tl;dr: The Worst Generation, a 6 person collective made up of myself and my friends will be releasing The Worst Generation Master Collection, a collection of almost 200 songs, on November 20th on Metalabel. See you there.

Yo! I think I finally found a decent writing cadence. I hope these works feel like listening to a homie rant about something that's on their mind and then you're like "shit, sounds good to me" at the end. I don't think I mentioned this here but I wrote a piece about why it sucks to be in music NFTs right now here if you wanna read that. Don't let it distract you from what we're talking about today tho. With the intro out of the way, let's chat.

Collective Impact is Greatest

Something on my mind lately, and almost constantly, is the idea that collectives, crews, and groups have the possibility to create and shape culture in a big way. If we look at a lot of culture right now, so much of it comes from the foundation of them. Odd Future, A$AP Mob, TDE/pgLang, Donda, Griselda, Been Trill, Brockhampton, Wu-Tang Clan, Gilga/Royalty, Opium, and many many more. The impact of the collectives I've named are undeniable and they will continue to have impact for years to come. Seeing this, I've been inspired many times to do it myself. If culture is a result of community, I think there is massive energy in working collectively toward things.

Over the years, I've tried a lot of times to work with a lot of people on a lot of things myself. In the early 2010s, I started a blog and hopeful clothing brand with like 15 people called First and Foremost. All 15 of us met up in my apartment in North Charleston (in South Carolina) and we talked about ideas around creating a culture blog and were gonna do a series of basketball apparel for a made up Charleston, SC basketball team. In the mid 2010s, I was rounding up a handful of Black creatives in Charleston to try to spin up a creative agency. Not only were creative agencies in Charleston all white owned, but they almost fully white staffed, so I wanted to challenge that status quo. From 2012 to around 2019, I ran a local culture blog that had an adjacent clothing line, printing and selling bootleg tees. For around 18 months, I would throw a show every month, where I would invite 5 different artists from South Carolina each month. Many of them, it was their first show in Charleston, and many of their first time getting paid to perform. In 2019 and again 2020, I created an album showcasing South Carolina music by inviting over 100 artists, producers, engineers and visual creators to the studio over the course of a weekend. The first album came out no problems, and the second album is finished but still in limbo. I tried handing the brand off to a few folks who kinda just let it die. During my time in web3 (I'm still in it), I got to be a part of the team for a collective called Campfire. We put on a few writing camps (I hate that phrase it sounds too "industry" for me) and released a few songs from them. My song I Love This Shit with Stonez the Organic on my project SS23 is actually from that.

I think for consumers, being able to look at collectives as a way to navigate the congested world of content we exist in is a major unlock. Having a direction to look and the ability to consume not only a group body of work, but individual bodies of work, feels good. If you followed Been Trill then you followed Virgil Abloh to Pyrex and Off-White (& eventually Louis Vuitton), You followed Matt Williams to ALYX & NIKE MMW (& eventually Dior), you followed Heron Preston to his namesake brand, you followed Justin Saunders to JJJJound, and that informed your worldview...just by being a consumer of Been Trill. It also worked in reverse, where if you discovered one of the individuals, you could then be led back to the collective, and then could spread out to the individuals within it. This is a non-musical example, but it can be seen in music as well, with almost more energy, because they're able to feature on each other's songs.

Despite all of the benefits I've outlined here, it's not as simple as "call your friends and make it happen." As with all things, the road to success is not only paved with your own failures, but the failures of others. The road is a series of lessons, in this metaphor.

The Worst Generation

Something a lot of people know about me is that I notoriously hate working with people, and I think what I mean is that I generally have more impact when I don't work with others. I firmly believe that collectives can create exponential impact, but creating synergy is not as simple as it looks. For a long time, I've been making music with a bunch of my friends, and we've been releasing under the label Worst Generation for the last few years. The "friends" in question are myself (Black Dave MK2), Illadell, Kaizër, Martin Grooms, MJX & Yung Half Dead. We've talked a few times about doing an official release together, but haven't gone deeper than that. We've been featured across each other's music but haven't released something official as a collect. Our first step toward that is finally arriving.

Worst Generation Master Collection

Worst Generation begins its journey of impact with the release of the Worst Generation Master Collection, releasing with the platform Metalabel on November 20. The Worst Generation Master Collection is the unabridged starter kit to get you into the Worst Generation universe. We've compiled almost 200 of our songs, individual and collaborative, as well as a collection of music videos we've done over the years. We've also thrown in some unreleased music. This gives you a full view of all of us as artists in community with each other over the last decade, in the form of a few zip files.

About Metalabel

Metalabel is a platform that specializes in collective release of physical and digital goods. A lot of people who know me know that I participate in web3 and NFTs, and this is not that. This is for everyone
(!!!), no crypto required! Once you purchase on Metalabel, you're able to head to your purchases and download the whole Master Collection.

Culture = Content + Context

This is a topic that I believe should have its own post (it will, don't worry), but I believe that culture is formed at the intersection of content and context. The Worst Generation Master Collection is a vault of content, filled with context, and we hope to bring you into our culture.

Would love for you to follow us on social media:

• Worst Generation on X

• Worst Generation on Instagram

• Worst Generation on Substack

That was a lot, whoops.

This post ended up way longer than anticipated. I hope you guys will fuck with us on release day. November 20th on Metalabel. For my crypto folks, this post is collectable.