The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet – featuring all the friends we’ve met along the way.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Microdosing

For the past few weeks, I’ve been on a microdosing protocol. The definition of microdosing varies, but it generally involves taking about one tenth of a “trip” dose 2-4 times a week. My goal is to tap into the deep-rooted contentment I find in psilocybin – for me, there’s more empathy, less anxiety and a more grounded sense of well-being. 

I’m testing a hybrid of the Fadiman and Stamets protocols – the two most popular microdosing regimens. Due to legal complexities, empirical research is difficult to find, but psychedelics – often via microdosing and supervised treatment programs – are slowly seeping into the mainstream.

As of this year, a couple dozen countries (or parts of them, at least) have “given a legal or decriminalized foothold” to psychedelics. In the US, Colorado and Oregon successfully campaigned to legalize and regulate psilocybin. But progress is still slow – last month, Massachusetts rejected a similar measure.

For me, these efforts are well worth pursuing. One side effect of my microdosing has been a deeper connection with the natural world – which consequently features an existential dread. Mushrooms can’t thrive on a dead earth, either, and perhaps that’s what they’re communicating when I eat them.

But imagine if we treated microdosing like other rituals, like a morning coffee or a multivitamin. Perhaps if more of us felt the existential dread, we’d do things better, in more sustainable ways. 

But as the dread creeps in, it’s important that we don’t simply succumb to a deep depression of an imagined – and perhaps, imminent – uninhabitable earth. 

How can we find balance between these spaces? How do we advocate on the behalf of others – earth included – while continuing to justify personal joy in the only life we get to live? Maybe the humble mushroom teacher – and a colorful cast of characters – holds some answers…

Deacon, Martin, BLOND:ISH, & Space

In college, I ran the soundboard for our campus music venue. A highlight was supporting the eccentric composer and electronic musician, Dan Deacon. Deacon’s reputation was built through his live shows. He didn’t play on stages. He performed on the ground, at audience-level, perched behind a table of hardware – an electronic mess of knobs, dials, cables and patches, glowing across varicolored LEDs.

As he played, he asked listeners to participate. Sometimes that meant sitting in a circle. But mostly, it meant movement. He asked us to use our arms to form tunnels while others ran through them. And we did, weaving through one another, laughing, outside the venue and back in again. 

Parked outside was Deacon’s signature school bus. The vehicle’s engine had been modified to run on recycled vegetable oil. On the tour prior (circa 2007, when Deacon bought a computer while tripping on mushrooms), to promote his debut record, Spiderman of the Rings, he’d retrofitted his car with a similar engine – “it constantly smelled like fast food in the car,” he told NPR. The record was a nod to the inner child, spastic noise rock that sounds like your favorite Marvel superhero playing video games with the cast of Sesame Street.

Now, some 17 years later, he’s scoring actual superhero movies. He composed the score for Venom: The Last Dance, the final installment of the Tom Hardy-fronted trilogy. Though I didn’t like the first Venom and will probably never see this one, I’ll listen to Deacon’s score, because by bridging joy and stewardship – for the earth, for the crowds, for the inner children we all have running around inside of us – he helped me realize that joy and sustainability can be kindred spirits.

Elsewhere, the DJ BLOND:ISH just announced that her forthcoming record, Never Walk Alone, will be a “biovinyl” LP made from biogenic waste (which includes recycled vegetable oil). The vinyl “is 99.98% petroleum-free,” she wrote on her Instagram, “and cuts 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the [manufacturing] process.”

BLOND:ISH is the founder of Bye Bye Plastic, a non-profit foundation whose mission is to “wipe out single-use plastic in the music industry.” Last year, she released a compilation on a biodegradable PHA vinyl record.

“Made using naturally occurring bacteria to build a plastic replication,” the DJ’s website reads, “this vinyl is entirely bio-based, and biodegradable in any environment, including the ocean.” 

The album’s first track, “Life is…” was also minted as an NFT on the Sound marketplace. BLOND:ISH has been fairly active in web3 – and in her associations with mushrooms. In college, before she became a DJ, she sold mushrooms. 

And on The Sandbox – a blockchain-based creative platform – she has a collection of mushrooms that populate her world, including: “A mushroom…that can take you to many places, or keep you company in one!”

