Bitcoin and Hip Hop
In a World of DJ Khaleds, Be an Immortal Technique
In 2006, I interviewed Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan. I asked him if the pre-1996 spirit of Hip Hop could ever be recaptured. Below is the exchange that followed.
Ghostface: Nah, I don’t think so. Nah.
Me: Why don’t you think it’s possible?
Ghostface: ‘Cause everything changed too much.
Me: That’s true… Do you think the Internet has been a major cause for change in Hip Hop?
Ghostface: Nah, nah, nah. Just people, period. Artists have changed.
Me: What do you think in the last decade has really changed about people?
Ghostface: Um. They minds. You know what I mean? Nobody wanna hear lyrics no more. It’s just about being up in the club and doin’ this and doin’ that. You know what I’m sayin’? In the South they have fun with it. Half of it’s become radio friendly. You don’t get a chance to play joints how we used to play. For instance, “C.R.E.A.M.” was a street legend back then. You know, they could play “C.R.E.A.M.” [on the radio] and all that. But, now, it’s like, to have a smash, smash hit you gotta really be something dance-y. The game has changed, man. Radio killed. Certain people got up in there. They were scared of certain Hip Hop and everything’s just fucked up, yo. You have more DJs acting like they controllin’ shit now. Like if you don’t do what they say they ain’t gonna play yo shit. They actin’ like they the boss of the muthafuckin’ game. You know what I’m sayin’? It’s craziness.
You can read the full piece here.
Alright, so you are probably thinking, “Okay, Frank. Very cool that you interviewed Ghostface, but what’s this got to do with finance?”
That’s a good question, and my response may seem like a bit of a stretch, but please stay with me.
Cryptocurrency coders (particularly Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin) = Pre-1996 Hip Hop emcees
Heads of central banks like Fed chair Jay Powell and politicians like Elizabeth Warren = Post-1996 hip hop (intentionally lower case) DJs
Code is one of the places in which truly free speech still exists, and some people (bitcoin holders) very much appreciate this (whether they know it or not). I appreciate it to a similar degree that I appreciate Hip Hop lyrics from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the “Golden Age of Hip Hop”.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur of coding. He perfected something that many before had taken a swing at, as Bitcoin wasn’t the first attempt at a cryptocurrency, but it was the “perfected” version, just as “Ready to Die” was the perfected version of Hip Hop). He created something so undeniable that it blew open the doors for a totally new, global industry. Actually, “industry” isn’t even the best word. “Paradigm” is a better word. Nakamoto changed the paradigm of the financial world, which is maybe even more than Biggie Smalls or Tupac Shakur did for music.
And then we have people like Fed chair Jay Powell, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, Captain Capitalism himself, Donald J. Trump, who are anti-cyptocurrency, even though the cryptocurrency markets are the only free markets that still exist. These people are the DJ Khaleds - the soulless clowns who diminish the spirit of what they claim to represent - of the financial world.
I have long been saddened by the fact that we live in a world where emcees like Immortal Technique are basically unknown, but someone like DJ Khaled is famous for simply repeating phrases “Another one” or “We the best” - like a clown-ass mamaluke. DJ Khaled is the epitome of what Ghostface was talking about when he said, “You have more DJs acting like they controllin’ shit now;” he’s a sign of how broken so many people’s minds are when it comes to music, the same way that Jerome Powell, Donald Trump, Jamie Dimon, and now Elizabeth Warren (in a bit of a different way compared to the previous three characters) are a sign of how broken people’s minds are when it comes to finance.
Merely hours after I published the last edition of the newsletter, the edition in which Elizabeth Warren won the “Clown Talk of the Week” award, almost on cue, it was announced that Warren made the following statement to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen via a letter:
“Crypto puts the [financial] system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders and miners…”
Super cringe-y. Hard to even type out. It’s so painful to think that 1. Elizabeth Warren knows so little about cryptocurrency or 2. She is just pretending to be ignorant about how it is likely the only way out of the mess that the institution for which she works helped to create. Either way, quotes like this are shameful, and if you are that woefully ignorant or purposefully manipulative, you are unfit to hold public office. Plus, I’ll take my chances with shadowy coders, as their code is public and auditable, whereas the shady bankers that destroy our financial system time and time again operate behind closed doors and use taxpayer money to prop themselves and their institutions up.
