The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (There may be unexpected stops along the way.)

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

The Making of the Modern Mind

Last week I wrapped up a two-year stint in therapy. I’ve been a bit guarded about that, hesitant to connect myself with its stigmas. But we need to normalize that type of care. It’s hard work to confront yourself, over and over again. It can be tedious and frustrating and painful, but today I certainly feel better being me, more often. And everyone around me is better for that, too.

In the midst of my weekly therapy pilgrimage to Central London, I was devouring Mike Jay’s Psychonauts, a history of “Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind.” It documents the pioneers who dosed themselves at great risk – i.e. before there were any short- or long-term toxicity/health precedents – for the benefit of deeper understanding. They voyaged across the mental frontiers, in the name of science, spiritual curiosity, to be the first, hedonistic madness – sometimes all of the above.

One of the book’s characters is the infamous Aleister Crowley, a British occultist, poet and adventurer (he also founded the religion Thelema and declared himself its prophet). Crowley’s drug journey, I learned via Jay, began in a flat on Chancery Lane, five minutes’ walk from my therapy sessions. 

He even coined a “Chancery Lane rule,” which was to “begin with half the minimum dose in the Pharmacopoeia, wait for the effects, and if nothing happens, double the dose. If you go on long enough,” he advised, “something is nearly sure to happen!” 

When I stopped by the old address, now on a commercial street filled with scaffolding and Lebanese eateries, I thought of the other pioneers in dark rooms, whittling away at their respective experiments, doubling the dose every time nothing happens. From the music maniacs to the web3 weirdos to the folks who venture down the rabbit hole of the self – and all those others who simply press on, undeterred: why do we care so much about that “something” happening? And what is it we expect to take place?

Drug Charts

As a journalist, I’ve always followed the weirdos – like Alvin Lucier, and web3 builders, and the Crowleys of the world. The result is an oblong portfolio that loosely centers music.

Over the years I’ve been added to a lot of peculiar PR email lists. Most such emails go unopened (sorry PR friends), but one recent subject line caught my attention: “Who Tops the Charts in Alcohol and Drug Mentions in Lyrics?”

Apparently, addiction experts at the rehab center Lantana Recovery analyzed the lyrics of 1,100 songs from the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 lists between 2013 to 2023. They counted the total number of alcohol and drug-related mentions. Drake and Migos led the pack, tied at 131 instances each. Others in the top 20 included Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone and Beyoncé.

"Music is a mirror of society, often reflecting and amplifying cultural norms and behaviors,” said Lindsay Richerson, recovery health expert and Executive Director at Lantana. “The frequent mention of drugs and alcohol in popular songs doesn't just entertain – it influences. 

“For young listeners, these references can shape perceptions and attitudes toward substance use, potentially normalizing risky behaviors,” she continues. “While it's important for music to portray the realities of life, including struggles and challenges, artists can also approach these themes with greater responsibility.”

After reading the study, I found myself wondering what exactly Lantana expected to “happen.”

I don’t want to discount or belittle the profound pains of addiction, but are artists really the issue? What about the punitive, deregulatory approach we have to drugs? Kids aren’t overdosing on fentanyl because Kendrick said “pool full of liquor, then you dive in it.” That Kendrick commentary, from his song “Swimming Pools,” is a testament to the importance of context in this research – which seems to be absent from Lantana’s methodology.

The final results of the study simply aggregate total mentions, which means crucial context gets ignored – e.g. lyrics like “cocaine is bad” mean something markedly different than “do cocaine, kids!” But in this study they’re treated the same.

The only differentiation is between “drugs” and “alcohol” – evidence of the enduring fallacy that all drugs are equal. That’s like saying all food’s the same. Take heroin, which of course has ruined many a music career (and beyond), but its fellow schedule one drug LSD helped birth a peace-driven hippie movement that led to one of our most bountiful periods of creative output. From society’s perspective, though, they’re both just “drugs.”

And outside of those two there exist innumerable head spaces – responses to molecular changes in the body, from caffeine to codeine to ketamine. Shouldn’t we – at least – differentiate between the “drugs” that ruin lives and the ones that help us better understand them?

Gratefully, there’s an ongoing evolution of the public consciousness – stemming from the widespread decriminalization of marijuana, and from thought leaders like Michael Pollan, who’s managed to push dialogue about some drugs’ benefits to the mainstream.

There’s also a growing acknowledgement of our history – a growing interest in the wisdom garnered by humanity’s centuries-old relationship with mind-altering plants. Some indigenous peoples, for instance, have been using ayahuasca in therapeutic settings for millennia. And it, like LSD and other psychedelics, has much lower addictive potential than other “drugs.”

Alas, again, according to the US government, all of these – heroin, LSD, marijuana, DMT (the psychoactive ingredient of ayahuasca) – are schedule one drugs, which suggests they have high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

It’s this kind of dubious, centralized thought that’s led some to liken psychedelics with web3. Both, in their own right, can ostensibly dismantle prevailing paradigms of sameness and status quo.

Recently I interviewed Tim Gulley, the founder of AyaAdvisors, “which helps people to stay safe by providing an independent platform for folks to leave reviews about ayahuasca retreat centers,” he said. 