More wisdom from the humble mushroom teacher…

Remember back in 2019, when Coldplay promised to stop touring until concerts were “environmentally beneficial?” The announcement followed the band’s A Head Full of Dreams tour in 2016 and 2017, which featured 109 crew members, 32 trucks and nine bus drivers traveling through five continents.

It was likely around the time frontman Chris Martin had his sole experience with mushrooms, which “sort of confirmed [his] suspicions about the universe,” he said. “[He] was like, ‘Okay, yep, that seems to be true.’” It’s unclear exactly what those suspicions were, but I imagine being a better earth steward wasn’t far removed from his trip.

Coldplay was hardly alone in accruing environmental debt by touring, of course. U2’s 2009 “claw” structure required 120 trucks. According to one environmental group, the band generated the equivalent carbon footprint of a return flight from Mars.

After the announcement, Coldplay didn’t stop touring altogether. They created a 12-point plan to reduce emissions by half, and earlier this year, they reported they’d reduced their carbon footprint by 59 percent.

All the while, Coldplay has still been relentlessly happy Coldplay. Last week, Rolling Stone published a lengthy cover story on the band. Much of the piece is dedicated to the band’s overt jubilance – a hallmark that’s earned them tags like “insufferable” and “faultless to a fault.”

Musically, I generally agree with these tags. I mourn the early Coldplay that plumbed self-pity and sadness as benevolent songwriting cues. Give me “Yellow” and “The Scientist” any day, without the saccharine glaze and colossal soundstages that define their output these last two decades. 

Still, in a world where Elon Musk is actually looking to orchestrate return flights from Mars, I won’t discount the value of their joy-laden counterweight. Perhaps it was what the mushrooms prescribed.

Speaking of Musk, to his credit, much of his success has been defined by climate-bettering pursuits – like fully electric Teslas and, via SpaceX, reusable launch vehicles that decrease environmental impact. (Though I’d argue, based on his other behavior, his endeavors are driven more by finance and power than by care.)

Musk and SpaceX currently find themselves in the crosshairs of at least three federal agency reviews. At issue is Musk’s failure to comply with reporting requirements. Conflicts of interest – a theme of last week’s Beat – are manifold. 

“To have someone who has major contracts with the government who would be in a position to pass along – whether deliberately or inadvertently – secrets is concerning,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire and a member of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations.

Environmental concerns are amongst the backlash incurred by SpaceX. Though SpaceX rockets are greener than others, their launch frequency – and where SpaceX conducts launches – negate much of the environmental advantages. And they have “sometimes ignored environmental regulations as it rushed to fulfill its founder’s vision,” NPR wrote two months ago in a piece titled, “SpaceX wants to go to Mars. To get there, environmentalists say it’s trashing Texas.”

In 2022, Musk painted Mars as a Plan B – and not just for humanity. He alluded to his Starship as being something of an ark: “We are life’s stewards, life’s guardians,” he said. “The creatures that we love, they can’t build spaceships, but we can, and we can bring them with us.”

It’s one of Musk’s nicer sentiments, and reminiscent of Terrence McKenna’s mushroom-inflected words in the Coda (it’s worth noting that Musk has endorsed the use of psychedelics), but even a crewed mission to Mars is likely decades away – to say nothing of any semblance of an Earth-like environment (optimistic estimates of terraforming Mars are measured in centuries).

If we can run our vehicles on recycled vegetable oil, and print our vinyl on biodegradable discs, and use mushrooms to build houses, grow better crops, dye textiles, provide packaging material, produce ethanol, create leather alternatives and incite a grounded sense of well-being while motivating us to be better stewards, then surely we can pursue Plan B without destroying Plan A in the process.

Coda

I’ve also begun to dabble in growing my own mushrooms. I bought the OG growing bible Psilocybin, Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide by the McKenna brothers (Terrence and Dennis) via their pen names, O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric. 

It’s a procedural tome for growing – with more organic chemistry than the layperson may be willing to endure. Still, it’s a fascinating read. And what I most appreciate about it is the foreword by Terrence McKenna. It’s a bit mystical, but as we celebrate the holidays with loved ones, more attuned to the importance of gathering and relational living, maybe his words won’t feel so farfetched.

In this passage, McKenna embodies the perspective of the mushroom when it’s imbibed by a human being. In that moment, wisdom manifests. Within that wisdom, perhaps there are even secrets that will help us travel to our Plan B’s – without destroying this home that for so long has enabled our co-existence:

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.