Wu-Tang, Playboi Carti, and a weird week in rap’s crypto world

thefader.com:

Nearly two years ago, Eminem and Snoop Dogg shared a music video for a new collaborative song called “From The D to tha LBC.” The visuals featured characters in the style of the Bored Ape Club, a Web3 collective that had become synonymous with the NFT craze that saturated popular culture. For some, the digital tokens and their cryptocurrency marketplaces were the next stage in the intersection of art and commerce.

For others, they were ugly and exploitative harbingers of some hyper-transactional future; every cringeworthy celebrity plug and memed scam unlocked a new level of schadenfreude. For many, NFTs might feel like a relic of the pandemic era, a confusing and upsetting trend from a confusing and upsetting time.

Holly Herndon, a musician and programmer who had been experimenting with NFTs for years before they caught on, defended them when I spoke with her in 2021. The blowback, she said, resulted from pandemic-driven financial precarity and an inaccessibility of the technology.

“All of a sudden you have this new wealth-driven system come on the scene and you see celebrities able to magic large sums of money out of nowhere,” she said. “And that's super alienating.” Read Next: Wu-Tang Clan announce Las Vegas residency