No matter how connected you are to the Notorious B.I.G., those in control of his inheritance believe you can be even more connected.
A 3,000-piece NFT collection that uses algorithms to revive the late icon’s characteristic was made available by the estate. First to a list of followers who had shown their devotion and later to the broader public. The Notorious NFT is committed to the idea that saving an artist doesn’t necessarily mean preserving them in your heart, but rather saving them to your digital wallet.
For those who support it, this is a chance to convey Biggie’s soul in a manner that even the rawest bootleg can’t, albeit, as with many other aspects of web3, not everyone will see the benefit.
“This is a chance to give fans a piece of his legacy instead of just pushing the legacy on them,” said Wayne Barrow, a longtime friend of the rapper who now helps manage his estate. “It’s what makes web3 great — you can participate instead of just purchasing what somebody’s selling.”
Barrow claimed that the digital art isn’t even the main attraction of the drop. The fate of the “Fulton Street Freestyle,” a well-known viral video in which a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace improvised lyrics on a Brooklyn street corner for cheering audiences, will be determined by membership in a collective.
No licenses have ever been issued for the performance. However, the 3,000 NFT owners will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not any paying entity is allowed to use it as a sample or in other derivative works. Depending on the specifics, members might even receive some money from the sale.
The drop is called “Sky’s The Limit,” a reference to Biggie’s posthumous 1997 hit about dreaming big — and a sly allusion to how far technology has come from the world of the song, in which he’s the only man around with a mobile phone.
Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace, businessman Elliot Osagie, and Barrow recently met with OneOf, an NFT company co-founded by Quincy Jones that had previously auctioned off an NFT of an unreleased Whitney Houston demo track.
For this, OneOf picked from a variety of Biggie’s well-known looks and modified them for the NFT. It is a “generative drop,” which refers to an AI producing distinctive graphics by making little adjustments to a number of templates, such as altering the backdrop color. Although organizers worked with the animation studio Seriously Fun, there is really no artist.
A two-hour presale “allow list” of fans who submitted declarations of their fervor was compiled in order to decide who gets first crack. Backers claim they wanted to prevent too many speculators from driving up the price, although they recognize that this is practically unavoidable (and perhaps desirable).
“Every single item has a story and it’s often not the story people understand,” said Christopher Sealey, OneOf’s creative director. “We have one with Biggie holding a bag of cash, and the reason we included it is not because he was talking about money but because if you talk to his neighbors even now, then they’ll all say how generous he was in the community.”