Reptilians and disco. Sparkling haze

(Conspiracy guide for those who are still moving to the beat)

The Milky Way Sapiens nightclub resembled an incubator for alien life forms that hatched, looked around and began to master the budget allocated for light music. Acid green neon pulsed to the beat of a track that didn't even try to be a melody. Mirror balls* hung not only from the ceiling, but also in the toilet - so that when you vomit, it would be beautiful. Light and music installations spat out all the colors of the rainbow at once, creating the effect as if you were inside a kaleidoscope in which a UFO got lost. The dance floor was empty. Young people sat on their phones, not even pretending that they had come to dance. They just wanted to shine - literally and figuratively.

Vic stood behind the bar. A blond man with a receding hairline, dyed a burning brunette, wearing a silver shirt with a neckline down to the navel, from which a tattoo peeked out - the emblem of the Casablanca Records label. His serious age was hidden under a layer of foundation, cynicism and ostentatious frivolity in his manners. He spoke with the intonations of a tired castrato from the opera who suddenly realized that all his life he had been singing in commercials for washing powder. A young man sat in front of him. Student. With an unfocused gaze. He came for empathy, information and a Harvey Wallbanger cocktail.

Vic places a glass of clear, bubbly liquid in front of the student that looks like a replicant's tear but smells like cheap lemonade.

- Here, take a bite of “Metaphysical Collapse.” Don't worry, it's just Sprite and cough syrup. The main thing is to stop in time, otherwise you will begin to understand the lyrics of modern songs.

The student drinks, winces, but not from the taste, but from a presentiment of the truth.

— Vic, did you catch the Disco Era? I'm writing an essay...

Vic takes a small jar of caviar from the refrigerator, spreads it on toast, and chews it without offering it to the student.

- Did you find it? Baby, I didn't just catch it. I was a decorative element. Not for an essay, although no one will believe you anyway... Do you know what the difference is between my generation and yours? You Google the lyrics to figure out what the song is about. And we lived in them - and only in the morning, waking up in someone else’s bed with someone else’s nose in your cocaine, did we understand: we didn’t live. This disco lived us. The 4/4 rhythm is not music, it is a frequency generator that took the soul out of us while we thought we were just dancing. You are now dancing to be seen. And we danced so as not to see ourselves.

Vic sits closer. On his neck, in the neckline of his shirt, you can see a chain with a pendant in the shape of a gold cocaine mirror.

— The lizards failed the “Hippie” project miserably. They wanted obedient vegetables, but what they got were pacifists with guitars who began to think about the meaning of life. For a reptilian to think about the meaning of life is like for you and me to taste our own leg. It’s unpleasant, pointless and makes you want to take a bite. By 1974, the Pentagon (under which, by the way, is still the largest reptile base on the East Coast) smelled of burning. Admiral Skvosius called in the analysts. — Vic pretends to hiss with an aristocratic accent.

- “Report, idiots. Why aren’t these bipeds still in the zoo?”

- “Sir, hippies sing about peace and love. This is uncontrollable. We introduced ideas of chaos, and they created communes! We gave them LSD and they thought it was spiritual!” — Skvozius hits the table with his tail, breaking a pencil.

- "Enough! Love is cancelled. The world is cancelled. We turn on the rear one. They need a new religion. A religion in which there will be no brain at all. Only rhythm. Only shine. Only... consumption."

— And then the Studio 54 Project comes onto the scene. Codename: "Brilliant Idiot".

Vic turns on an old iPod Nano, worn to holes. Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" begins to play from the speakers - in this sterile space, filled with soulless techno beat, her living, breathing flesh sounds like an invasion of another civilization.

- Do you hear? Do you think it's just a song? This is a weapon of mass destruction. Giorgio Moroder... do you think he's an Italian producer? Ha! This is the call sign. Do you even think? - we couldn’t, but about your generation... So, Giorgio Moroder is a humanoid from Sirius-6, his real name is Moroder-S'sharr. He came to Earth with the sole purpose of removing the soul from music, leaving only fuck. Disco beat is the digital metronome of samsara. As long as you fall into a share, you exist. As soon as the music stops, it turns out that your flares are supported by nothing, and the cocaine trail leads straight to the marketing department of the underworld. You see, hippies were difficult to control because they had meanings. Even if the point was “get high and look at the rainbow,” it was a process. Disco offered a process without a process. Process as a result. You just go to the club. You're just moving. You're just looking at the mirror ball. This is the first trance in the history of mankind, achieved without a shamanic tambourine, but with the help of a rhythm machine.

