February 24th, 2022:
Cultural initiatives are very hard to create out of thin air. Even creating a small piece that is designed to add to an already existing cultural movement is far from easy. Inventing something completely new is something extremely rare to be successful with.
The best of the best across time have now and then found a way to shape or reshape existing culture, and found a way to color it in a new light. Fairly contemporary superstars like Eminem, Prince and legendary publications like The Village Voice come to mind. Extreme accomplishments who in their own way rejuvenated pop music, rap music and metropolitan cultural news reporting.
Once in a blue-moon, a new cultural phenomenon built within existing paradigms blasts onto the scene by turning everything upside down creating a huge leap in cultural development. Hip-Hop is a good example. With its four cornerstones (DJing, MCing, Breakdancing and Graffiti) Hip-Hop set a new foundation for cultural expression that exploded as a global movement that still is sending shockwaves through everything.
Fashion and the breakthrough of female expression through apparel is another mind-blowing example in how art and culture can shift paradigms and re-shape life for millions of people. Fashion had existed for hundreds of years until Coco Chanel and other revolutionaries found a way to use it as a clear avenue for female emancipation throughout the western world. An avenue that since then has grown into several industries and given meaning to many professional careers.
Then there are the extremely few and shining moments where completely new cultural movements are being created by small groups of people who find groundbreaking new ways to invent or utilize tools and infrastructure to create a new world. Cave drawings, the printing press and classical music jump out as starting points for three major pillars of human culture over the last few tens of thousands of years, intensifying over the last few hundred years.
During our lifetime cultural expressions change more quickly than ever. New cultural movements are launched all the time across a multitude of infrastructures and platforms. Most of it is just overhyped stuff and many times outright crap that is forgotten before they can take off. But just like it has always been, the profoundly creative remains and is remembered forever.
Which is why we remember Mozart but not Salieri, why we still wear and pay homage to the creation of Coco Chanel, but nobody remembers Madeleine Vionnet. The founders of earth shattering cultural movements become their movement. Like Anthony Hopkins’ fictional character says in Westworld:
“Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin never died. They simply became music.”
Dr Robert Ford
Over the last few decades, culture and business has become more and more intertwined, and not only after the fact. Some of the big cultural expressions have been designed as a business from before they existed. Jay-Z didn’t just pitch himself as a rapper, he pitched a whole platform for a hip-hop centric empire from the start. Michael Jordan and Nike turned an extreme athlete into an attitude and global street wear phenomena that has made Jordan more money than his NBA career ever did.
Big business are not oblivious to what is going on. Marketing executives, brand managers and brand owners have been shouting about “lifestyle” for years now. Everything from underwear, beer, insurance, coffee and detergent are desperately trying to add a “lifestyle”-component to their offering, followed by members clubs and discount schemes and cringeworthy attempts to make a point system feel like a premium membership experience. So…. would the real Starbucks member who’s truly proud of their Starbucks points they can use to get a discounted Frappuccino (while constantly lending their cash interest free to Starbucks in turn) please stand up…?
Enter the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Inspired by the Cryptopunks but with a commercial membership component that is part of the pure genius addition by the founders that makes the BAYC something completely new and profound in human cultural significance.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is a non fungible cultural members club (soon to be a physical members club) where you wear your Ape as a badge of honor in all digital, and some physical, social settings while you at the same time carry the commercial rights that enables you to start a sub brand leveraging your Ape’s IP, which belong to the owner of the NFT, which you can trade!
It’s like Amex black meets Air Jordans meets digital unchangeable cave wall drawings that will be printed on our new cave walls called “Ethereum”, literally forever - meets business.
NFTs are the cultural arm of blockchain, which is quickly turning into blockchain’s “killer app”. The Bored Apes are not just the top of that food chain, they were also first in putting all these glorious pieces together creating the first consumer brand on web3. Read that again - The First Consumer Brand on Web3. That’s not nothing. And that’s still just part of it.
The wearable membership plus the commercial rights it comes with has not just increased the value of the assets in an explosive fashion, it’s also what drives the loudest and tightest community in NFTs forward. Not a brand that tries to create a member club (think Starbucks), not a members club that tries to be a brand (think Soho House), not a brand that “shares” some of its success with some of the owners (think Airline miles) not a series of collectible art pieces that tries to shape a community around it, not a community that tries to create something tangible for the community to hold on to - but all these things combined in a future shaping cocktail of extreme potency.
Esteemed investors such as Andersen Horowitz have been said to be in talks to invest at a valuation of around $5bn which would put the BAYC at a comparative level with companies like Supreme. The hundreds of millions in revenue and the billions in valuations are vast sums being thrown around that might seem like the most important and solid acknowledgement a startup (yes people, let’s remember this is a startup…) can get but we think that there might be another level this fascinating experiment might be able to reach.
Rolling Stone Magazine did a great interview and article with the founders in the famed BAYC issue back in November where we got to meet the team behind the Apes and hear their reasoning. It’s a fascinating read which we won’t relay here but there’s something magical about 4 guys coming together and just starting a cultural revolution of a magnitude we haven’t seen in a long time.
We’re not sure that the team themselves have grasped what they are in the process of actually making happen. The whole concept of NFT as brand/membership/cultural movement etc, has obviously escalated since the deployment of the BAYC and their own derivatives, and even if people who are not on the inside are shaking their heads in disbelief and waiting for this “fad” to be over - we think this is just the start.
Since Gutenberg invented the printing press over 129 million different books have been published. The absolute majority of these are already forgotten and will never surface again, but the invention created some immortality in the literature that it spread all over the world. Same thing applies to NFT projects printed in the early days of blockchain. Especially if the project is a new cultural innovation the likes of the world has never seen before, just like the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
When the time comes, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, No Sass, and Gargamel, might take their rightful place in history next to Gutenberg, Mozart, Orwell, Welles, Prince and Quentin Tarantino as some of the greatest of all time when it comes to culture innovation.
Studio TBD has acquired Bored Ape #9511 for the Studio TBD DAO Collection. We are proud and excited to be a part of the Yacht Club and are currently developing our contribution to the club and the monumental cultural shift it represents. Mint the Studio TBD Membership token to become a member of the DAO and join us on this exciting journey.
Here is a deck presentation of Studio TBD DAO and our Membership NFT mint.
#ForTheCulture