The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. (With a few unexpected stops along the way – such is life.)

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.

Identity Squared

A few months ago, I saw the artist FKA Twigs at a cafe in London. She was having a coffee, sitting in plain clothes, chatting with friends. I glanced over, trying to square her appearance with the person I’d seen play at Coachella, and then at Panorama (Coachella’s short-lived east coast twin), and then at Manhattan’s Park Ave Armory. 

That identity felt a million miles away. On-stage, she’s magnetic – bewitching, even. Whenever I saw her perform I thought of Bowie, who used identities like the Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust to give himself storytelling containers – and to distance himself from the pallid image of normalcy. 

But that was to protect himself, too. It’s easier to create for a character than to bare your authentic self, whoever that may be. Pseudonyms and masks provide a layer of abstraction. Intangible as they may be, they’re a carapace that absorbs attention and maintains private truths – whether you’re Tahliah Barnett (aka FKA Twigs) or Satoshi Nakamoto.

FKA…Someone Else

Barnett began her career as Twigs, a nickname inherited for the way her joints cracked. When she started making waves, ‘The Twigs’ – a band of twin sisters that’s been playing music since 1994 – asked her to change that name. She did, and since 2012, Barnett has ridden the FKA Twigs container to fame.

Identity remains close to her heart. This April, Barnett appeared in front of the US Senate judiciary committee to advocate for artists in the age of AI. While she sees positives in the tech – and even plans to employ a deep fake to engage with fans on social media, so she can spend more time making art – she wasn’t there to laud, but to waylay the coming storm.

Barnett blamed “an absence of appropriate legislative control” for the frequent, non-consensual use of artists’ voices and likenesses. It’s “not acceptable,” she said.

“I am me,” she added. “I am a human being, and we have to protect that.”

2024 has been a huge year for Barnett. She was on the cover of Vogue. Her face has been plastered on billboards all around London. In August, her new film The Crow – the modern reimagining of the 1994 cult classic, co-starring Bill Skarsgård – arrived. And in anticipation of her new album, Eusexua (coming in January, her first LP since 2019), she’s been touring the globe, experimenting in some middle ground between performance art, concert and rave. 

“Eusexua” is a term coined by Barnett. “Eusexua is the thing that makes me feel alive,” she said in a statement. “A moment of pure clarity when everything moves out of the way, everything is completely blank, and your mind is elevated.”

Last month, Barnett partnered with Sotheby’s for her durational piece, “The Eleven,” which was performed at the London gallery every day for two weeks.  

“Reaching that state of Eusexua is what the performance at Sotheby’s is all about,” Sotheby’s commented, “dealing with, and overcoming, through a series of healing somatic movements, the eleven aspects of life that FKA Twigs has found are most critical to her well-being.”

In the performance, eleven dancers (including Barnett) move through those eleven aspects, repeating each one for eleven minutes. It was also filmed at 50 frames per second and live streamed. Online viewers could capture and purchase the frames, each a one-of-a-kind, on-chain collectible.

Barnett’s “devotion to complete creative freedom also extended to the way she dressed,” the Sotheby’s statement continued. For the entire preceding year, she wore “simple yet beautiful pieces of clothing, developed in conjunction with her friend and collaborator Yaz XL, and developed with designer Camille Liu.” 

No doubt it was this simple attire I’d seen in that London cafe. “The garments allowed her freedom of movement and expression, and to focus on the internal rather than the external.” And come January, they’ll be on sale alongside her album.

Was the Barnett I’d seen at the cafe, then, simply another performative layer between “her” and FKA Twigs?

Ten minutes walk down St. James Street from Sotheby’s sits Christie’s, London’s other nearly 300-year-old auction house. The other day, to my surprise, Christy’s was featured on NPR. And it was because, since 2018, they’ve been using the blockchain to track provenance.

I still don’t understand why it was promoted as news, but it’s a reminder that the blockchain has ongoing, real-world utility that’s absent of speculation and scam. In fact, the blockchain is a means of protecting identity, and as I’ve written before in The Beat, it could be the verifying technology that protects our known voices and likenesses.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Sometimes, though, likeness is most powerful when it’s not known at all.

For more than a decade, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has remained elusive – premium fodder for investigative journalists. Dozens of possible characters have been proffered, but every time, ultimately, holes emerge and the narrative frays.

