Work Text:
It all started with that one Issta post.
Ryo scrolled for a while, her thumb becoming numb and her eyes starting to grow heavy. Social media was so boring sometimes; there's infinite posts but no posts, and all of them are silently screaming for your attention. She lied on the bed on her stomach, slowly kicking her legs up and down while continuing to absentmindedly scroll. That's when a little notification pinged from the bottom of her screen: one of her favorite music artists had just made a post.
Of course, bored out of her mind, she clicked on it. The attatched photo looked showed the album cover to her latest work, but it was adorned with a very flat-looking border. The album name and other info was displayed, but most eye-catching was a ratio in the middle of the screen: 3.25/5. The caption hanging to the bottom of the post provided a bit of insight.
'rateyourmusic.com giving me a great score as always! PEACE >_>'
Rate...your...music? Ryo was puzzled; was it a review congregator? No, the album looked to have ratings in the thousands, there's no way thousands of published music critics took a look at this one album. Ryo reread the name of the website: rateyourmusic. Rate MY music? The music that I listen to?
Hardly any time had past before Ryo and quickly stamped her password in and logged onto her computer, typing the URL into her browser. The layout was simple, the frontpage offering reviews from various certain albums, with all reviews being tied to user accounts. 'I could just rate whatever I want? Just freely express my opinion on music?' Ryo thought to herself, her eyes squinting at the screen. She was met with lists of hundreds of albums that were apparently popular, despite Ryo initially believing them to be niche.
She clicked the album at the very bottom of the front page, one with multiple tens of thousands of ratings. The name of the album was quite unique, but Ryo wasn't totally sure what it meant to "lift her skinny fists like antennas to heaven". Perhaps that alone is what piqued her curiosity; how unique it seemed. The score was astonishingly high, higher than any other rating she had seen on the site thus far. 'Must be the greatest damn album ever made'. Ryo thought to herself, waving her hand around.
Ryo kept the page for the album as she opened a new tab, trying to search for an album of her own this time. Ryo thought to start simple; clicking the search bar, she typed a simple name in: Kessoku Band. She wasn't really sure what she was expecting, but there were no results. Perhaps she would check back once they finally secure that record deal? ...Nah, who cares about what other people think? If netizens rate your music poorly, who are they to judge you? Besides, everyone is entitled to their own opinion!
...
Ryo couldn't help herself. If she couldn't rate her own band, she'd rate her favorites. It took only five minutes for her to hastily register an account and start her rating adventure. Ryo didn't even initially bother giving nuance to her ratings: if she liked it, full five stars. If she didn't, half a star. She rated random albums for about an hour, not giving thought into it until finally becoming bored once again. It was like she had scrubbed her entire inner catalogue of music and could rate no more...but then she remembered the secondary purpose of the site. She opened yet another new tab: the charts tab.
"I wonder what everyone else thinks is the best." Ryo said aloud to herself. A cheeky grin grew on her face as she started her second musical journey, sorting all albums by highest rated. Every rating was high, every review was brimming with love for the music, and each band felt distinctly different. Ryo felt easily swayed by all of it, swiftly believing she had found a haven of TRUE music fans. She knew a lot of these bands and artists, most of them being personally lauded by herself, but she now had proof that she wasn't the only music hipster around. She had found her people, fellow people who hated commercial music just as deeply as she did.
And thanks to this website and thousands of other music fans, she perhaps found a pot of musical gold. Ryo swiped up her headphones from across the room and began to listen to one of the highlights of the userbase: an LP titled "Remain in Light".
Their first practice since the culture festival felt so good.
Even poor Bocchi was excited, despite her infamous faceplant just a few days earlier. She gently tuned her guitar, while Kita tuned her vocals with utterances of the syllables from the classic musical solfege. Meanwhile, Nijika waited idly in the corner of the room, leisurely sipping a bottle of water.
"You told me you've already written a new song?" Kita asked Bocchi, gazing over towards her friend and smiling brightly. Hitori nodded.
"M-Mhm. I tried something different, you see..." she replied, her feet shifting in shyness.
"Oh? Do tell, Hitori-chan!"
"Well, instead of writing about personal feelings...I tried to-"
There was quite the bang from the southern end of Starry. The door had swung open, a familiar face sauntering in without a care in the world. Nijika jumped in her boots, almost spilling her water, while Hitori and Kita felt similarly startled. After finally settling down and realizing who just walked in, it was no other than-
"Ryo!" Nijika cried, noticible frustration in her voice. "You're 10 minutes late, what took you so long?"
