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.

MadGibbs

In 2014, the rapper Freddy Gibbs teamed up with legendary producer Madlib (Otis Jackson Jr.) to make Piñata. The record was preceded by three preview EPs, arriving annually from 2011 to 2013, each better than the last. 

Piñata debuted at number 39 on the US Billboard 200 and served as my first real entrée to both artists. Gibbs’s trenchant, no-holds-barred vocal burrowed itself down into my gut, and Madlib’s renowned sonic scope came into focus.

"My stuff, it ain't fully quantized… it has more of a human feel, so it might slow down or speed up,” Jackson once said. “So you have to be the type of rapper, like [MF Doom] or Freddie, who can catch that, or else you'll be sounding crazy.”

Last Thursday I saw the duo reunite for a 10-year anniversary show at Primavera Sound, the massive four-day festival in Barcelona. They played Piñata track by track, illustrating the dynamic “human feel” relationship they’ve cultivated over the years – with more than just beats and bars.

“Is weed legal in Spain?” Gibbs asked, innocently enough, before he took a drag from a blunt and passed it back to Jackson, who helmed the turntables behind him.

The crowd laughed. I didn’t know the answer and I’m not sure anyone else did either. Maybe the cops didn’t even know, because the answer – as is typical with these things – is not straightforward. 

Buying, selling and public consumption is illegal, I learned, but smokers can join cannabis clubs – especially prevalent in the Catalonian capital – and partake in club-grown green. There’s even a law protecting the rights of these clubs. The status of that law, however, remains unclear.

In situations like these, where does that leave us? Mired in grey areas and marketable truths, the ethical path feels increasingly difficult to discern. Is crypto a scam or a revolution? Streaming profits are higher than ever but you’re telling me music is imperiled? Is AI a savior or a destroyer of worlds? Is Israel protecting itself or committing genocide? Can I smoke this joint or nah?

Across political chaos, financial inequity, AI, drug and even crypto regulation, it feels like we’re orbiting some Matrix-like simulacrum, where Donald Trump can raise $50 million the day after becoming the first felon ex-president in US history.

Welcome to the arbitrary nature of law, where “fair and impartial” systems of justice are conflated with righteous virtue, greed and power. We expect some unbiased omniscience to relieve our ethical quandaries through law, but when even the most “impartial” legal servants interpret it through biased eyes (see: the ideological divisions in nearly every recent supreme court decision), to whom do we turn for our truth?

Callous acts of greed

Regular Beat readers can attest that I never miss an opportunity to call out Universal Music Group (UMG) boss Lucian Grainge for his cognitive dissonance – like purporting to champion artist-centric, equitable compensation models while giving himself a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bonus. 

“It’s shocking that record-label owners are earning more out of artists’ works than the artists themselves,” Conservative M.P. Esther McVey said in 2021, citing a Parliament hearing about the bonus package.

Now UMG is facing a shareholder revolt after the advisory firm Glass Lewis – which advises major investors how to vote at companies’ annual general meetings – urged voters to reject an “excessive” $150 million payout for Grainge over the next five years. (That includes a $100 million share-based bonus.)

Meanwhile, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is tweeting BS like: “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content” — an attestation of total ignorance of the fact that good art is resource-intensive. Body, mind, pockets and soul all bear the burden of cost. And like with Grainge, I won’t miss an opportunity to remind everyone, yet again, that Ek bid $2 billion to buy Arsenal while 98.6 percent of Spotify artists were earning $36 per quarter.

These are callous acts of greed. When so much of our population lives in squalor, why are they culturally acceptable? Why are they lauded? Why are they even legally defensible?

Can anyone confidently make the argument that allowing one person to hoard $150 million – the equivalent of thousands of affordable housing units – is a lesser offense than, say, three strikes laws that, until recently, triggered mandatory life sentences for folks who have been caught with weed three times? 

Thankfully, punitive measures for marijuana are subsiding. And in the wake of cultural de-stigmatization, other long-illicit drugs are also being reconsidered.