Who is the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator? The search goes on, because as ever, we’re spurred by our insatiable curiosity and desire for closure. 

But the revelation of Satoshi’s true identity won’t simply sate the curious. Satoshi – if he still holds the 1.1 million Bitcoin he mined at the currency’s outset, which is unknown – could be worth billions (someday, even, trillions – if the Bitcoin maxis have their way). Today Bitcoin is already the world’s tenth most valuable asset. Its $1.2 trillion market capitalization ranks it between Meta and Berkshire Hathaway. 

“If Satoshi is uncloaked,” writes Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker, “he might have to choose between unimaginable affluence and the integrity of the system he built.” Indeed, if the real Satoshi does still have access to that Bitcoin, and if he reactively sells the currency in response to his exposure, the cryptocurrency could crash. These are major implications.

Lewis-Kraus is writing about Satoshi because, earlier this month, the filmmaker Cullen Hoback asserted he’d found the guy. In a previous documentary, Hoback exposed who he claims is QAnon. And in Money Electric, he makes a case that Peter Todd, the “disputatious” Bitcoin developer who claims he could code before he could read, is the cryptocurrency’s long veiled sire.

Two days after HBO released the Money Electric trailer, Lewis-Krause notes, “millions of dollars of early bitcoins that may have belonged to Satoshi – much of it mined in the first few months of 2009, and untouched since – began to move.”

Todd, like all those who have preceded him, vehemently denies that he’s Satoshi. And since the documentary aired, he’s gone into hiding.

“Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping,” Todd said to Wired. “Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi.”

Adds Hoback: “While of course we can’t outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case.”

That case – and the long, precarious search for the Bitcoin creator – are very well-documented by Lewis-Krause (give it a read). Truth seekers have used everything from linguistic links, timestamps (the late Hal Finney, a “perennial favorite,” for instance, was photographed in 2009 running a 10-mile race at the precise moment Satoshi was sending emails), and various other mechanisms to piece together Satoshi’s cryptic likeness.

Lewis-Krause also cites the well-known fact that, based on his code, Satoshi was clearly not a traditionally trained programmer. He doesn’t get into the code itself, though.

“Whenever anyone says X is Satoshi, my first response is always ‘show me the code,’ tweeted Amir Taaki, an “OG Bitcoin dev” who built Dark Wallet with Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin (as well as Cody Wilson, a guns-rights activist who, according to Wired, is one of the most dangerous people on the planet). “This should be our default position.”

Even so, the stance taken by much of the Bitcoin community – including Todd and Taaki – is that there’s nothing to be gained from pursuing Nakamoto’s true identity. 

As Taaki continues:

There’s power in anonymity. It can come in various levels of abstraction, from Bowie to Burial to Banksy, who at Sotheby’s six years prior to “The Eleven,” rigged the frame for his piece “Girl with Balloon” to be shredded as soon as it sold.

Would we gain anything from knowing who Banksy is? Or is his commentary more effective when Banksy – or Satoshi – can be any one of us?

And then there’s FKA Twigs, who simply dons a moniker and stage presence that exists outside of her day-to-day character. Would we really feel her art if she showed up as the plain clothes person I saw at the cafe?

These are the forms that each creator chooses because it makes the most sense for their creation. It’s the level of abstraction that makes their work most resonant – where eusexua can be achieved, if you will.

And across all of these, even as we search for “true” identities, we’d do well to respect these words: “I am me. I am a human being, and we have to protect that.”

Coda

As a child I had a debilitating stutter – this is something I’ve shared here before. It made it impossible to trust my voice. Singing was the only way to cheat it, but even then, I was bullied and forced to turn inwards. In time, a rift emerged between myself and the image of myself, and they grew in tandem until I could no longer tell them apart. 

Recently, I named the image Moon Man, and my own music has become intertwined with him. As with FKA Twigs’ “The Eleven,” putting my music into the world has become, as she put it, “a physical and artistic quest for self-healing.”

Moon Man and I are polar opposites and yet the same, and various other characters continue to make themselves known – reflections of the multitudes that we all contain. I think we all struggle to hear the most salient voice, and to find balance in that band of merry mischief makers. Because maybe, they’re all true, strangers in a familiar setting that we get to spend our lives getting to know.

This week FKA Twigs released the second single from Eusexua, fittingly titled “Perfect Stranger.”

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.