:: Lagos-High-Life ::

Music. It always started with music. As soon as he put the records on, the euphoria would begin to crawl from his feet, snake up his spine to wrap his head in slow, delicious, shivers. The joints helped, and once in a while the alcohol but usually, he was flying high on a straight riff even as he dusted the discotheque with a drug of pure, delirious funk'n'roll. Under the stroke, tap and lick of his tapered fingers, slick vinyls slid under the bucking needle to let loose an elixir of royalty and rebels from the land of milk and honey and burning crosses that - despite those who claimed to have flown back across the vast angry ocean from its shores, in tight cravats and Jim Crow slang - no one from this city of cardboard dreams truly believed existed. The dance-floor became the checkerboard of harlequin contortionists gyrating and curling, slippin' and sliding under an immense spinning metallic sun that radiated silver beams off cracked mirror walls and into the wide eyes of the hopeful and the desperate alike. Under his hand, James Brown stuttered once, twice, three times, to prove black was beautiful and Santana wailed hymns to the innocuous Voodoo priestesses sipping Fantas in the dark crumbling recesses, with a glitter in their eyes. Looking out through the grimy glass of his booth onto this quicksilver panorama, DJ GoldC felt like one of those men they sent to the moon aboard - what did they call it again? A space-ship. That's right, a Space-ship. He was going to fly this jook joint high through the stars tonight because it was he - as everyone hip to the city knew but wouldn't say, "cuz the trees have ears, ya dig?" - who was the finest helms-man in the country, capable of commanding every platformed, afroed, without-a-dinero, state designated alien-undesirable around his moon-stoned pinky-fingers until the early dawn spilled through the cracks and roused the night-revelers-time-travelers who still swayed on the dance-floor clutching at their sweet, somnambulant dreams.