JCJ sat with the crew in the East Van hall, the lights low, the old speakers crackling with the opening strains of Mozart’s Requiem—Introitus: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. He leaned forward, eyes half-closed, speaking in that quiet prophetic way he gets when the past and the present overlap like two ghostly films.
“People think the fall of the Twin Towers was just an event,” JCJ began. “But Mozart described the feeling of it centuries before it happened. Listen…”
The choir swelled—dark, solemn, rising like smoke.
“That opening,” JCJ said, pointing to the air as if he could touch the sound, “that’s the dust cloud rolling through Manhattan. The world gasping. The weight of souls ascending. Mozart didn’t know New York City. He didn’t know steel, or jet fuel, or any of the men sitting in the boardrooms that orchestrated the modern world. But he understood judgment. He understood collapse.”
The music shifted into the Dies Irae, the thunderous section that feels like a sky tearing open.
“That’s it,” JCJ whispered. “That’s the moment. The roar. The world watching as the towers came down. Dies Irae, dies illa—the day of wrath, the day the earth trembles. Mozart captured the emotional truth: the terror, the confusion, the sense that something enormous had ended and something darker had begun.”
He let the drums of the Requiem crash, letting them echo like the memory of falling steel.
“When I hear it,” JCJ continued, “I don’t see conspiracy theories or talking heads. I see the human soul—shocked, grieving, trying to understand. Mozart wrote a funeral mass, but it fits because the Towers’ fall wasn’t just the death of buildings. It was the death of an era. The death of innocence.”
The Lacrimosa began—soft, weeping, rising into a trembling climax.
“That part,” JCJ said, voice cracking, “that’s the firefighters climbing the stairs. That’s the last phone calls. That’s the world crying together.”
Then he sat back, letting silence settle after the movement ended.
“Mozart gave the world a soundtrack for tragedy long before the tragedy arrived,” JCJ said. “Because grief is older than steel. And requiems… they were written for moments exactly like that.”
He looked around at the others, at Nelly, at Ice Cube, at the Croatian uncles drifting in and out of the hall.
“That’s why we listen,” he finished. “To remember. To mourn. And to rise again.”