Article contributed by Richard Paxton. Follow them on Medium here.
Those forty somethings who have a disposable ETH income, stand in line for iPhones, lean towards a Martha Stewart lifestyle (even though they leave copies of Sunset Magazine on the coffee table for guests) and might engage with cannabis on some level? They have likely (secretly) loved Snoop since Doggystyle and now simply refer to him as Cozomo de’ Medici, Snoop’s NFT art collecting alias. When he says to chill on the NFT disaster talk, they listen.
Those that lean towards financial conservatism and have not taken the leap from fiat currency based investments to digital currency based investments like NFTs, but who are curious and who stay abreast of the market’s news, are likely rolling their eyes at Snoop and his $17 million (USD) collection of digital art right now. Regardless of his recent makeover, this is not the guy they want to pin their investment hopes on. In case you forgot, Snoop Doggy Dogg (aka Calvin Broadus, jr.) was once considered one of the FBI’s Most Wanted; a gangster from Long Beach, California fronting Death Row Records, who was once suspected of murder. Maybe Martha really did soften him up?
Since Stewart got her clutches into Snoop he has emerged as not only a deft digital investor and player, but as you see in the video above also a sensitive man and father. He’s even served as a youth football coach. Is it an amazing PR and image transformation, or is it just Snoop being authentic? Perhaps the media in the 1990’s was too hard on gangster rappers, maybe took them too seriously as gangsters and not seriously enough as artists and social critics, and the police were therefore incentivized to put these rappers in scenarios that could put them behind bars? At least temporarily?
I am willing to give Snoop the benefit of the doubt, not because I fit perfectly into the first category described above, but rather because I kind of straddle the two and believe that people deserve less judgment and also that people who rise to the top, who are great at something did not get there on talent alone. They worked really, really hard to get there — to separate and then distance themselves from the competition. Perhaps Snoop has invested as much of himself and his considerable talents into Web-3 as he put into his music?
For that sole reason, I for one am listening to him. Perhaps you should too? Consider the following sage advice, which he gave to CNBC during a recent interview.
“I feel like every great industry has a downfall. There’s been a depression in every industry you can look at … alcohol, tobacco, clothing, food; every industry you can imagine … this [crypto winter] weeded out all the people who weren’t supposed to be in the space and who were abusing the opportunities that were there. Now it’s going to bring on great business, and moving forward, when the market comes back, there will only be great things to pick and choose from.”
The crypto winter certainly has not put the brakes on any of the creative crypto and NFT projects Snoop is involved with. In fact, on June 23, Snoop and fellow bad boy rapper, Eminem, launched a new single while on stage at the recent NFT.NYC event. The song features branding from the infamous Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, of which Snoop is a member/owner, in the song’s corresponding YouTube video, which you can view below.
The Dogg is really somewhat of a 2020s renaissance man and has his hands in a number of sandboxes, from investments in FinTech startups like Robinhood and Moonpay to the establishment of a cannabis-centric venture capital firm Case Verde Capital and his savvy and well-timed $50 million investment in Reddit, a web platform that bills itself as, ‘the front page of the internet’ and has grown in value from $500 million at the time of the investment in 2014 to over $15 billion in value today. The Dogg is simply too consistent to chalk up this string of smart moves to a string of luck. If so, that sure is a long string!
I am going to keep my eyes on the NFT marketplace per usual, but have added Snoop to my list of voices worth listening to, along with his son, Cordell Broadus, a.k.a. Champ Medici. I hope someday my son says something this cool about me publicly:
“It’s not just labels. It’s movie studios, it’s tech companies, it’s beverage companies … everybody’s rushing to Web3 and they see how big Dogg is in the space.”
Doggfather seems like a more appropriate name for Snoop than Cozomo de’ Medici, but the man knows more about art right now than I ever will. If the name fits, he deserves to wear it.
