The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

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.

Anarchy

Last Friday night, I was standing on the streets of Athens, chatting with a small group of locals outside of a souvlaki joint.

“Are you communist or anarchist?”

“Uh, which are you?” I responded, wondering why there were only two options.

“Anarchist,” they said, defiantly.

We were looking for ‘rebetiko’ music, commonly known as the “Greek Blues.” Now part of the national identity, rebetiko was once banned in Greece because “their songs spoke of hashish, trouble with the police and the misery of life on the margins.” We had intel that there’d be music on the second floor of this restaurant.

“I think that closed a couple years ago,” said one of the anarchists, taking a bite from a gyro. “If you’re anarchist and like chess and backgammon, go there,” they said pointing down the street. “That way,” they said, pointing in the opposite direction, “there’s a metal bar.”

We were standing a few doors down from Exarcheia Square. Historically, Exarcheia is known as an anarchist neighborhood – “adored in equal measure by intellectual activists and scruffy late-night revelers.” Our new anarchist friends informed us that the city’s conservative government was planning to put a metro station in the Square, one of the area’s last green spaces. In the eyes of the community, that station would be the death knell of Exarcheia, accelerating a losing battle against gentrification and its transformation into “a Disneyland for tourists.”

Riot police stood guard next to the park, wary of conflict. “Don’t go to that cafe,” our comrades added, pointing to an Illy next to the square. “It’s where the cops go.”

After we parted ways, we continued seeking music – unsuccessfully – before landing at a bar called Revolt, scalding our throats with a local ‘roki’ – a fiery pomace brandy and traditional Greek swill – before calling it a night.

Around 1:30am, we walked back through Exarcheia Square and the by riot police. Not 10 seconds after we’d passed, the ground behind us erupted in flames. Explosions shook the air, and we all started running.

The next morning, we discovered that 30 “young people” had attacked the police with molotov cocktails. It was harrowing, thrilling and a visceral confirmation of the tension in the region – in brief: a nearly fatal quest for music.

Tension

There’s tension in anything that holds opposites in one hand. The Beat, in some fashion, is a testament to tension: AI versus humans. Web2 versus web3. The “capitalist colonization agenda of the recording industry coexisting with the socialist minded independent music world,” as Thurston Moore wrote in an ode to the late Steve Albini. It’s the quest for music in those in-between spaces.

Not long ago I celebrated Sebastién Devaud’s – aka the French artist Agoria – career-spanning mission to reconcile seeming oppositions, mitigating the sense of ‘the other.’

His mission continues. “Our humanity can be defined by our ability to establish links,” he was quoted in a recent interview with the international news station, France 24, about the AI-generated music video for his new song, “I Feel Good.” “Even,” he continued, “with what lies beyond our immediate understanding.”

And it’s beyond our understanding where tension is most plentiful. AI is one such place – feared and fecund are its implications. Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr. – better known as the musician Washed Out – recently released his own AI-generated music video, which was touted as OpenAI’s first officially commissioned Sora collaboration between a musician and a filmmaker.

Greene faced swift, ardent backlash, which he later addressed via Twitter: 

“I acknowledge the fact that AI art is a controversial subject and I have other projects in the works that are far from this type of approach. But I don’t agree that it is as black and white as some commenters have suggested,” he tweeted. “Whether you’re scared, excited, or undecided about these new tools, they are here to stay. We just need to collectively figure out the most responsible ways to harness them.”

Advancing AI presents a potential sea change across all facets of life. Change is inevitable, and indeed, AI is “here to stay,” but not all change is progress, either – at least not from every angle. Does gentrification bring more money to Exarcheia? Sure. But are the insipid franchised cafes cropping up coming at the expense of the energy that made the neighborhood what it is? Also yes.

Is AI a creative partner that can help creators work more efficiently, and alongside the best versions of themselves? In a best-case scenario, yeah. But is there also danger that AI – when paired with content platforms where the bottom line is the ultimate decision-maker – will corrupt creative principles? Also yes.