The FDA, for instance, is currently considering the approval of MDMA as a clinical treatment for PTSD. (On Tuesday, a panel of experts advised the FDA to reject the consideration, but the FDA isn’t obligated to follow that advice.) Regardless of the decision, outside of a medical setting, MDMA remains – as do magic mushrooms and LSD – a schedule one drug, which indicates a substance has high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.  

Safety and abuse, surely, are important factors, but all of these drugs are less lethal than alcohol (and in the case of weed, LSD and shrooms, by orders of magnitude). Why is booze nearly omnipresent across our cultures? What, as a society, are we scared of? The ravers who take MDMA and dance all night? The hippies that get stoned and play music in long grass? The psychonauts who take mushrooms to feel more connected to each other and the natural world? Terrifying stuff.

At a certain point, we need to ask who these laws are working for – and whose power remains unchallenged by our tacit acceptance of them, and at what point we become complicit for following them.

"Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?"

With Thoreau’s words bouncing around our heads, what should be our guiding light to compliance and civil disobedience? Ethics? Money? Harm reduction? Social order? God?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, as well as the top three leaders of Hamas, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The US House just passed legislation to sanction the ICC for that act. Should Netanyahu should get a pass when more children have been killed in Gaza than in four years of global conflict. They seem to think so – do you?

Meanwhile, the New York Times just reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs paid for a pro-Israeli marketing campaign that targeted US lawmakers – especially those who are black and/or democrats – encouraging them to fund Israel’s military. To influence political thought, they created hundreds of fake social accounts and ChapGPT wrote much of the copy.

And speaking of ChatGPT, whistleblowers from the product’s creator, OpenAI, tell us the company is engaged in a “reckless” race for dominance, “putting a priority on profits and growth” and using “hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology.”

Elsewhere in AI, with chilling frankness, Sony Pitctures’ CEO Tony Vinciquerra said (h/t Ted Gioia): “We’ll be looking at ways to use AI to produce films for theaters and television in more efficient ways, using AI primarily.”

Were any laws broken here? Maybe not. But does any of this change what you feel is right and wrong?

My friend Derrick Washington has been incarcerated for the better part of two decades, serving a life without parole sentence. He just earned an appeal to fight for his release after it was discovered that his arresting police withheld evidence that demonstrated his innocence. Assuming all goes well, that’s about 20 years of his life stolen from him, all in the name of pride and power. How would you respond? How should the law deal with those police?

During the MadGibbs set, “fuck the police” was a common refrain. In some countries that alone could get you arrested. But in no country will you get arrested for “putting a priority on profits,” or ‘protecting your country,’ or earning a hundred million dollars, even as the world burns around you.

Coda

The last set I saw at Primavera was Deftones, the phenomenal nu metal band (no that is not an oxymoron) I revered as a teen. It was my first time seeing them, so I wasn't going to miss a chance to mosh with other diehards.

After 20 minutes of top tier mosh at center-stage, I realized my phone was missing. The pit – bless them – spread the crowd like Moses parted the sea. “Dropped phone!”

Alas, despite their kind efforts, no phone.

A few minutes later, the same thing happened to someone else. And then another person. And then another. After the show, when we found no phones in the wake of the departed crowd, theft was an easy deduction.

Resigned to a lost cause, I walked back to my wife and friend, who were graciously waiting for me to get done thrashing about. I was consoled, and then we got food. 

On our way out, we saw someone getting detained by police, surrounded by a small crowd. Suddenly I realized the whole lost-phones Deftones crew was there. “This guy may have our phones!” one shouted.

I joined the party. Escorted back to a secure area, we watched as the police laid out 35 stolen cell phones on the front roof of a squad car. We made statements and I watched as the cops patted down and chatted with the perpetrator. The interaction was no nonsense, but it was still human, with occasional smiles and a wordless acknowledgement of one another’s common ground.

"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings,” Thurgood Marshall once said, “we pay ourselves the highest tribute."

Indeed. Remember that life isn’t “fully quantized.” If we forget to give it a human feel, we may just come off sounding crazy. And, yes, I did get my phone back.

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.