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.

Carnival

On Friday morning I climbed up steep stairs to Santa Teresa, a Bohemian neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Dressed as a sunflower, I walked alongside a mass of costumed climbers to the popular Carmelitas Bloco (block party) during the first day of Carnival. The bloco is named after the Convento de Carmelitas, a neighborhood convent, and inspired by an anecdote that describes a nun who once jumped over the convent’s walls to join the revelers. 

Throughout Carnival, hundreds of blocos march the city’s streets, gathering around music genres, locales, legends and myriad other themes. Thousands of others assemble in cities across Brazil. And these are not mere street parties with DJ sets, drinks and a few streamers – these are thoughtfully prepared extravaganzas, with mind-boggling floats and rehearsed bands, dancers and stilt walkers, all garbed in colorful costume. 

Some blocos even compose their own music to play alongside classic Carnival tunes and popular Brazilian songs. Most have loyal followings who’ll brave the formidable sun to dance through cramped city streets. And at night, samba schools showcase legitimate masterpieces, dancing through Rio’s Sambódromo in globally televised parades.

Each gathering represents months of dedicated community work, piecing together a visual and aural narrative that often evokes broader social commentary – like the samba school Paraiso do Tuiuti, which rallied this year around themes of slavery to advocate for reparations, and the bloco Mulheres Rodadas, which centers women’s rights in their parties.

For most people involved, these projects are labors of love – opportunities to express a belief, dance, dress up and gather around music. And the love is palpable. Everyone shows up with such passion and joy, shared equally across the organizers and the organized – even when it means staying at the Sambódromo until 4am, or waking up before sunrise to race across the city to gather before a bloco departs. 

It’s got the kind of magic that gets you out of bed.

Wide Awake

In 2020, the New York Times profiled the Wide Awakes, a Civil War-era political movement resurrected and contemporized by the artist Hank Willis Thomas. Like the Carnival tradition, Thomas wanted the movement to be oriented as much around joy as it was around action. “If being civically engaged feels like a burden this season, we’re not going to have the level of impact we think we should,” he said. “They’re called political parties. Let’s make it a party.”

Tariq Trotter – also known as Black Thought, a member of the hip hop group the Roots – is a member of the Wide Awakes. “Throughout history, it’s been young people, creatives, intellectuals, and philosophers – the visionaries – who understood the power in uniting and who contributed to the greatest progress,” Trotter told the Times. “What the Wide Awakes represent is the modern-day version of something we’ve seen at different points throughout history.”

When Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler first introduced his project Metalabel, he referenced the Wide Awakes, and cited the Trotter quote above. Under the Wide Awakes moniker, the collective and “open-source network” – as Strickler called the collaborative project – has dabbled in everything from public art installations to fashion, music to mobile soup kitchens. Together, the collective gathers behind a concerted, joyous and costume-adorning effort to affect political change.

Strickler took a step back to observe how the Wide Awakes model might be elevated and remixed. He started by exploring what the Wide Awakes of the world really were. They were like a label, but more collaborative and scene-driven, so Strickler started imagining them as ‘metalabels’ – “groups of people working under a common identity for a common purpose with a focus on releases – distinct public works that reflect and manifest their views.”

One of the key elements of a metalabel is having “a scene it participates in.” “Metalabels are at their best when they document, represent, or are in dialogue with a community or scene,” Strickler wrote. “In some cases the label may end up creating a scene, inspiring others to explore adjacent territory.”

After ten curated releases – from the peer-based collaborative project Assembly to the connective Lonely Writer’s Club – Metalabel started to tease a new feature simply titled ‘Release,’ which is still light on details but appears to offer a template and tool-set to other would-be metalabels.

“Metalabel is a new space for releasing, selling, and exhibiting creative work,” the minimalist website now reads. “A model for a new creative era. Coming 2024.”

It concludes: “As individuals our powers are limited. In groups we become stronger.”

Metalabel 2.0

For much of its two-year journey, Metalabel aligned themselves with the broader web3 movement. The tenor of that relationship is changing.

On Wednesday, Strickler shed more light on Metalabel’s intentions, tweeting a new essay and video titled “when the means justify the ends.” In the video he talks about the tensions between technological determinism and human experience, and about going on a “crypto diet” after experiencing many of the flaws for which crypto is stigmatized.

He references, for instance, the elimination of artist royalties – citing the same example I mentioned last week as part of the Other Internet’s case studies in “Crypto’s Three-Body Problem” – as well as other hyper-speculative, overly transactional behavior that have eroded the foundation of crypto’s promise.

Clearer than ever was the reality that money – not culture – was central to crypto. Late last year, Metalabel penned a quasi-private essay – noted publicly in the new aforementioned video – that explained their decision to distance themselves from crypto, relegating it from their major to minor.

In their newly outlined stack, you’ll notice that many of the points are still adjacent to web3 ideals. Hopefully, though, they’re also capable of skirting its shortcomings:

In the video, Strickler references the Michael Azerrad book Our Band Could Be Your Life, which details the origins of punk and hardcore in the US. He explains how outré emerging artists couldn’t get the attention of established labels, so they started their own, releasing records and pushing more punk into the world, manifesting a scene in the process.

The feelings of punk and joy have been fleeting in web3, and I’d be hard pressed to note anything that resembles a true punk-like scene. Crypto’s inherent financialization creates a pervasive sense of ulterior motive and risk. And for all the painstaking attempts at building incentive structures that guardrail behavior, there’s never been a bloco to wake up early for. Very little – if anything – in web3 feels like Carnival.

Coda

Throughout Carnival I was thinking a lot about public access and managing identities, two of the conditions that appear broadly in Metalabel’s stack. Everyone is free to join, and costumes connote a sense of play and participation in the adventure. The “operating system” is more experiential than release-based — as a metalabel might be — but the essence is there: “groups of people working under a common identity for a common purpose with a focus…that reflect[s] and manifest[s] their views.”

Could Metalabel become the Carnival for the new Internet? Where beneath the umbrella of joy and community and social good, groups can spin out blocos to reflect and manifest unique purpose?

What feels obvious but worth mentioning is that there’s joy in gathering around something shared. It’s always gotta start from there.

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.