“Alright, chat, that last track was absolute garbage. I’m not gonna lie to you. Two out of ten. Stop sending me these generic drill beats, I’m begging you.”
Sitting in a neon-lit bedroom in Los Angeles, popular music critic and Twitch streamer Kaze leaned back in his expensive gaming chair.
In 2014, Kaze was the undisputed king of underground rap reactions.
With nearly twenty thousand live viewers watching his broadcast, a single positive review from him could launch an unknown artist’s career into the stratosphere overnight.
He reached for his energy drink, his eyes scanning the rapidly scrolling wall of text on his second monitor.
He was looking for the next link to review, expecting the usual self-promotion.
Instead, the chat was completely broken.
It wasn’t moving at its normal pace.
It was a torrential, unreadable blur of spam.
Kaze squinted, leaning closer to the screen.
Almost every single message from the hundreds of college students invading his stream contained the exact same words.
User_99: BRO PLAY WISHING WELL
ForumGod: JUICE WRLD.
SOUNDCLOUD.
NOW.
ChiTownKidd: YOU NEED TO HEAR WISHING WELL BEFORE IT BLOWS UP!
DropOutDan: JUICE WRLD JUICE WRLD JUICE WRLD
Kaze frowned, muting his microphone for a second to clear his throat.
Spam usually annoyed him.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, forced viral campaigns were pushed by talentless kids paying for bots.
“Alright, alright! Calm down!” Kaze shouted, unmuting his mic and holding his hands up in surrender.
“Chat, you’re literally crashing my interface. Who the hell is Juice WRLD? Is this a troll? If this is a meme track, I’m timing all of you out for twenty-four hours.”
The chat only moved faster.
Sighing, Kaze highlighted the name, opened a new tab, and typed it into SoundCloud.
He found the completely blank profile.
He looked at the play counter on the single uploaded track.
When Marcus had found it an hour ago, it was at zero.
Now, it was sitting at a staggering 4,500 plays and violently refreshing upward every few seconds.
“Wishing Well,” Kaze read aloud, raising an eyebrow at the acoustic tag.
“No profile picture. No bio. You guys are hyping up a ghost. Let’s see what the hype is about.”
He maximized the audio source for the stream, leaned back in his chair, and clicked play.
Kaze crossed his arms, wearing his signature mask of heavy skepticism.
The crisp, melancholic acoustic guitar loop filled his high-end studio headphones.
His posture instantly shifted.
He uncrossed his arms.
The skepticism in his eyes was replaced by genuine surprise.
The melody was gorgeous, raw, and perfectly layered with a heavy trap bounce.
Then, fifteen-year-old Jarad’s raspy, agonizing vocals dropped in.
Kaze’s eyes went wide.
His mouth fell open slightly.
As the verse kicked in, he did the one thing his audience waited hours to see: he gave the ultimate, undeniable ‘stank face’ of absolute musical disgust—the highest form of praise a hip-hop head could give.
He let the song play for exactly one minute and twenty seconds before he violently slammed his hand onto his keyboard, pausing the track.
The silence in the stream was deafening.
Kaze slowly took off his headphones and looked directly into the camera.
He looked genuinely shaken.
“Chat,” Kaze whispered, leaning into his microphone. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Chat, are you kidding me right now? Who is this? Where did this come from?”
The Twitch chat was exploding with fire emojis, exclamation marks, and students screaming I TOLD YOU!
“I review music for a living,” Kaze continued, his voice rising with infectious hype.
“I listen to hundreds of songs a week.
This…
this isn’t normal.
The vocal texture?
Insane.
The mixing?
It sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, but somehow it feels wider than a studio master.
The pain in his voice?
You can’t fake that.
That is raw, unfiltered, crying-out-for-help trauma on a track.”
He threw his hands up in disbelief.
“He took an acoustic guitar and made it sound like the heaviest trap beat of the year. The kid is singing about how the pills are suffocating him, and he made it sound like an absolute stadium anthem. This is generational talent, chat. I’m calling it right now on stream, timestamp this video. Juice WRLD is going to be the biggest artist on the planet.”
Kaze put his headphones back on and slammed the play button to finish the track.
He didn’t know it, but he had just thrown a gallon of gasoline onto the fire.
Twenty thousand viewers simultaneously opened new tabs to find the song on SoundCloud and YouTube.
The ripple that started in a college apartment had officially become a digital tsunami.
Hundreds of miles away, in the middle of fifth-period geometry, Jarad’s phone continued to violently vibrate against his leg.
The battery was actively overheating from the sheer volume of notifications pouring in, completely melting down his phone.