The student tries to get a word in, but Vic raises his finger, decorated with a ring with the inscription “Parliament”.

- Now listen here. Factology. 1977 New York. Studio 54. This is a place where face control was stricter than on the border with the USSR, but if you looked like a hallucinogenic mushroom come to life, you were allowed in without queuing. Who went there? Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger. Who worked there? Drug dealers, gigolos and dancers. Who controlled it? Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. But the real owner was a fat lizard in a human suit, who sat in the VIP room and ate exclusively cocaine, because normal food made his scales dull. And look. Conspiracy mechanics.

First stage: Production. Musicians used to gather in garages. It was difficult to bribe them all at once. The Reptiles introduced the concept of studio musicians. Do you know who played on 99% of the disco hits? Not groups. These were mercenaries from the Muscle Shoals studio and guys from MFSB (Mother, Father, Sister, Brother) - officially “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother”, and according to NSA documents - “Intergalactic Front of System Drums”. They weren't human, kid. They all had perfect timing. Because they had not just a metronome in their ears, but a signal from a satellite. By the way, the disco drummer is the only person in the world who can replace a kitchen timer, and no one will notice the catch until the timer runs out of batteries.

Second stage: Vocals. Who sang about love? Blacks, gays, women. That is, those who in the 50s were not even allowed near the microphone. The reptiles decided: “Great! Let's make a straight white man feel uncomfortable in his own culture. Let’s make him sing along in falsetto.” The idea is brilliant. Look at the Bee Gees. Barry Gibb sang like he had gold thread tied around his balls. And this was the standard! Men dyed their hair, put on satin pants and started wagging their butts. The goal has been achieved - masculinity has been leveled, the male has been turned into an ornament. Flared trousers were invented to make it more convenient to hide your tail in them if you are a reptilian, or a spare check if you are a simple one.

Vic pours himself something amber, and the student another sprite.

— Third stage: Cocaine. There was a problem with LSD - it expanded consciousness. Cocaine, which the lizards synthesized in the basements of Studio 54 (there were installations for processing coca leaves, which were delivered by diplomatic mail from Bolivia, right in the ventilation system), cocaine worked differently. It created the illusion of control. “I’m cool, I can do anything, I’ll buy this club!” But in reality he was just drying out his brains. The man stopped sleeping, stopped eating, stopped thinking. He just wanted more. More bits, more glitter, more powder. This was the ideal consumer. No reflections. Only movement.

Vic points to the empty dance floor.

— Stage four: Homosexuality as a business model. Don't look at me like that, don't be a prude. Lizards are hermaphrodite creatures. They don't care about reproduction at all, they clone in vats. And they sincerely did not understand why people are so fixated on procreation. So they decided: “Let’s turn this item off for them?” Disco clubs became incubators of new sexuality. It was genius: mixing gays, straights, transvestites and drug addicts in one dark room with four beats to the beat. It's easy to hide an agent in such a crowd. In such a crowd it is easy to control aggression by turning it into dance. Remember Village People? "YMCA"? This is not a song, this is a recruitment anthem! “You can go to the YMCA, everyone there does it!” - they sang about hostels for Christian youth, but everyone heard about orgies. While humanity was arguing whether this was a hymn to freedom or debauchery, the lizards sat on the roof and neighed, shedding their skin. Argument for the sake of argument is the best way to distract from the truth.

The student is silent, just twirls the tube.

- Donna Summer The producers recorded her moan in “Love to Love You Baby” in 22 takes. 22! Because they couldn't get the right frequency. This frequency was later used by NATO to jam radars in the USSR. Seriously. Pure physics. The vibration of a woman's voice on a certain note creates interference. While Brezhnev groaned and listened to Western news, American planes flew into the airspace unnoticed.

— Gloria Gaynor. "I Will Survive" Feminist anthem? Yeah, right now. This was the code for sleeper agents in Eastern Europe. On the reverse of the record, if you spin it at 78 rpm, there was a message: “If Operation Disco fails, all males will change their gender to female and continue observation.” The irony is that Gloria herself did not know what she was singing

— KC and the Sunshine Band. "That's the Way (I Like It)." The dumbest text in history. “That’s it, that’s it, I like it.” What is this"? Dance? Sniff? Die? The decoding is simple: the frequency of repetition of the phrase synchronized the biorhythms of the listeners with the frequency of the UFO engines. When a million people simultaneously headbang to "That's the way... uh-huh uh-huh", they create a field in which reptilian ships can pass through walls. That's how they got into the White House in '77.