"Uh, sorry. I was busy scrobbling." Ryo admitted, walking towards the group with her bass in hand. For a moment, Nijika believed she had forgotten how to speak...or is it some new slang term she'd never heard of? She daintily put her finger to her chin.
"Can you please define 'scrobble', Ryo?" Nijika pryed, her friendly demenor quickly returning. Ryo smugly looked off to the side, flinging her arms up in a shrug. "I guess you're not as musically inclined as me, heh."
Nijika pouted; how very rude to say that to a fellow musician! Kita and Hitori stood still like statues, also confused as to what exactly Ryo was talking about. Hitori simply returned to tuning her guitar for practice, while Kita eyed Ryo's new shirt. She realized that she's hardly ever seen her senpai in a different outfit, and her new one seemed quite peculiar. It was a white long-sleeved shirt with a black logo in the middle...it almost looked like some sort of strange hand gripper?
"Ryo-senpai, where'd you get that shirt? It looks so pretty on you!" Kita proclaimed, reaching over towards Ryo.
"Oh, I didn't know you were a fan of Aphex Twin as well. Wasn't Syro just a great album?" Ryo replied, proudly puffing her chest up. Kita stopped in her tracks again, looking even more confused than before as she tilted her head. "...what's an Aphex Twin?" she asked.
Ryo shook her head in shame, flashing the most ostentatious look in her eye as she showed her shirt off. "Of course you just wouldn't get it. Terrible music taste..."
Kita's face slumped in sorrow. Ryo-senpai was seemingly acting even more pretentious than usual, somehow. Nevertheless, Kita was always ready to follow in the beautiful Ryo's footsteps. "Ah, well...could you maybe guide me towards expanding my horizons and listening to something better?!"
"Niche music is great, like shoegaze and Deftones. Have you heard nothing of the great Swans?"
Kita already had her phone out, ready to add all of it to her playlist. Nijika didn't hear this part of the conversation, busying herself with grabbing her drumsticks from her backpack. Meanwhile, Hitori shuffled over towards the blue haired bassist and raised her hand. "I uh, I know Deftones..." she warbled. "But...they aren't really 'niche', are they?"
Ryo narrowed her eyes and scoffed. Typical Bocchi-chan, of course she wouldn't understand. She was having doubts that she was in the presence of a competent musician at all now, since she clearly couldn't ever wrap her mind around the nuances of real music, unlike Ryo. She flung the strap around her shoulder and walked over to her bandmates, looking ready to play. But first, she made an announcement, standing in front of them all like a public speaker.
"I've written a new song, I think it'll cement our place in music history for years to come."
What a bold, bold claim. Hitori's eyes widened, very clearly warm to the idea of being a music legend; Kita nodded vigourously as she always did to Ryo's words; all the while, Nijika's skeptical eye never left. She held onto her sticks tightly as she sat in front of her set.
"You've written a song? Like, lyrics or just music?" Nijika asked, curious to what Ryo had in store.
"No lyrics. Bocchi-chan will be using very loud reverb pedals, you'll be drumming slowly, and Kita will also be using reverb pedals for her guitar. Also, the song is 15 minutes long."
It wasn't hard to see that the band was stunned. Kita shivered, thinking her voice was the best she had to offer to Kessoku Band, only for her to be silenced for an entire 15 minutes. Although Nijika admired the commitment to such a challenging track idea, that just isn't what Kessoku Band was known for, at least by their fistful of fans. She pouted her lip again as she thought of a response.
"That's pretty daring, but..." Nijika tried to explain. "That just isn't really what we're known for as a band, I think."
Ryo pretentiously scoffed again. "We would do numbers on RYM though, count on it."
Just like that, Hitori knew what this was all about. The utterance of that abbreviation was like a light that gave her all the information she needed about the rabbit hole Ryo seemed to have trekked down. With essentially half of her life being spent online mingling with other music fans, it was hard to avoid for long. Hitori had abandonded her own account years earlier, very quickly growing tired of the clique-like attitude of the userbase. She really wanted to say something now, that one should just be proud of what they enjoy and not have to worry about what others think.
Nijika, being restless, didn't give poor Bocchi that moment to speak, suddenly raising her voice. "Alright, can we just practice our last song as a warmup?! Kita, sing your lovely heart out. Bocchi-chan, give it your all, and Ryo-"
"Wait, Nijika-chan!" Ryo interrupted, withdrawing her phone from her pocket with blazing speed. "I need to show you my Topster. There's 6 post-rock albums on there..."
"What on earth is a Topster?!"