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 Olympics

Last week I traveled to Marseille and Lyon, two of France's satellite cities for the Olympics. Paris is closer to me, and the event’s epicenter, but that’s exactly why I avoided it – and gratefully so, given the transport mayhem that ensnared the London-Paris byway.

In both places, the Olympic presence was ancillary – to the extent that I found myself wanting to skip the soccer matches we held tickets for, bask in the street art, seek out romantic side streets, follow the jazz in the air to its source and listen till dawn. The arts were calling.

It was only later – via Ted Gioia – that I learned the arts, in fact, used to be an integral part of the Olympics. Sports competitions in ancient Greece, Gioia said, always involved music – folks believed the long jump, for instance, needed music to facilitate rhythmic coordination. 

But art wasn’t just an enabler. Ancient Olympic games held competitions for poetry, comedy and lyre-playing. The most frequent event, held 22 times, was the Competition for Trumpeters. Herodorus of Megara won it 10 times in a row. This man was a caricature – and perhaps it’s the sands of time that have made him so – but legend says that, in a single sitting, he could knock back seven kilos of meat and just as much bread before guzzling a spectacular six liters of wine. Watching him trumpet must have been as heart-stopping as his morning breakfast.

The arts weren’t limited to the ancients, either. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, always envisaged their reintegration into the games. “There is only one difference between our Olympiads and plain sporting championships,” he said, “and it is precisely the contests of art as they existed in the Olympiads of Ancient Greece, where sport exhibitions walked in equality with artistic exhibitions.”

He eventually made it happen. The arts were part of the Olympics from 1912 to 1948, with categories in architecture, literature, sculpture, music and more. What eventually eliminated them was the perception that placing professional artists side-by-side with amateur athletes – the primary participants in the modernized Olympics – lacked integrity.

Times have changed, of course. Today Lebron James – who will earn a base salary of $48,728,845 this year – is suiting up for Team USA. And I watched Argentinian Julián Álvarez – who earns $5,200,000 a year from his Premier League club, Manchester City – play versus Iraq (if any athletic is to qualify as art, it may be the Argentinian brand of football).

With the original rationale irrelevant, it seems that what now lacks integrity is the arts’ exclusion. So is it time to resurrect the Arts Olympiad? And if we did, what could that mean for music?

Gold Medal for Best Guitar Solo While on Acid

Today, music’s place at the Olympics is largely nationalist hype and ad fodder: anthems during the medal ceremonies; Lady Gaga and Celine Dion performing a duet of the Édith Piaf classic “La Vie en Rose” during the opening ceremony (Dion’s first performance in nearly four years); Gwen Stefani and Anderson .Paak making an Olympics-themed song for Coca-Cola; Beyoncé introducing Team USA (kind of). 

That’s all fine, but music’s got legends of Herodorus stature, and of “Pocket Hercules” eminence (that’s Naim Süleymanoğlu, the Bulgarian-born, Turkish weightlifter who smoked 50 cigarettes a day and could clean-and-jerk three times his body weight – Süleymanoğlu defeating Greek lifter Valerios Leonidis at the Atlanta games in 1996 is well worth a watch.)

Music’s got Ozzy, drunken guitar-offs over the muse who inspired two of the greatest songs of all-time, Coltrane kicking down the bathroom door on a drugged out David Crosby. Imagine a “best guitar solo on acid” event where Hendrix squares off against Syd Barrett and Jerry Garcia.

Or, more seriously, a competition for best rendition of a host country cultural treasure, like “La Vie en Rose.” Or a global battle of the bands, where the preceding year is filled with “Olympic Trials” that showcase myriad emerging acts.

In some ways, squaring the rigor of Olympic athletics feels incongruent with music’s fluidity. There’s already too much competition in the forced zero-sum games musicians must play to reach audiences. But we don’t not do stuff like this – we have countless “best of” lists, as Gioia notes, and battles of the bands are important showcases for new acts. And look at Eurovision, a friendly, Europe-wide music competition that can catapult emerging artists into the global consciousness (see: ABBA). 

Couldn’t it simply be an expanded version of that?

But as we ask ‘why not,’ perhaps we should first ask ‘why’ at all. Take this passage in the New Yorker by the critic, essayist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Louis Menand, writing ahead of the 2012 London games:

Alongside the philosophical question of ‘what are we even doing here,’ there’s also the economics to consider. Host countries often lose money. The London games had a bill of just under $15 billion, 76 percent over budget. The Rio games in 2016 had a 352 percent cost overrun. Why do they host? What is that nebulous delta between the economic value of the Olympics and their perceived value?

