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 Lewis Connection

A few years ago my dad bought 87 records from an online auction for $52. One was the self-titled EP by The Lewis Connection, a Minneapolis funk band that formed in the 70s.

On the corner of the album, still wrapped in cellophane, was a note that read “to a blood I grew up with – to Ransom, from Pierre. Thank you.”

My dad did some research and unearthed the record’s history. It turns out The Lewis Connection included a recording of “Got to Be Something Here,” which features the barely discernible strumming work of a young Prince, whose Purple Rain turns 40 next week. 

The Lewis Connection wouldn’t arrive until 1979, after Prince’s major label debut, but because the track was recorded several years earlier, it’s thought to be the earliest recording in existence of Prince’s playing. As such the record goes for several hundred dollars.

I ended up tracking down Pierre Lewis and recording a podcast episode with him, and later I tracked down the Minneapolis bar where Lewis still performs on a regular basis. This is how music discovery works with context – it’s a point of connection to other people, a reason to seek out other humans. This is how digital and physical worlds can come together to create something neither of them can do on their own. 

During our conversation, Prince – unsurprisingly – was a focal point. And as we approach the 40th anniversary of Purple Rain, it feels timely to revisit his iconoclasm and moral fortitude; his conviction as artist champion and self-advocate – to peek through the purple veil to a place where artist rights are safeguarded, and fates cannot be so expressly dictated by platforms or corporations.

If Prince were still with us, riding out these wayward realities of extraction and control, what might he do?

What Would Prince Do (WWPD)

Throughout his career, Prince was vigilant with his music – and frequently at loggerheads with his label, Warner Music Group. In 1993, when Warner refused to steadily release his massive back catalog, Prince started appearing in public with the word ‘slave’ painted on his face. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol he later copyrighted as Love Symbol #2 and “drew attention to the issue of ­artists ­controlling their own destiny,” as his then-attorney Gary Stiffelman put it. 

That spirit wandered into the 21st century, and in 2010, Prince was already fed up with the digital world. “The Internet’s completely over,” he told the Daily Mirror. “The Internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. … All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

Prince’s rationale was more than just ‘math is for nerds’ and ‘old man yells at cloud,’ though. It was rooted in a loss of quality – “I personally can’t stand digital music,” he told The Guardian in 2011. “When you play it back, you can’t feel anything. We’re analog people, not digital” – and in unfavorable economics: “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

In 2015, he pulled his music from Spotify and other streaming services – except for the artist-stewarded Tidal and Minnesota Public Radio station, The Current (my own go-to spot on the dial since 2005) – to protest free streaming tiers and advocate for artists’ rights.

(On the day he died, with his music unavailable on streaming platforms, “Purple Rain” was the top-selling song on Apple’s iTunes, and his greatest hits compilation The Very Best of Prince was the platform’s number one album. 18 months after his death, his estate brokered new deals to make his Warner music available on streaming platforms.)

Prince’s relationship with social media was much the same. In a 2014 Q&A session via his freshly christened Facebook profile, he was flooded with 4,000 questions. He answered exactly one of them.

Two months later, without explanation, he deleted all of his social accounts overnight (some speculated the act was in response to a grand jury’s failure to charge the Ferguson police officer that killed Michael Brown).

Prince later had a brief “dalliance” with Instagram, dubbing the experience “Princestagram,” but by and large, he avoided social media like the plague.

And of course, he had the luxury of bypassing social media without personal detriment. He’d already been coronated. But had be been forced to depend on social media – as is the case for artists today – to find his people, would he have had the same cultural impact?

As we know him, Prince is an enigma of confidence and skill, but he wasn’t born that way. During our conversation, Pierre Lewis described him as that shy kid from the basketball court. Today’s shy, social media-averse kids don’t have the luxury of other channels, where they might let their talent and work ethic speak outside of phone-shaped, attention-demanding platform contours.

We already know our addiction to social media is flattening culture, so what does that mean for the future of art? How many would-be Princes will be crushed and constricted, condemned to a life as a TikTok-tinted pauper?

Bonfires

Culture isn’t the end-all-be-all in this conversation, though. Regulatory bodies may not stand up for culture, but they will raise their hands for health.

On Monday, the US surgeon general announced that he’d push for a warning label on social media platforms, “advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.” This comes as TikTok reckons with a divest-or-ban law and multiple states are proposing legislation to prohibit “addictive” feeds for minors and the Los Angeles school district, the second-largest in the U.S., that just voted to ban student use of cell phones and social media during the school day.

In analogous battles, myriad governments are challenging the streaming paradigm and adopting long-sought crypto regulation. Buoyed by both, on-chain builders persist in their battles against limiting centralized platforms. Intentions aren’t always pure, but there are those fighting the good fight – one that even Prince might have joined.

An enticing new arrival is the Bonfire Season Pass, a “time-bound membership” built around moments.

Through custom web3-enabled websites that leverage gated content and digital assets, Bonfire has been empowering creators to gather their communities for a couple years now, finding inspiration in its namesake.

As I wrote in my 2023 feature on Bonfire co-founder Matt Alston, the word “bonfire” dates back to the 15th century, when the priest John Mirk compounded the words “bone” and “fire” in his Book of Festivals, describing a communal blaze that celebrated St. John’s Eve.

In the half millennium that’s followed, even in this technological age of blockchains and AI, we still honor the bonfire as a sacred gathering space, saluting its primordial ability to bring our bones to the fire.

Season Passes are an extension of that act. They’re intended to gather folks around a release, a tour, or a physical product. And unlike memberships elsewhere, they exist on artist-owned domains and can be branded in the artists’ styles.

Importantly, they’re also interoperable, attached to a fan’s wallet so that people can unlock benefits from anywhere digital bones gather – away from the lurid lights of TikTok and Instagram, where the digital and physical worlds can come together to create something neither of them can do on their own.

Coda

I just landed back in London after spending a couple weeks in New York. For most of my time I was in Brooklyn, where I lived from 2015 - 2022. Some friends and I spent a night dancing at Nowadays, an erstwhile haunt, getting steamrolled and elevated by the dynamic DJ/producer, Aurora Halal.

During a dance break in the backyard, we ran into some acquaintances and ended up discussing Prince. We took turns remembering where we were when we’d learned he was no longer with us.

I’d been in a cafe in Brooklyn, surrounded by other writer-types on laptops. Whispers passed around the tables and suddenly we all stopped what we were doing. One by one, we removed our headphones and looked at one another, as if to share in the full sensory sadness of that moment.

After a couple minutes, we sighed and returned to our own little digital worlds. I put my headphones back on and listened to “Purple Rain.”

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.