The endless repetition of the chorus in disco hits is a classic mantra-visor. While you sing “Stayin' Alive” three hundred times in a row, your neural connections are being rewired to suit the needs of the reptilian administration. You think you're celebrating life, but in reality you're just confirming the terms of the license agreement for the use of your biosuit.

Pause. The student forgot about the straw.

- But this is America. And there was also Europe. And there, baby, there were better things going on.

The student freezes.

— Boney M! Oh, it's actually a circus with Bahamian seahorses! Frank Farian - do you know who this is? Super producer. Architect of the new slavery. He understood the main thing: there is no need to look for talent. Talents are capricious, expensive and mortal. We need to assemble a conveyor. He had an aquarium in his studio in Hamburg. Seriously. A small lizard was swimming in the aquarium, connected by wires to a synthesizer. The lizard twitched its tail to the beat, and Farian took notes. Hence this fat bass, which made the grandmas' legs give way in '76. What about the group? Four people from Jamaica and Montserrat whom he found waiting for benefits. They didn't even know what they were singing. They were told: “Open your mouths, we will do the rest in the studio.” And they opened it. “Daddy Cool” - everyone thinks it’s a funny song about a cool dad. Yeah. "Daddy Cool" is a reference to Admiral Skvosius. "Daddy" is slang for "daddy" among lizards. And when they sang “She's crazy like a fool,” they actually hissed, “She's crazy like a programmed person.”

Hit! World! And “Rasputin”? Think about the text. “There lived a certain man in Russia long ago, he was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow.” This is a portrait of a reptilian in human form! Eyes with a fiery glow - a vertical pupil with a red backlight! They sang the biography of their brother, who infiltrated the royal family in order to destroy the Russian Empire. And people dance to it! Raise your hands and do “la-la-la”! And most importantly, not a single live concert is normal. Farian was afraid that if they sang live, everyone would see that Bobby Farrell was not a person at all, but an android with a built-in metronome. And his voice is not his own - synthesizer. Pure simulation.

Vic pours himself another drink.

- And the French! Ottawan! "Hands Up"! Do you think it's just a song? These are instructions for use for humans.

Vic gets up and starts showing moves like a real animator. The student involuntarily watches his hands.

- “Hands up!” Give me your heart!” - literally: “Hands up! Give me your heart!” This is an order! The lizards realized that they had made a mistake with complex texts. It needs to be simpler. So simple that even a zombie would understand. - Hands up! (Raise your hands, we are scanning you) - Give me your heart! (Give me your soul, we don’t need it anyway, we’ll pour it into a test tube) And people raised their hands! At discos! Thousands of people! In unison! It was a dress rehearsal. The reflex is developed.

And the song “DISCO”? "Madame, your panties are low"? What does pantier have to do with it? And despite the fact that at the frequency where this word is pronounced, a portal to the fourth dimension opens. I checked. I have a record at home, if you play it backwards, you can hear Vanguard saying in Arabic: “Allah Akbar, but disco is more important.” Joke. Or not a joke. The main trick of disco is that if you don't know how to dance, you just say it's "self-expression" and continue to twitch as if there was an angry squirrel tangled in your overalls.

Vic sits down, smiling contentedly.

- And the Italians... This is actually a song! Do you know why Italo disco sounds like it was written by a robot who just watched a porn movie and is trying to retell the plot to a grandmother who has trouble hearing? Because it was written by robots.

In Milan, fat bald guys with glasses were sitting in the basement. They had never danced in their lives. They had calculators. They said: “America does disco with soul? It's ineffective! Let’s take away the soul, leave only the bass, and let’s have the words in English, but in such a way that no one understands what we’re singing about, because we ourselves don’t know English!”

— Raffaella Carrà — do you think she’s just an aunt with bangs? This was a special project for the southern territories. Her song “A far l'amore comincia tu” - “Start making love first” - was a brilliant diversion. While all of Italy danced to her hit and pointed at the TV, the reptilians sat in Geneva and rubbed their claws. There was a lot of sex, even more dancing, and children... And there were sharply fewer children. The ideal formula: the population has fun, consumes, fucks, but does not reproduce. The demographic collapse of the 70s was Carr's doing. The lizards clicked their tails contentedly: there was already material for experiments, but there was no need for extra mouths.

