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.

The Dylan dilemma

As a small town Minnesota boy, I grew up with Bob Dylan as a cultural fixture. He wasn’t my icon. But he was the guy, the legend who propelled himself from rural to riches, all through the power of folk – an honest and upstanding tradition of sharing and collective care.

That mythos made it all the more disheartening to learn that his character is jaded by believable accounts of inauthenticity and straight-up theft. For the past 10 months, I’ve been tangled up in blue, so to speak, using Dylan’s slippery figure as a lens into the dissonance between folk and copyright, art and wealth. And throughout that exploration, while steeped in the world of the blockchain, some big questions arose:

• How can we find ways to harness the superpowers of the blockchain – decentralization, immutability and provenance – without harming creators who still rely on copyright to earn money?

• How can we protect creators’ rights while also embracing the truth that everything is a remix, that genius is a fallacy, and that collective attribution of the folk is a much healthier way to share and celebrate art?

Amidst the music industry’s stalwart, labyrinthine legal frameworks, the forgotten folk spirit and the Promethean mindset of web3, there’s an oasis of possibility to find some middle grounds. In that oasis, some "answers" emerged, and all it took was the better part of a year, a 9000-word essay (from which some of this newsletter is excerpted), launching a new collective committed to using the blockchain to resurrect folk methodologies, and minting a cover of Bob Dylan’s song, “Girl from the North Country.”

Folk’s transformation

In the 1960s, folk music was scuffling with its transition from tribal to individual, caught up in the larger entertainment industry’s growing infatuation with idolatry. "Transformation has always been part of the American idea: in the New World, anyone can become a new person,” writes David Hajdu in his book Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

“The irony of Robert Zimmerman's metamorphosis into Bob Dylan lies in the application of so much illusion and artifice in the name of truth and authenticity. Archie Leach and Norma Jean Baker became Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe when they went into show business; but folk [music] was supposed to be neither business nor show.”

Alas, business and show is what it became. Idols emerged. And the power of copyright helped enable a transformation from music of the folk into music of a folk, incentivizing artists like Bob Dylan to use the folk canon to elevate his own mythos as an icon. Our cherished bard built a career atop the hearts and stories of those who came before him, and that’s important to recognize.

Outside the folk tradition, though, everything does not belong to everyone. In 2020, Dylan sold his catalog to UMG for an estimated $400 million. In 2022, he sold his recorded music rights to Sony in a deal estimated to be valued at $200 million. Without question, Dylan is a superlative songwriter, but (especially) in the context of a transmissive music and an “everything belongs to everyone” spirit, it makes no sense for one folk to have all that wealth.

Dylan took the folk idiom, recreated it in his own image and then refused to abide by it, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The point here isn’t to discredit his skills as a songwriter or wordsmith, or to diminish his character. Dylan’s musical borrowing is very folk, but the individualism – perpetuated by the legal precedent of copyright – with which he maneuvered was not.

Cultural anthropophagy

In last week’s Beat, in the context of restoring folk methodologies, I explored Gilberto Gil and tropicália – a music (and more broadly cultural) movement that coalesced myriad styles, like “samba and bossa nova with the avant garde and imports like American psychedelia and pop rock” – as well as the Creative Commons forum that spurred Gil’s invitation for the digital world to “join in the samba.”

Tropicália was inspired by “cultural anthropophagy” – the custom of eating human flesh – and its reclamation as a worldview by Brazilian philosopher, Oswald de Andrade. The credo is a symbolic devouring and digesting of external influences and information, and their subsequent transformation into something new and entirely Brazilian, where the flesh of one piece becomes the stem cells of another.

As individuals, we too cannibalize the information of others for the construction of ourselves. Plumbing through the deluge, we gradually hone in on our music, the stuff that strikes like lightning and catalyzes our own art. We devour the flesh of others to discover what exists in our own.

If we acknowledge this, we must also acknowledge that it makes little sense to claim sole ownership of the stuff that comes out when we put pen to paper. This has always been true. The folk tradition — from which Dylan emerged — is a manifestation of that essence. The pursuit of decentralization is a reflection of a revived awareness of this truth, and in a memetic digital world, the precedent of copyright is becoming increasingly untenable.

This machine kills copyright

Folk is a custom focused on collectively developed and shared intellectual property, as well as its preservation. As such, the blockchain’s superpowers of immutability and decentralization make it a fitting technology for upholding that tradition.

But at the heart of this matter is a major point of friction: the permissionless ethos of public blockchains and the private ownership of the intellectual property stored on them.

The context required to fully grok the maelstrom of the incumbent music industry, copyright at large and the legal murk of the blockchain is, well, why the piece is 9,000 words long. And told through the chronology of Dylan, there’s a growing illusion that seeps in, marked by the distance between self and other.

Perhaps the reason we feel that distance at all is through isolating human constructs like “all rights reserved” copyright – or nation states. Ideas, art and identities are temporary artifacts of an interdependent reality, and our systems should reflect that truth.

The project — titled “this machine kills copyright” — evokes the famous juxtaposition of Woody Guthrie’s (Dylan’s hero) acoustic music and the “this machine kills fascists” precept plastered to the guitar that made it. It grew out of FOLK – a new collective focused on tracing ancient folk relationships and methodologies in order to embed them into a new commons infrastructure and cultural flow.

We minted a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” Like many of his songs, its origins lie in the hearts of other people. The piece’s melody and lyrics were inspired by this rendition of the traditional ballad “Scarborough Fair” performed by English musician, Martin Carthy, whom Dylan visited in England.

We’re using the blockchain – and music illogically copyrighted to only Bob Dylan – to reroute funds to folk communities that reference the folk traditions from which the music was born. Proceeds will be split between FOLK — to support subsequent experiments, artists, & stewards who are caring for our world and our histories — and five such communities: Akiya DAO, All Genre, Kernel, Songcamp and Water & Music.

Coda

In total, there are 595 NFTs available – one each for every approximate million Dylan made from selling his songwriting catalog and his recorded song rights. The number is also an homage to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 595 NFTs project, which was largely misunderstood and panned due to environmental concerns and “an uncharacteristic capitulation to capitalism.”

Sakamoto, though, calculated and offset all the carbon costs of minting – and indeed he has a lengthy history of offsetting his own footprint, from deploying solar panels during his tours to using eco-friendly paper packaging for his albums (since 1994!) to converting his own home to 100% reliance on wind energy. He also conducted the on-chain project in the spirit of gathering.

“Similar to how each individual note in a composition comes together to create a greater whole,” Sakamoto wrote in a project retrospective, “I imagined that digitized notes could bring each individual NFT holder together as part of a larger and more harmonious community.”

Sakamoto’s vision was rooted in the ideals of web3 – that the blockchain could champion music, not the financialization of music as intellectual property.

“To my dismay,” he continued, “the project also attracted considerable attention from investors more interested in money than music. I certainly did not expect that my music would become an object of financial speculation.”

While many of us continue to be dismayed by the reality of Sakamoto’s observation, there are still folk ideals at the heart of myriad aligned communities, seeking to use this — and other — technologies for good.

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.