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Crypto 2022 Culture Week

How crypto is changing media and entertainment – and forging its own culture. Follow along with our continuing coverage here.

 

Rapper Latashá on NFTs and Inclusivity in Tech

The way the hip-hop artist and Zora community manager sees it, NFTs' benefits are well worth the gas fees.

 

Infinite Games: How Crypto Is 'LARPing'

Crypto communities are playing a big series of "live action role playing games," and they're changing how we organize and interact across digital and physical spaces.

Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

Rapper Latashá on NFTs and Inclusivity in Tech

Latashá Alcindor still has a day job, but it's a lot more fun than the last few.

 

Like many of the artists now intimately involved with NFTs, Alcindor – better known as the mononymous rapper Latashá – began the year without much of an interest in crypto. She'd already found a kind of underground success in her native Brooklyn, with a series of independent albums and singles released over the the past few years. 

 

Music had been a side hustle before she started making real money from it; stints at companies like Urban Outfitters and JPMorgan helped pay the bills. "I was doing three shows a week, while also working my nine-to-five," she said. Sustained collaborations with two prominent New York performance spaces, National Sawdust and The Shed, helped raise her profile, but the songs themselves were never her primary source of income.

 

It was Alcindor's partner, the artist Jahmel Reynolds, who got her hooked on non-fungible tokens back in February. 

 

"It was right during the [coronavirus] pandemic, we were both trying to figure out supplemental income," she explained. "Couldn't really perform, couldn't really do anything. And then Jah came to me one day and was like, 'Yo, you ever heard of this thing?'"

 

Alcindor said she didn't pay much attention until Reynolds started to generate income from his NFTs. It was a sign of a clear momentum at a moment when cash was scarce – and money has a way of melting away some of that initial skepticism. She minted her first token (tied to one of her music videos) on a protocol called Zora, and one of the site's co-founders snapped it up for $1000. 

 

"Since then," quipped Alcindor, "I was hitting the ground running."

 

Zora hired her as the company's head of community programming in June, and she's been promoting the brand ever since. At this year's Art Basel, in Miami, Alcindor hosted Zoratopia IRL – a day-long event focused around the intersection of culture and crypto, with an emphasis on Black NFT creators.

 

NFTs remain relatively inaccessible, thanks to crypto's technical barrier to entry (interacting with these systems is exceedingly complicated) and consistently high fees. Putting art on the blockchain is far more expensive than just uploading it to Instagram.

 

The way Alcindor sees it, the potential benefits are well worth the price of entry; you won't find music videos selling for thousands of dollars on Instagram. 

 

"We're trying to encourage marginalized communities to come on board," she said. "It's beautiful to see people see other people's stories and be like, 'I could do that too.'"

 

Read the full interview here

 

Will Gottsegen

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