Where is the threshold for ‘responsible harnessing?’ What is the proper balance of ‘fear and excitement and indecision?’ It’s in the grey spaces and nuances between these answers that remain laden with tension, slowly feeding the creative’s existential discontent. 

And throughout the entertainment industry, that tension is increasingly palpable.

Oscillator

“I don't mean this to be alarmist, but is the entertainment industry ok?” tweeted the artist RAC a few weeks ago.

He cited many known points of tension:

RAC is working on a new project called Oscillator, which exists in the design space of artist-fan data. Alongside Jack Spallone – who has built and advised on various on-chain music projects, from Catalog to Hi-Fi Labs – the artist raised venture funding from Coinbase, ConsenSys and Seed Club, amongst others. 

Oscillator’s messaging promotes shared, open data across the music industry, hearkening a transition away from centralized platforms that hoard and monetize data at the expense of artists and fans.

The project’s first app is Fan Score, which culls a wallet’s on-chain interactions with a given artist (as of now, seven of them, including RAC) and generates a score. Said score is subtly gamified by presenting it alongside other wallets’ scores. 

Another application, Poke, dropped this week. It’s a simple Farcaster-based app where people choose eight favorite artists and then get matched with folks who have overlap. In this way, beloved music becomes connective tissue for deeper interaction, musical and otherwise.

Oscillator – whose protocol has yet to be released – also recently published a more mission-driven post called, “Building An Open Music Ecosystem, Together.” Central to the piece was one line, emboldened twice: “Our ability to coordinate on shared infrastructure will be our defensibility against incumbents.”

After the second instance of the phrase, the post concluded: “Collectively, we can’t be disrupted or acquired or turned off.”

So how do we confront the growing unease surrounding the entertainment industry? If it’s not AI, what is it? Could our ‘existential discontent’ be more fundamental than the technology we use?

In my recent brush with Athenian anarchy – as well as time recently spent on a feature about the web3 learning institution, Kernel, whose syllabus was largely informed by the anarchist and anthropologist, David Graeber – I found myself reading Graeber’s “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” 

We tend to think of anarchy as an agent of chaos, but anarchy is not the absence of rule. It’s the absence of rulers – those folks who’d otherwise ‘disrupt, acquire or turn off.’ Many of web3’s principles share commonality with anarchist philosophy: autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy. 

Technologies like AI are secondary to the ways in which we organize beneath them. As long as incentives are misaligned and value is locked in platform silos, tension will loom large because we can’t actualize these principles. We feel free to pursue them, but are they actually possible?

The anarchists would, perhaps, suggest that we’ve been sold a certain brand of “egalitarian” society that precludes such an actualization.

“The spectral violence seems to emerge from the very tensions inherent in the project of maintaining an egalitarian society,” wrote Graeber. “We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”

Across various new Internet movements, there are people organizing in new ways because they’ve seen the limitations of our well-trodden histories and definitions of ‘egalitarian.’ Is it egalitarian when artists can’t see their own music data or access their own communities? When somehow autocrats and fascists continue to rise to power? When culture can’t be protected from state-sponsored profiteers? 

Our quest for music is no different than our quest to ‘sing of life on the margins,’ to build collectively and in a decentralized manner, to foster systems of mutual aid, to be curious about the things that lie beyond our understanding. In each, we challenge the notion that there are oppositions. We ‘mitigate the sense of the other,’ and in doing so tension eases until it sounds like music. To find such symphony of shared sound, some people are even willing to risk death.

Coda

We did eventually find rebetiko. In an old square about a mile from Exarcheia, a trio – a vocalist, a guitarist, and a bouzouki (a kind of Greek mandolin) player – serenaded seated crowds into the wee hours of the morning. We sat outdoors, chatting and drinking white wine as the music vivified the space.

The players performed with an especial ease, and a collective bravura that only comes from well-practiced dialogue. They had no need to look to one another for cue or confirmation. Superficially, they barely acknowledged each other at all. But it was clear that they were deeply in sync. Any tensions had melted long ago, replaced by some flow that exists beyond our understanding.

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.