Latashá is Manifesting Her Way Out of the Matrix
A hot NFT market helped the artist and rapper overcome a tough creative spell
On August 9, the artist Latasha Alcindor – who makes music as Latashá – premiered her new track, “A Ten.” The song’s characterized by heavy, distorted 808s, and by Alcindor’s lyrics of self-empowerment. “They chase the clout while I just evoke it,” she raps. And later, “Life’s been a movie, I wrote my script.”
In the song’s music video, Alcindor appears in a nondescript cubicle. She answers a call on a desk phone. “Hello?” Cut to noise.
It echoes the famous scene from The Matrix where Morpheus calls Neo, instructing him to duck and weave through an office of cubicles to, eventually, leave the matrix. That nod is intentional.
“A Ten” exists within Alcindor’s new TASH55 “storytelling container.”
“Latashá has been between two worlds and needs you to help her get out of the matrix and into her (r)evolution,” reads the song’s drop page (as of this writing, the song has been minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) 19,421times).
“Get out of the matrix” invokes two of Alcindor’s passions: film and metaphysics. The “two worlds” Latashá has been between might refer to reality and illusion, or the physical body and the mind. Or it could be the nebulous divide between web2 and web3, which is marked by its own partitions of perception.
“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth,” Morpheus tells Neo, just before he takes the red pill. Or was that a web3 pitch, promising to liberate us from an exploitative web2? An invitation to “see how deep the rabbit hole goes?”
Much of web3’s grandeur comes from that metaphor, and from drawing a clear line in the sand from that which came before. It’s inspiring, and delusional.
“The delusion is what’s going to allow us to think bigger and beyond,” Alcindor told me recently, speaking from her LA home. “But [we need to] reel it in a little bit."
We spoke about her role in bridging these two worlds, and her sustained optimism for web3 – as well as her deep relationship with hip hop, the maturation of her voice, and writing the script of her “(r)evolution” in her own hand.
Alcindor was born and raised in Brooklyn. "I grew up in a pretty lower middle class home where there was no idea of being an artist as an occupation," she said.
“Love for hip hop specifically was very secretive,” she continued. “I was playing it in my headphones and rapping Lil’ Kim way too young, and doing all the musical things quietly by myself.”
When she was 15, Alcindor started writing poetry. She shared it with her then boyfriend. “We used to fight about who was the best rapper,” she remembered. “And when I gave him my poetry, he was like, you should really do this.”
Her voice evolved at Wesleyan, where she pursued African American Studies with a concentration in Black Performance Art and Psychology. Throughout, hip hop was central.
“I did super deep dives in hip hop – the spirituality of it, how commercialism works on hip hop, how America utilizes hip hop,” she said. “And I became an advocate for hip hop artists, because I really believe that hip hop is a form of journalism.”
Around 2010, still at Wesleyan, Alcindor wrote a play called The Memoirs of Hip Hop. She embodied and personified the genre alongside other connected music. “Mama Africa was the grandmother, and then jazz was the mother,” she told me. “I was like, alright, I'm gonna go to Broadway – that's what I'm gonna do.”
She ended up working at Chase. “My mom was like, you need a job.”
At night, though, she was touring the New York City underground, performing at poetry slams and cyphers. “Everybody knew me as the party girl who did poetry,” she told me. “I often say that I manifested my way into becoming a hip hop artist. I feel like the universe was like, ‘oh yeah, you love this so much? Now you're gonna be a rapper.’”
Before long, she was opening for stars like Kanye West, Q-Tip and Big Sean. But she was still finding her footing. “At that time, I didn't know myself as an artist fully,” she explained. “I had no experience on how to make money or understanding of the business.”
In 2012, she released a record that was negatively received. A deep depression ensued. Alcindor sidelined her music, reducing her output to occasional “tidbits” on SoundCloud while she languished at Chase. “I quit Chase three times,” she said. "I was writing in notebooks every day that I wanted an angel investor to come into my life and help me move out of my crib and do music.”
That year, “while trying to figure [herself] out,” she started exploring metaphysics. She credits her friends Witch Prophet and Sun Sun for introducing her to Spirit Science, a blend of metaphysical ideas and new age spirituality that involves concepts like thought manifestation. She was reading things like, “I am a spiritual being having a human experience.”
Her true “anchor” for her interest in metaphysics, though, was her Caribbean and Latin upbringing, she said. Alcindor’s grandmother was a spiritual healer in Haiti. That work inspired her to seek a “higher source energy to transform [her] own life when [she] was undergoing depression.”
