Curren$y’s For Motivational Use Only drops today, and its lead single, “Never Fall Off,” is manifesting an infinite run at the top. But it’s not greedy: “I wish the same for my dogs,” they say. “Money won’t break us apart.” This is about as ambitious as we’re going to get today (jumping shortly into some bummers in the weed business) so enjoy the high while it lasts.
New Yorkers, are you ready to fight? Hot on the heels of the We <3 NYC dispute, Hellgate is out with a mic drop on the tacky weed bodega aesthetic.
The grey-market stores springing up since New York passed the weed bill have become almost a meme of themselves: puns everywhere, stoned-looking cartoon characters; the opposite of the contemporary branding you expect to see when a state goes legal. Folks have been pointing and laughing for months, but a nexus of design types and old-school New Yorkers are kind of into it.
Edward Snajdr, co-author of “What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification and Placemaking in Brooklyn,” calls it (as summarized by Katie Way) “reminiscent of a bygone era in New York City small businesses,” a time where the appearance of a physical business would give you an idea of what was going on inside that you didn’t have to decode through serifs.
Scott Santoro who teaches at Pratt went so far as to call it outsider art.
Anyway, your consumer opinion is one thing, and the state’s is another. Our governor is thinking about trying to deter the unlicensed dispensaries with massive fines ($200k for getting caught selling unlicensed).. AND FELONIES. That would effectively re-criminalize weed, shunting the responsibility from the state, which is probably to blame for all the illegal business after taking two whole years to license anybody at all.
Interesting choice of regressive stance, what else you got?
You know who’s *not* dealing in outsider art is Ben Cohen. That’s Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry, whose new pre-roll venture is rolling out low-THC “slo-smokes” for the folks who miss when a single toke wouldn’t get you blazed out of your mind.
Aside from being personally on-brand, the company is an example of how rich white people probably ought to enter the weed business: as a nonprofit, B3 (short for Ben’s Best Blnz) distributes most of its margins as grants to Black cannabis entrepreneurs through NuProject, and the rest goes to the Last Prisoner Project and the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance.
Something to appreciate is how Ben’s branding honors Blacks luminaries as a way of acknowledging how the war on drugs used weed to undermine their communities. The packaging features the work of Dana Robinson, whose paintings reinterpret ’50s and ’60s ads from Ebony Magazine (“the only time I would see Black people in adverts,” said the brand designer Eddie Opara). And custom typefaces by Tré Seals work to “define what equity could be” (any typeface designers who want to say more on this, pls chime in).
When you see the box is also scattered with quotes by Angela Davis and Nelson Mandela, you start to remember that a lofty white boomer is in charge — like, maybe that’s the clearest way to reference abolition, but also do we want to namecheck some people who are actually in the industry? Anyway, the schtick from the ice cream days stands: if you’re not going to directly support your local guy, maybe buy from Ben instead of — oh wait, B&J got bought by Unilever.
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