learned Korean initial-consonant shorthand to keep up with teenage chat, Myeongjeon continued staring at the screen. When Iseo asked whether he could share the channel because she was curious, Myeongjeon sent her the address. No reply came for a while, but several dozen minutes later, another KakaoTalk message arrived.
[You made this Nothing Here?]
[Yeah]
[Holy shit, this is crazy]
[Are you crazy[ What is this??>]
Perhaps because of her trembling fingers, Iseo kept making typos. But she thought there was nothing she could do about it.
‘This song is too good…!’
“This is a scam!”
When she let out a shrill scream, a sudden bang came from the room next door. Her biological relative had probably thrown a pillow against the wall because she was being too loud. Iseo took it in stride and kept her fingers moving busily.
[This song is so good[]
[Could we use it as a band song?]
[I really want to play it at least once]
[The bass line is easy too]
[I guess. The bass is just playing the root notes.]
[If we're going to make it a band song, we'd have to rearrange it from scratch and record everything again.]
But Myeongjeon was skeptical. He had made the song without considering a band in the first place. If they recorded it as it was now, the band would merely be used as a prop, while adding more arrangements to bring out the bass, keyboard, and drums might end up killing the guitar.
[I guess we could just make one band song.]
[Then are you going to make it a vocal song?]
[Not sure. I don't know much about writing lyrics.]
When he first made the song, he had considered adding vocals, but eventually gave up. No lyrics had come to him in the first place.
Well, perhaps that was only natural. Myeongjeon had barely read any books beyond guitar manuals and books about bands, and he had never been particularly good at studying Korean, either.
[Then I'll write the lyrics.]
[You?]
[Why?]
[I mean, if you will, I can leave it to you, but…]
He recalled what had happened recently. Hadn't he told Iseo to try studying composition, lyric writing, or arranging? He had said something like that, but for some reason, he still felt hesitant about entrusting the lyrics to her…
‘Well, she'd be better than me.’
Myeongjeon decided to think of it that way.
[But don't you have another song?]
[I don't really have another one in mind right now. I should focus on practice.]
[The performance's coming up soon, too.]