Def Jam just signed a bunch of NFT whales

When you work in journalism, you get a lot of emails. That you wouldn’t-wish-on-your-worst-enemy inbox totals. (As of this writing, mine is 35,101.) After a while, neither is surprising; you just become Cypher in The matrix watch the characters float across the screen and decipher their meaning. This week someone made a very disturbing message: I’m too old for this shit.

That’s not what it actually said, of course. What it actually said was: “Def Jam signs digital avatar music group The Whales.” When I opened it, I found that the label whose work I’d been consuming since the days of the tape deck, the one that signed Jay-Z and Slick Rick and the Beastie Boys, has made a deal with a group of made-to-order cartoon whale characters. by a Web3 company called Wagmi Beach. It is a partnership between the brand and The Catalina Whale Mixer, which Billboard says is “a collection of 5,555 NFT avatars on the Solana blockchain.” In layman’s terms, a long-revered label just signed a bunch of digital collectibles to make music.

Please understand, it’s not that I find this concept confusing. I grew up in the Gorillaz era. But what is confusing is that there is currently no Damon Albarn. The press release promised an “all-star cast” of writers, producers and artists, but named none. Instead, Wagmi co-founder Alec Lykken issued a statement declaring that Web3 signaled “a fundamental technology shift that will change how music and art are consumed by generations to come.”

Sure, but what music? Def Jam has connections to the biggest artists in the world, and I’m sure there will be some people who actually make a solid record, but this has to be the metaverse’s version of putting the cart before the horse. The press release didn’t even say what genre of music The Whales would be making.

This isn’t meant to pooh-pooh an idea just because it’s full of buzzwords and glosses over concrete details, but if Web3 really wants to revolutionize art, it should make some too. Yes, Dadaists would argue that anything can be art if you say it is, but a band without music is something else. It’s hard to imagine Rick Rubin going into the studio with a bunch of digital collectibles, even if they’re made by people with some really good ideas about their vibe.

I want to be proven wrong on this. Maybe The Whales are the next Gorillaz. Or, at the very least, maybe they can hire Albarn to make them sound like they are. Maybe they can do every concert in Fortnite and never give out autographs. Maybe I’m the one who’s out of date.