Songs As Ordinals A New PR Stunt

Rappers love flaunting their wealth; it makes up a large percentage of their lyrics, and it’s been part of hip-hop culture for decades. What began a positive message of rags to riches through your art, work ethic, and endeavours have devolved over time into braggadocious bars that seem never to find a conclusion.  

It’s always about upping the next rapper, about attaining a greater amount of wealth only to waste or fault it; luxury cars, designer clothes, and massive mansions have been the hallmarks of rap songs and music videos. As these items become ubiquitous, they lose their appeal, and the flexing requires a makeover. 

Finding new ways to display wealth has led some in the rap game towards Bitcoin and, to a greater extent, crypto🤮.

What can I say? 

Rappers aren’t Bitcoiners; they are shit-coiners. They have bad OPSEC and high-time preferences and fail to see how they’ve benefited from the fiat system and how money is redistributed. 

Mic Drop on Crypto? Why Rappers and Crypto Don’t Always Rhyme

For anyone who has spent any time learning about Bitcoin and how it works, this foray of rappers into the world of finance feels off and crypto cringe-worthy.

I remember physically convulsing seeing Snoop Dogg at Wrestlemania 39 wearing a gold and black diamond Ledger Nano X around his neck on a gold chain. 

I also pissed myself seeing Drake share an image of his diamond-encrusted Ledger Nano on Instagram, writing, “Waiting on you, Bitcoin.” 

Why not really flex on us and drop that seed phrase on us, Papi? 

Keep your flexing off-chain

Now you can talk out your arse about Bitcoin, flex your hardware signing device and shill whatever project you want to your fans; I don’t mind, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest, but when you’re actively promoting spamming your music into the blockchain, now we have a problem.

French Montana recently triggered this debate after choosing a unique release strategy for his previously unreleased track “Bag Curious.” On March 14, the Mac & Cheese 5 account on X (formerly Twitter) announced that the song had been inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

The song is also the third-largest Ordinal inscription, taking up an entire block, indicating that the blockchain can adapt beyond the world of finance. The inscription is numbered 64333690, has a size of 3.956 megabytes, and occupies the entire block #834,618.

I highly doubt French knows how to set up a full node, let alone inscribe arbitrary data using a BRC-420 metaprotocol into the blockchain.

So, who are the accomplices of this crime against the blockchain? From the promotional material, it looks like a combination of the Bitmap and Merlin layers, the faux layer two scaling solution, and public Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital.

Nice to see you’re willing to put your name on this nonsense so I know who to hate for the following quote. 

Seriously? Robust cloud storage system? Get out of here with that nonsense; my node and everyone else is not your damn cloud server; this is a device to maintain consensus over global money for the entire planet. 

I know my complaints and views mean nothing, and if you have Bitcoin, you can do what you want with it and purchase block space for any use case, but man is this narrative enraging.

Stay in your lane

Now, I am not here to mash on French Montana. He doesn’t know what this is all about, and his publicist likely thought it was a good idea. Maybe a kickback from those companies smoothed the process over, but don’t you see how out of place this is?

Without a deep understanding of what you’re promoting, it just makes you look like a moron. 

Not that he wouldn’t be the first celebrity to promote Bitcoin or crypto or toss around technical jargon, but do they grasp the underlying tech and what it is used for?

It just feels like tone-deaf, inauthentic shilling for a quick fiat payout. 

Using Bitcoin as a USP

When your music is easy to reproduce autotune garbage that was ghostwritten for radio plays and TikTok dance trends, it won’t exactly stand out or remain memorable on the merit of the work itself, so you have to find other ways of standing out. 

So, will embedding a song no one will remember into the time chain for all time make it part of history? I doubt it; just because a file is hosted on-chain doesn’t make it any better. There is no premium to command; all you did was host a file in a clunky and slow database meant for financial transactions. 

I guess flexing on the plebs and showing the world you can purchase an entire Bitcoin block for yourself is the digital version of luxury cars and champagne, which are classic rap flexes. 

The top has not yet been topped.

Bitcoin is getting frothy as we move into halving cycle mania. That will always attract the uninitiated, the celebrities, the sports stars, and the influencers looking to make a quick buck off the latest hype.

When these characters appear in the space, markets feel “toppy”. 

Bitcoin is going up, it’s in the public mindset, it’s cool again, and people are making money, so I get the appeal to use it for marketing your brand or business. 

So, I had better get used to the nonsense that would follow. 

This will likely be the first of many forgettable projects that will kick off over the next 18 months until this all comes crashing down and everyone shuts up, goes into hibernation and washes their hands of ever speaking about Bitcoin.

The cringe will continue

The examples of rapper-Bitcoin pairings feel cringe-worthy, but it does get the idea of Bitcoin out to a broader audience that might not have considered it or paid attention to it until their favourite celebrity starts shilling it. 

So I’ll take that as a silver lining; however, awareness is only the first touch point and financial literacy and responsible promotion are key. 

Learn about Bitcoin before you put a dime of your money into this market so you know what to expect and you’re ready for the volatility ride; if you’re following your favourite rapper into Ordinals, I warn you to prepare for any of the money you put in to go to zero. 

Finally, if celeb endorsements in the finance space do make you feel uneasy, as they should, it might be better to hit the mute button on any of them for the next few months.