— Gazebo with his “I Like Chopin”? Listen to the voice! The man sings so high that the dogs howl in an ultrasonic sound. This is because he, Gazibo, was fed exclusively grasshoppers to stretch the ligaments. And “I Like Chopin” is not about the composer. This is the code: “I Like Shopping” - “I love shopping.” The “ch” is simply not audible in ultrasound, and everyone thought it was cultural. And he sang about shopping centers. Brilliant.

The light music on the ceiling changes color. Now everything is filled with poisonous pink.

Vic thoughtfully twirls a lighter with the Casablanca logo in his hands.

“But the funniest thing, kid, happened in ’79.” The lizards overdid it. They wanted to turn man into a vegetable so much that they made the music too... white. Too sterile. They killed all the drive, leaving only rhythm. And then he appeared. Reptile storm...

The student is silent, just watching.

Vic switches to a whisper.

— Disco saxophonist? No. Punk rock. You see, punk wasn't invented by people. Punk was invented by reptilian dissidents. Young lizards who looked at the older generation and hissed: “You have turned the Earth into a circus! These people wear tight pants and sing about how much they love fucking while listening to a metronome! Where is the energy? Where is the dirt? Where is the aggression?!” And they went underground, created the Sex Pistols and said: “Don’t trust disco, it’s from the devil!” Of course, the old lizards (the ones from Studio 54) were horrified. Punk was destroying their orderly system of consumption. But it was too late. The Disco project began to burst at the seams.

Climax - Disco Explosion in Chicago. Have you heard about "Disco Demolition Night"? 1979 A box of disco records was burned between a baseball game. 50 thousand people shouted “Death to disco!” Who organized this? Steve Dahl, radio DJ. Who was its producer? Right. Reptilian dissident agent. He wanted to destroy the old order in order to build a new one - the era of machine music. And he built it. Synth-pop, house, techno... This was no longer organic debauchery, it was a digital concentration camp for the ears. Disco dancing is the only form of prayer in which God does not listen to the believer, but simply uses him as a battery in the remote control of history.

Vic turns Donna Summer off. A dull beat hangs in the club again.

- Do you see this crap that’s playing now? - nods to the speakers. — These are the grandchildren of punks and the great-grandchildren of disco. There is no meaning, no melody, not even sex. Only beat and emptiness. The reptilians won. They made it so that a modern club is a place where people don’t even get to know each other. They just come, shake their phone and leave. But you know what's funny? I miss. I miss the time when even conspiracy theories were beautiful. When the glitter was poisonous and the powder was pure. When we thought we were dancing on the bones of the old world, but in fact we were just paving the way to a new, even more boring one. The 70s are when the devil came to a party in tight lurex, offered everyone a “path” and promised that tomorrow would never come. Lied, you bastard. Tomorrow came, it was gray and without sparkles.

The student is silent and finishes his drink.

Vic looks in the mirror behind the bar. Corrects dyed hair. Smiles.

- I? I, baby, am a relic. Moved here, in the 2000s, to synthesizers and homosexual producers. I thought it was more fun here. And you know... - he leans over the counter, and the student sees how his pupils become vertical for a second, and then round again. - ...at some point I caught myself thinking that I liked being part of the herd. Dance, don’t think about anything, feel the rhythm with your tail... that is, with your tailbone. Nostalgia, baby. Это единственное чувство, которое у нас не отнять. Даже если мы сами его и запрограммировали.

Вик протягивает студенту визитку. На ней только одно слово — «Casablanca» и номер телефона, начинающийся с 666.

— Если вдруг начнёшь слышать в старых пластинках шипение, которое складывается в слова — не пугайся. It's me. Переслушиваю архивы. И передаю привет Сквозиусу. Где бы он ни был. На Альдебаране или в Нью-Джерси.

Студент уходит, забыв заплатить. Вик смотрит ему вслед, наливает себе ещё «Янтарной ностальгии» и бормочет под нос мелодию «I Will Survive», нарочно фальшивя.

— Сейчас бы диско... Настоящего. С медными духовыми и жирным басом... А не вот это вот всё... Эх.

The light goes out. Зеркальный шар перестаёт вращаться. В темноте только тлеет сигарета бармена. Или это светятся его глаза? Какая, в сущности, разница...

*Зеркальный шар над танцполом — это не предмет интерьера, а фасеточный глаз демиурга, который дробит наше единство на тысячи сверкающих осколков, чтобы мы не заметили, как у нас из карманов крадут вечность под ритм 4/4.*