A Creator's Journey to Self-Sovereignty: 'The Why Is in the Who'

Transcript

this is who I am this is what I do this is who I am I'm the living proof so oh M the remix featuring K Natasha record huge day produced by sunson oh my God filmed by my babe Jamal oh yeah yeah film by yours oh my god um yeah how you feel how you feel I want to cry right

now trying to hold it because I'm so grateful cry no I'm not going to cry cuz I cry all the time cry and celebration oh my God te of Joy 11,000 let it out on January 5th of some year I'm not going to tell you Latasha Alcindor was born accidentally my mom named me after a revolutionary being Latasha Harland and she also named me after Lou alcendor Kareem Abdul jabah still trying to decide if he's my grand Uncle probably

owes me a check somewhere but imprinted on my birth certificate there was Legacy there was activism there was a fight I grew up in Brooklyn New York right after the crack era right with hip hop surging biggie Sak Cruz shabar ranks are instilled in my blood and all I wanted to be as a kid was a star but you know growing up in a Caribbean and Latina background that was not really a thing I did grow up with a crew of hustlers though my mother had a

regular 9 of5 in the daytime and at night time she was a dance hall Queen the Jamaican clubs my dad was a street Hustler I'm not going to tell you what he was selling but you know and my aunt used to boost clothes and I don't know if you know what that means but we'll talk about it later and I was just this little girl with my headphones on pretending to be TLC but the walls in New York apartments were really thin and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment where me and my mama was sharing who would sleep in the bedroom out of that I just started to

write and create poetry and I found the first love of my life at 16 years old and he was like yo girl you really good at this poetry thing you should do it more and it was the first time I found somebody who appreciated my expression and understood it he was then shot and murdered and at that moment I felt like all I had was poetry to heal myself and to understand myself now my mama was like we not doing that poetry and I ended up taking a lot of law classes and becoming this idea of what it is to be success I was the champ at my mock child's classes and debate team

and etc etc but I hated it so when I went to Wesleyan University that's when I started to develop this love for sociology black study psychology and I started deep diving into performance art and Hip Hop and that's when I realized like this was what I wanted to talk about this is what I cared about I cared about my own history I cared about the history of other people I wanted to see and develop an activism through these works and so I started to write different plays and thesises and I thought I was going to graduate and become I'm Linn Manuel existence was like ha you think I ended up working for a scary bank that

I'm not going to tell y'all also about and I would go in with my blonde hair and my long nails and people was like that girl don't belong here and I did it and at night time I would head over and go to the ciphers in New York City and the Poetry Slams and I would just give them everything I could and before I knew it I I became Latasha the artist and people were like girl you should be out here and I did I ended up opening for Kanye West qtip Big Sean and all these crazy people but I had no clue what was going on in the music industry at all all I knew is what Jay-Z told me was to keep my masters and make sure I

keep everything to myself as long as I could but when I would go to these label meetings they would tell me things like girl you got to be sexier you got to give us more your body is not right what you're saying is not right and I just fell into this deep depression because I had finally found a passion for something that I really loved and enjoyed but this industry just couldn't compete or understand who I was so I fell into a lost moment I really remember this time period where I was between getting a metro card or paying for

dinner because I had given everything I could to this music industry and I just wasn't receiving the value back I remember my Mama being like girl this dream isn't for you but deep down in my core I knew that there was something really special about what I was creating and doing for people and so I continued on I started to just self-managed Self book I was doing everything I can to be out there and for people to see me I even might have emailed some of y'all in this room as a fake manager or PR person I was trying to just get myself out there and then it started to grow and shift before I knew it I became the

first hip-hop artist to perform and become an artist and Resident at National sawdust the shed I was also one of the first to bring music to Maybelline and Ulta beauty and do a lot of expansive things and I was like okay something is starting to grow then I found my family lighthouse we started to build music videos and content and it really started to expand in the space people in New York City was like oh she's fire we need to support her we need to grow with her and without a dollar these people invested in me they started shooting my music videos they started telling people about who I

am and what I was doing and then we grew together and to Los Angeles and Los Angeles was a trip boy I was like this is a whole different kind of hustle I signed a publishing deal that was pretty much crap to pay my bills I was doing sync music and trying to get my music out there even more and the company that I was working for this Publishing Company pretty much asked us to build content without pay and I asked them how can we exchange and they pretty much told me that our Sweat Equity didn't equate to what they did and at that point I was tired I was

done I was unraveling the pandemic then hit I lost my publishing deal I lost pretty much everything I was trying to figure out how to make ends me but what really mattered to me was figuring out how to get direct to my consumer how to get rid of the middleman how to make sure that my check was coming right to me and that's when web 3 appeared one day my partner came into the room and was like yo you ever heard of crypto art and I was like nah what's that he was like so you could sell your art for crypto and I was like nah I don't with

that and he was like no I think this is an opportunity for us so I started to Deep dive I found out what blockchain was what smart contracts were doing all of that and I was like okay this seems kind of cool and then he paid all his rent on time during the pandemic as a full-time artist and I was like okay okay little nice dinners at home I was like okay something's happening here but what really really hit me was that he was just so excited to find value for his art again so I minted February of 2021 on a platform called Zora I minted a music video that

was living on my hard drive put it up and it sold in three minutes and at that moment I felt the sense of relief like there was a path for us an opportunity for artists to transform the ways they were receiving value especially artists like myself that didn't want to oblige to the same systems that were being out there and then I started running we ended up pushing more music videos that were living on YouTube this is glowup remix and glowup remix ended up selling for $330,000 and I was like that was what I was making in a year a few years

ago after that we released Go Go Wine which actually belonged to the publishing deal that I was a part of and when I told them I was doing nfts they were like I don't know what that is I was like awesome you're only getting 10% we ended up making $50,000 off of that music video something shot in a garage during the pandemic at that moment I knew that I no longer was going to be portrayed as this starving struggling artist I was going to tell a different story for communities and artists like myself who have been homeless who have been hard at struggling and finding a way to make opportunities meet and I was going to

tell a different story of energy exchange of making sure that people saw that music was a fine art that we always deserve to receive this because the energy in music transforms lives and makes people open and makes people think something different and then I found a community of people that felt that way and it opened up my communal Consciousness to everyone and I decided that wanted to work and be embedded into this new world that we found and so I became one of the first women in Hip Hop to use blockchain and also one of the first to end up working for a company as a head of Community Management with that I became a Founder

to zooropa zooropa was an educational program dedicated to supporting and highlighting artists in the space we toured all around the country last year it was insane and all these artists were so grateful to just have Sean in a moment to really showcase what they were doing that they never felt before in other spaces in web too and with that I found a paradigm shift I found my why I understood that this was Way Beyond Myself and things started to unveil of what I wanted to create and become and now with everything that I've done and everything I've been I'm now raising and starting my own

company called Topia and Topia is going to be dedicated to supporting musical artists and building their own blueprints for their existence we want to utilize web two and web 3 tools and Bridge them together so artists could build their own blueprints like I've done with myself and I'm very grateful for this time and I'm very grateful for all of y'all to hear this story because there's so many stories like mine out there so many stories of people that felt like they didn't have value that didn't have anything that they needed did and now they're finding their gold thank you so [Applause] much