But then yesterday morning on CNBC, she really upped the ante, as she paralleled cryptocurrencies to non-FDA approved “drugs”, a non-apt comparison that I believe was made to simply continue to stoke fear in the market. Feel free to listen to her ill-informed babbling below.
We don’t need an “FDA to test these drugs”. Blockchains are public ledgers. The code for Bitcoin is public. Encryption is a mathematical equation. There’s hardly anything to be tested.
Besides, the Bitcoin network recently underwent a massive stress test: a large portion of its mining network was recently forced to migrate out of China and the network continued to operate without a hitch. Instead of assembling an “FDA to test these drugs,” Senator Warren, why don’t you go and assemble a team of lawyers to prosecute the bankers who caused the 2008 financial collapse or any one of the many politicians who have essentially been caught engaging in insider trading in recent years? (Great thread on that below.)
The government only has the power to regulate the on and off ramps to cryptocurrency, the exchanges (e.g., Coinbase and Gemini) and these are already regulated. Hell, if you live in a state in the U.S. like New York, you can’t even use over 90% of cryptocurrency exchanges because of regulation. So, until she proposes something concrete and explains what the word “regulation” means to her, I am done listening. I’m tired of listening to geriatric politicians from both sides of the aisle continue to ramble on and make veiled threats about a topic they know so little about.
Elizabeth Warren is, metaphorically speaking, the radio DJ that is “scared of certain Hip Hop,” as Ghostface put it. So is Jay Powell, so is Jamie Dimon, and so is Donald Trump. Just as Ghostface said that “Everything’s just fucked up” in the world of music, the same is true in the world of finance - and while we can squarely blame the Powells, Dimons, and Trumps of the world, it saddens me to say that the Warrens of the world seem to want to stand in the way of progress now, as well. The financial powers that be have had their day in the sun. They’ve shown us that they are either out to do the bidding of the super rich, or unable to stop those who do the bidding of the super rich (in Warren’s case).
Now, obviously, we can’t all be “shadowy super-coders”. This wasn’t even a thing at my seventh grade career day, and, even if it were, I’m still not sure that it was my calling. I don’t have a very good computer brain. However, we can reap the benefits of what these coders have given the world, and we can enlighten others as to why what they have given the world is important, which is what I try to do in this newsletter. And I do so in the spirit of someone like Immortal Technique.
Immortal Technique - a Peruvian-born, Harlem-bred emcee - has long been my favorite artist on planet Earth, and he holds this place in my heart not only because of his words, but because, as he puts it, he is “the message and the money.” I’ll let him explain better via his lyrics from my favorite track of his, “Industrial Revolution”.
“Stuck in the underground, a general that rose to the limit / without distribution, managers, a deal or a gimmick.”
To translate and add to what he said in the lyric above, Immortal Technique not only writes his own songs, but he owns his own publishing, he manages himself, he is invested in the label that releases his music, etc. He is a DIY machine, and, because of it, he isn’t held down under the thumb of a corporate record label or any other slick music industry pros, yet he still makes a good living off of his craft. Whoever knows Immortal Technique, knows him mostly due to the power of word of mouth. You’re not going to hear Immortal Technique on the radio because his type of Hip Hop is exactly the type of Hip Hop that Ghostface claimed radio DJs are scared of. [Also, fun facts about Immortal Technique: he graduated from the college at which I teach, Baruch College (CUNY), and also teaches in NY prisons via John Jay College (CUNY)].