While it’s not a perfect analogy, this line of thinking reminded me of another recent Gioia essay, where he explores the “value” of music – that ‘nebulous delta’ between music’s value and the prevailing music economics of penny streams and artist exploitation. He roots his inquiry in music’s economics-obsessed naysayers – especially tech platforms and Adam Smith, who writes the art form off as “frivolous.”

But let’s go back to Ancient Greece again. Folks like Plato and Aristotle, too, wrestled to cohere their visceral experience with music and its more practical value. To make his point that music’s value just is, Gioia cites philosopher Hannah Arendt, who often referenced and drew inspiration from ancient Greek philosophers:

“According to Arendt, they are superior to other forms of work and labor, which only have meaning when they create products for use and consumption. But music, like healing, is good in itself – it doesn’t need further justification.

“This is the exact same reason why Adam Smith hates music,” he continues, “it serves as an end in itself, and not a product for exchange.”

Of course music can be a product for exchange – Swifties are spending an average of $1300 a show. And, having just been to them, I can say that the Olympics are no stranger to “consumption.” But framing music as “healing” unlocked another connection for me.

In Lyon, I went to see Argentina play Iraq in the group stages. My seat was in the Iraq cheering section (who are spirited supporters, I must say). When we arrived, there were people in our seats, and moving them incited a veritable derby of musical chairs. Nobody, it turned out, was in their actual seat. We’d ruined the peace.

But cooperation ensued! I ended up with a Brazilian on my left, an Iraqi family on my right, and Argentinian couples ahead and behind me. As we were finally settling, Iraq – a massive underdog – scored to tie the match, sending things back into chaos. A large, sweaty, joyous Iraqi man bear-hugged me, lifting me off the ground and jostling the Argentinians behind me. Somebody next to them fell over. A baby cried. Vuvuzelas blared. It felt like I’d been whisked through a mosh pit in a melting pot and it was excellent.

Argentina eventually took over the game, earning the expected cheers and groans along party lines. But then the game ended and we all filed out of the stadium, onwards to our lives. For those 90 minutes, though, against all odds, this game brought us to a shared space with common purpose, and sometimes that’s enough to heal us.

For very few things do we set aside our politics. Music as our “universal language” is often touted as a rare exception. But the Olympics, too, are a global ritual – a platform for cultural exchange, international cooperation and tolerance. They do ‘instill, reinforce, or reboot’ attitudes and beliefs ‘vital to our functioning.’

Like music, the fact that the Olympics exist serves as an end in itself. Check out these North and South Korean athletes taking a selfie together:

A similar selfie happened in 2016. And there are many other examples, like the unexpected friendship between Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, and German long jumper Luz Long during the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.

There’s also American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists at the 1968 Mexico City games – an act that was criticized at the time (notably by International Olympic Committee president, Avery Brundage, himself an American, who had also presided over the 1936 Olympics and given no such objection to the Nazi salute), but today is commemorated in murals, statues and music around the world.

These exchanges soften relations and open dialogues, and we know that music does the same. Nixon sent the Philadelphia Orchestra to Beijing in 1973 to help rekindle US-China diplomacy. In 1999, Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian-American academic Edward Said founded The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra to encourage co-existence.

These acts change the way we think about the world. So if the Olympics can inspire nations to transcend economics and embrace that kind of value, why can’t music, which functions similarly? Maybe bringing music to the Olympics would reawaken our conviction that music is valuable, worthy of pride and prestige – not the toy of hostile platform bosses who can’t see beyond its economics.

As Gioia writes: “Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world – namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms – are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.”

Gioia’s Substack has an active comments section, and I quite enjoyed this one:

“Those that believe music has no value, yet make millions off of the musicians that labored to make it, have in themselves no value.” 

Coda

Sébastien Devaud was born in Lyon. He, too, created music for these Olympics. In collaboration with Yacine Dessouki and NDRK, he composed the song “Olympe” – part of France’s tourism campaign.

Devaud makes music under the alias Agoria, borrowed from the word “agora,” which is Greek for “meeting place.” Devaud’s career-spanning mission is to reconcile seeming oppositions, mitigating the sense of “the other.” Today I’ll leave you in the spirit of that meeting place.

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.