So Koffee’s new album is out and this one piece of the Pitchfork review does her such a service:
“Signing to a major label at 18 [and] winning the Grammy for Best Reggae Album at 19… is the kind of uplifting trajectory the music industry loves, and the narrative tends to flatten Koffee’s message. Her joy is rightly celebrated, but she also tells real stories about her life, including critiques of the Jamaican government’s complicity in structural poverty and gun violence (most explicitly on 2019’s crunchy dub “Raggamuffin”). And so Koffee’s COVID-era album, upbeat as it sounds on its face, is not a spiritual turnaround… She ultimately lands on a gratefulness that reads as hope, simply because to do otherwise doesn’t seem much in her nature.” That’s what “Gifted” is: gentle and sunny song of uplift, sitting within a full and complex spiritual topography. Keep that in mind as you bliss out to the tune.
Did you know that Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon and Eva Longoria are all in an “alpha chat” on Signal where they share NFT intel? Oh wait sorry you don’t know WTF is an NFT? That’s probably because you’re a woman, you poor, marginalized dummy. But you’re in luck: these feminist celebs are here to Bring. You. IN (crowd goes wild) to the space dominated by GROSS TECH BROS (Thirdlove bras go flying).
As you have likely read by now, we have girlbossed crypto, and nothing shows it off better than BFF Minted, an “access”-themed Zoom conference where Gwyneth and Mila appeared earlier this year to introduce more women into the NFT space. Selected scenes, per the Washington Post:
“Randi Zuckerberg, the older sister of Meta’s chief executive, told the BFF crowd that six months ago, she was just like them. “I was skeptical, I was confused. Fast-forward to now, I now own more than 100 NFTs!” Zuckerberg said, comparing NFTs of digital art to collecting designer handbags.”
“[Brit] Morin closed the event by offering everyone in the audience a free NFT of a friendship bracelet that is trading for at least $3,000 on the secondary market, with 7.5 percent of those sales going back to [Morin’s own company] BFF.”
This is a particularly egregious example of the fem-NFT projects have been drumming up hype around already-powerful white women pretending that anyone breaking into the boys’ club is radical enough. Nitasha Tiku really skewers the dynamic in the Post — read it — but for now let’s hear it for the WOC-led crypto projects (Crypto Besties and she256 among them) doing a much harder, and much more expert job of creating their own space.
Elsewhere in limited-edition nonsense, it appears that Coke is out with a new flavor that’s supposed to taste like pixels? Having experienced Crystal Pepsi and Mountain Dew Code Red, something tells me that Coke Byte more or less tastes like soda, but we’ll give it the time of day. If it wasn’t obvious who this product is for, you’d find some clarity on a specific island in Fortnite where you can find the “cans” nestled in with a variety of Coke-engineered activities. And if you want to actually, you know, taste it, it’ll be sold in real-life stores for a brief moment starting May 2. The only remaining question: does it come in diet? (Yes, exclusively.)
If you are into today’s newsletter, I’m going to *strongly* recommend subscribing to Dirt. Written by a rotating cast of Intellectual People, they’ve got the uh… rub on the space where internet culture meets aesthetics. This week, they hit the “bad wibes” around the whole Berghain debacle and managed to deliver an infinite cackle in the form of birds that look like Guy Fieri. (Also a critique of the new Bitchcoin!) Anyway. Whenever you’re ready for more, find Dirt here.