And so I channel my inner Immortal Technique each time I sit down to write this newsletter. I don’t work for a news agency, I don’t have an editor, and I don’t care if you agree with what I write or not. I’m aware that there is bias and even anger in what I write, and, again, I don’t care. You can take from it what you will and make up your own mind about the topics about which I write. I am just here to offer an alternative perspective on finance, and to do so in an unmitigated fashion.
And I also write with something that Immortal Technique himself said to me when I interviewed him (back in what I believe was 2008, pre-financial crash) in mind. We spoke about his activism and organizing work in Harlem and about how he didn’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but that he felt it necessary to educate people about the precariousness of their financial situations.
“People come up to Harlem [and] they think people are still shaking around and they’re dancing and having a good time, and I’m telling people, ‘Look, it ain’t like that. People are being kicked out of their homes. They’re being removed forcibly in many situations.’”
In the age of COVID, an age where people are being kicked out of their homes because the government has paused their ability to earn an income without necessarily providing them with the funds to support themselves, the above quote rings particularly true. Not only is the government not doing its part in many cases, but it’s working with/allowing the Fed to exacerbate wealth disparities.
Now, I won’t pretend for even a minute that this newsletter is a form “activism”, because it’s not and I won’t demean the term like that, but it is a form of education. The politicians and bankers of the world, in conjunction with the mainstream media, do not want to discuss what is actually happening. These people are the DJ Khaleds of the world, the antitheses of the Immortal Techniques and the Ghostface Killahs. They keep repeating the same nonsense so that you keep you dancing to their off-beat rhythm. I’m tired of it, so I’m here to scratch their records and to give some oxygen to the “real emcees” among us.
When I used to make music more regularly, my goal was always to write the songs that I wanted to hear. As I writer, I write the words that I wish newscasters or journalists would say. Am I right about everything? No. Do I write about money because I want to be rich and own a big house and nice cars? Absolutely not. I write about money because I am sick of watching the people who make things worse profit the most. I also write about it because I have personally struggled with seemingly insurmountable student loan debt (more on that here), and I have seen too many friends struggle with it, as well. And I write about it because I deeply believe in the idea of being “the message and the money,” as Immortal Technique puts it. In other words, financial independence is important to me because we should be able to own the things that we dream of creating. We shouldn’t have to live under the censorship or the rules of institutions that don’t understand the importance of our creative vision. I write a lot about Bitcoin because of its anti-censorship qualities, and because it cannot be directly manipulated by the bankers and politicians of this world who do much more harm than good to our financial system. Lastly, I write about money because the world of finance is filled with DJ Khaleds, and we need more Immortal Techniques, people with the courage to share some much needed perspective that isn’t a part of the mainstream conversation, because right now the mainstream conversation is the equivalent of “being up in the club and doin’ this and doin’ that,” as Ghostface put it. But my gut tells me that last call is coming soon and that the house lights are about to come on.
[Steps down from soapbox.]
In closing, here are some words from two Hip Hop legends that are invested in the crypto space.
(Nas was an early investor in Coinbase and did very well when the company went public.)
So, I might not be coming out of Queensbridge (like the most dangerous emcees) but I’m just down the block, and I’m trying to use my words to get some of these financial narratives straight. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope that maybe some of what I write resonates with you and that you learn something in the process.
Straight Outta Astoria,
Frank
Twitter: @frankcorva
Currently Reading: “‘I Bleed with My Athletes’: The Story behind Dean Boxall’s Celebration” (A Piece on Australian Swimmer Ariarne Titmus’ Coach) & “We Are All Investors Now”, by Nick Maggiulli
Currently Listening To:
“Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” -Wu-Tang Clan
That was a pretty cool analysis/analogy 👍 It would work for me if I thought any particular piece of music or other art had any kind of absolute value relative to others - but I don’t. I agree with what I think Raoul Paul is trying to say - That the central banks have done what they should, that the wealthier countries are going to go the Japan way, and that we should focus on what the situation is without caring much and prepare accordingly.