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"Maybe my thoughts are creating my reality,” she began to wonder, “and maybe I should start shifting my thoughts."
In 2016, following years of manifesting, the universe showed up again. After hearing Alcindor on SoundCloud, a woman reached out and encouraged her to lean back into music. The woman – a well-known poet who chooses to remain anonymous – became her mentor. And in time, that poet became her imagined angel, giving Alcindor $10,000 to leave Chase for good and focus on music.
Around then, Alcindor began to “shift her thoughts” toward her music, too.
“A lot of my [early] music started in a place of anger and frustration,” she said. “I went to a high school that didn't really offer great education. So when I went to Wesleyan, I got all this schooling on what the systems do to black folk and people of color.
“I was really saddened because I felt like I was buried in it when I was a child and I didn't know,” she continued. “My parents are immigrants, and I had people in my life pass away from gun violence. I was just like, everything's a lie.”
Her early oeuvre – what she calls her “shadow work” – reckoned with that reality. But she came to feel the weight of the shadows. "I always understood that rap is powerful – the words and things you say and rap come true,” Alcindor said. "I saw that with Biggie. I saw that with Tupac. I saw that with Kanye West.”
Seeing her own truths manifesting, she changed course. “My music became about healing and expression,” she said, “allowing myself to manifest a more powerful version of myself through my music.”
Her album B(LA)K – released in 2017 – was the last of her shadow work, and the beginning of her web3 journey. In 2021, she minted the video for one of the album’s singles, “Ilikedat.” via the NFT protocol Zora.
The filmmaker Jahmel Reynolds – who works under the moniker Jah. – shot the video. He’s been Alcindor’s partner since 2016. When the pandemic ravaged live performances – Alcindor’s primary income stream (“I think I've done over a thousand shows,” she told me) – Reynolds encouraged her to explore NFTs.
It was a good idea. In 2021 alone, her NFT sales amounted to more than $100,000. "Artists were making money that they never had seen before, and never knew they could be valued at – or that people would meet that value!” she exclaimed. “That was just such an emotional time for me."
She became the Head of Community at Zora, where she started an education program called Zoratopia. “I was getting DMs from artists about what I was doing,” she said. “At that point the information we were gathering was so powerful for so many creatives.”
To onboard artists to the space – and to fill a void in crypto for gatherings that were welcoming to people of color – Alcindor started organizing Zoratopia events at major crypto conferences. She brought in big names to perform, like TOKiMONSTA, Mick Jenkins and Vic Mensa.
Alcindor was paving a new way forward to help artists “heal money wounds.” At the end of 2021, she tweeted a recap of her year’s NFT sales, which got progressively larger with each drop. The future seemed bright. And this, she wrote in her tweet, was just “the beginning.”
In The Matrix, when Neo first enters the “real world,” he tries to reconcile his memories from what he now knows was a simulated dream. “None of them happened. What does that mean?”
“That the matrix cannot tell you who you are,” replies Trinity.
When the bear market arrived, NFT platform builders borrowed market dynamics from what they knew: web2. Free editions gained popularity. And the race to the bottom bore an eerie resemblance to the web2 reality artists are trying to leave behind.
But even while much of on-chain music reckons with an identity crisis, Alcindor, eyes wide open, continues to manifest “bigger and beyond.”
“Web3 is the future,” she said during an inspiring fireside at this year’s Ethereum Community Conference. “In web3 I made what I could’ve made through a record deal without giving away the rights to any of my masters.”
Even from 2024, where 2021’s NFT boom looks and feels like a dream, she’s still making it happen. With 19,000+ mints (so far) of “A Ten” – at 0.000111 ETH (approximately $.30) a pop – she’s earned about five grand. And the more accessible price point means more people can bridge worlds with her – or at least meet her somewhere in between.
“Recently I've been tapping back into my shadow work,” she told me. “I remember when I first started in web3, everybody was like, ‘Oh Latashá’s so bubbly, and she's so light.’ And then I started getting real, and people were like, ‘Oh my god Latashá you're dark now.’ And I was like, ‘I'm just everything.’”
“And that’s what the music is for me now – it's this expression of my multidimensional self,” she continued. “Allowing myself to be angry and to be joyous and to be empowering; to have fun while also being real, while also being sad. All the things that make us human – and maybe even beyond.”