Gulley’s life changed when he watched ayahuasca treatment help a relative who had exhausted all other options. He then committed his life to supporting the treatment of others, because why might happen if everyone had access to this kind of healing?

In 2018, Gulley launched AyaCoin to try and fund a retreat center in Ecuador, purchase land to protect the rainforest and provide a token that would exchangeable for ayahuasca retreats. And, via contract split, five percent of the income would go to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). The token offering was ultimately unsuccessful, but Gulley remains undeterred, and continues to pursue his retreat center.

Also in 2018, an anonymous Bitcoin philanthropist named Pine started The Pineapple Fund. He contributed a $4 million matching fund to MAPS, helping the organization raise $26.9 million for phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. 

Last month, the FDA denied the MAPS-driven petition to approve MDMA (also a schedule one drug) as a clinical PTSD treatment, but MAPS’ President and Founder, Rick Doblin – who’s been working toward this goal for 30 years – remains undeterred. “I’m not going to go smoke pot and hang out on my couch for the next 20 years,” he told the Washington Post.

Elsewhere in web3, in Gitcoin’s latest grants round, an organization called Psychedelic Puppet Show hosted “Decentralized Science and Art in Psychedelics.” The community round offered a matching pool of 58,000 Arbitrum (nearly $30,000), aiming “to support innovative projects that advance the artistic and scientific understanding of psychedelics.”

What I appreciate in all of these projects is that they’re based on a desire to “advance” our “understanding” – to add nuance to the facile sameness that’s been imposed by institutions. And they’re driven by folks who pursue that understanding undeterred, rooted in their initial conviction, and the belief that “if you go on long enough, something is nearly sure to happen.”

Reset

Broadly speaking, web3 has been victim to that institutional sameness, even as it seeks to differentiate itself from what’s come before. Old mindsets have crept into on-chain culture, and that’s sucked the wind from the sails of those committed to “advancing” our “understanding.”

“[We shouldn’t] try to perpetuate [web2’s] intense competition that isn't necessarily beneficial to the greater good,” said web3 thought leader Simona Pop in an EthCC fireside with TV presenter Poppy Jamie. As web3 grows, Pop sees companies transplanting web2 folks into web3 projects without first immersing them in web3 culture.

Pop’s session – titled “Why web3 needs therapy” – was grounded in her own web3-driven mental health journey. As an Internet-native industry, builders can be “at keyboard” all the time – as Pop was, pushing her excitement to its brink, until she wasn't excited about anything.

Now, after a reset, Pop’s empowering people to create boundaries and be open about mental health – “don’t repress the shit out of it,” she said – and to preserve the community values that made her so excited about web3 in the first place. 

“Trees grow both ways,” she said. “It’s called ‘geotropism’” – e.g. roots grow down, branches grow up. “That root system – and I believe we are that,” Pop said gesturing to the room, "is very, very important.”

Black Dave

One of the deepest roots of our on-chain music tree is Black Dave. For the NFT protocol Zora, the artist and web3 thought leader just penned an ode to music NFTs called, “Why I’m Still in Music NFTs.”

The first 90% of the piece, though, could’ve been called “Why Music NFTs Suck.” “Right now it feels like it’s easier to quit music NFTs than it is to stay,” he writes.

Black Dave mentions the noise, the speculation, artist faux pas, platforms’ ‘quantity over quality’ race to the bottom – complaints regularly featured here in the Beat. My favorite part of the essay was this:

The “desired outcomes” of the pioneers often get muddied along the way, corrupted by incumbent thought. It can become difficult to remember that music NFTs were once exciting, a potential salve for old industry wounds. But trees grow both ways, and the canopy is dense.

Black Dave did reserve the last 10 percent of his piece for the subheading:  “So what doesn’t suck about music NFTs?”

“Honestly, at this specific moment everything sucks about them,” he wrote, “but I know there are a ton of folks who are passionate specifically about music and blockchain and NFTs who are thinking about the landscape and the tech offerings and are looking for and building ideas that could lead in this direction. I’ll be here trying as we all figure it out.”

It takes a bullheaded crew to stay the course. You’ve gotta double down and double the dose until “something” happens. Sometimes that means shining a light on the bullshit in the hopes that more people understand and we can find our way back to the roots.

Because what else could that “something” be but our hope that our work and our resilience will make the world – and ourselves – a little better than they were.

Coda

In the ‘60s, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert started the Harvard Psilocybin Project to study the drug’s effects on the human mind. It was an academic affair – until, as Jay wrote in Psychonauts, Allen Ginsberg showed up and “disrupted the scholarly mood.”

As pioneers sometimes do, Leary ran before the rest of the world was ready to walk. A pernicious war on drugs followed, spawning a culture of fear and quashing a brief enlightened period – during which we cared less about profit and productivity and more about creativity and collectivism.

But even in that fleeting moment, we got Allen Ginsberg and Thelonious Monk and so many others who made something happen. They opened people’s minds to a more colorful world. What could we make happen if we lived in that kind of world all the time?

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.