Own the Album. Follow the Story.
Streaming gives listeners convenient ways to discover and enjoy music. DIZAZTA AREA MUSIC also offers another option: purchasing the complete album directly as a digital download.
That means the music becomes part of your own collection while directly supporting the independent work behind it. With DIZAZTA, the experience can continue beyond the songs through videos, interviews, publications, and other connected media that reveal more of the world surrounding each release.
“How It Started,”
the prequel to “Get Money, Spend Money,” is a tense confession of desperation, betrayal, and a conscience unraveling under pressure. The song opens with a stark spoken intro: “Before the sirens. Before the lick. Before I taped up Dominick... There were choices. And I made all the wrong ones.” Instantly, the stage is set for a story about reckoning with the decisions that lead to a breaking point.
The first verse drops us into the grind of poverty—eviction notices, hunger, dead-end jobs, and mounting frustration. The protagonist watches others, like Dominick, flaunt unearned wealth, fueling resentment: “Back home, news flash—Dom just hit a score, Flexin’ on the 'Gram with a safe behind his door.”
Prayer offers no comfort, so he turns to scheming with friends, crossing the line out of survival, not greed: “It was eat or be eaten, and I ain’t playin’ that game. Tried to stay clean, but the dirt paid quick… This how a good man gets turned to a lunatic.”
Before Get Money, Spend Money
Every consequence has a beginning.
How It Started goes backward to the choices and pressures that existed before Get Money, Spend Money. Instead of beginning with the aftermath, the album asks what happened before everything crossed the point of no return.
This is where the road starts.
When Survival Changes the Rules
An empty refrigerator looks different when you're the one standing in front of it. An eviction notice feels different when your name is on it.
How It Started places financial pressure inside the story rather than treating it as background. Survival begins influencing judgment, patience disappears, and choices that once seemed impossible start becoming imaginable.
The Distance Between Right and Desperate
Most people don't wake up believing they're about to destroy their own boundaries.
Sometimes that distance closes gradually—one frustration, one disappointment, one rationalization at a time. How It Started explores that uncomfortable territory where a person can still recognize right from wrong while becoming increasingly willing to cross the line between them.
Watching Somebody Else Win
Desperation becomes even harder to contain when somebody nearby appears to have everything you don't.
Dominick's money doesn't simply represent wealth in How It Started. It becomes a pressure point—a visible reminder of what the protagonist lacks, what seems unfair, and how quickly another person's success can become fuel for resentment when your own circumstances are collapsing.
The Choices Before the Sirens
The sirens aren't where this story begins.
Before consequences become visible, there are conversations, plans, frustrations, compromises, and moments when another direction is still possible. How It Started spends time in those earlier spaces, allowing the listener to understand the decisions before witnessing what those decisions eventually create.
When Prayer Feels Unanswered
Faith can become complicated when desperation is louder than patience.
The story reaches a point where prayer doesn't seem to be changing the immediate circumstances. That silence becomes part of the internal struggle as the protagonist begins looking elsewhere for an answer—opening the door to decisions that promise immediate relief while carrying consequences he cannot yet fully see.
Crossing the Line
There is usually a difference between thinking about something and actually doing it.
How It Started lives inside that transition. The story follows the movement from frustration to planning, from planning to participation, and from knowing a boundary exists to making the decision to step across it.
Once crossed, that line becomes much harder to find again.
Continue the Story Through the DIZAZTA Universe
How It Started belongs to a larger storytelling world where albums can connect across different chapters, perspectives, videos, publications, and experiences.
After hearing where this story begins, continue exploring DIZAZTA AREA MUSIC and discover the projects that reveal what happens when earlier choices finally meet their consequences.
A Prequel Changes What Comes After
A prequel doesn't simply tell an earlier story. Done right, it changes how the next story is understood.
By revealing the pressures, relationships, and decisions preceding Get Money, Spend Money, How It Started gives additional meaning to what follows. Actions that might otherwise appear sudden now have a history.
The consequence has an origin.
More Than One Bad Decision
It would be easy to reduce the story to a single terrible choice.
How It Started looks deeper. Financial pressure, wounded pride, resentment, opportunity, friendship, fear, and desperation begin stacking on top of one another. The album explores how several smaller compromises can eventually create one enormous consequence.
Storytelling You Can Enter From Different Angles
The album tells the story through music, but DIZAZTA expands that experience through connected media.
Videos can visualize a moment. Interviews can reveal another perspective. Publications can slow the story down and explore details differently. Together, those pieces allow listeners to experience How It Started as more than a sequence of tracks.
Everybody Has a Breaking Point
One of the questions underneath How It Started is uncomfortable precisely because there isn't an easy answer:
How much pressure can someone absorb before desperation begins changing who they are?
The album doesn't need to excuse every choice to examine how those choices developed. It follows the pressure toward the breaking point and lets the consequences speak for themselves.
The Beginning Matters
Knowing how something ends is not the same as understanding how it began.
How It Started returns to the beginning because beginnings reveal motives, warning signs, missed opportunities, and moments that seemed insignificant before everything changed. Looking backward makes it possible to see the road that wasn't obvious while it was being traveled.
Hear How It Started
You've seen the pressure building. You've entered the circumstances behind the choices. Now experience the complete chapter.
Hear How It Started from beginning to end and discover the story that sets the stage for Get Money, Spend Money.
How It Started — $10