Swagger of Da Gods
I’ve had several people ask me some version of “what’s the deal with the popularity of y00ts/DeGods?!”
Here it goes:
There’s a great story that Dave Chappelle has told about a young Kanye West before he became Kanye West.
They’re hanging out and Ye gets a call from a friend. “No I can’t meet up,” he says. “I’m with Dave Chappelle watching unseen episodes of Chappelle Show… Cus my life is dope and I do dope shit.” Click.
If you take nothing else from this article, take this: Frank, and the DeGods project by extension, are successful because they have “my life is dope and I do dope shit” energy.
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At their best, there is a magic to hyper-confident 20-something boys. At their worst, there’s a felony (or several).**
So far, it seems DeGods has the former.
Their rise and fall and rise again is documented in this podcast w/ Kevin Rose and in this article and all over Twitter at this point.
They hustle hard and pivot harder, they’re smart and entrepreneurial and great viral marketers. Their success so far is predicated on all of that.
But at the end of the day, successful projects aren’t just about hard work. There is always an extra je-ne-sais-quoi. An authenticity and a ~vibe~ that connects for people and which comes straight from the top.
And DeGods has it.
I mean, they’re knuckleheads, obviously, with the 23-year-old presumption of invincibility that makes chugging beer from the inside of your own shoe seem appealing as opposed to disgusting.
They invoked a paper-handed bitch tax (lol).
They bought a basketball team in Ice Cube’s 3 v 3 pro league.
Cus my life is dope and I do dope shit.
But that knuckleheadedness is a big part of the appeal. There’s very little the world rewards more than young people who hustle incredibly hard and look like they’re having the time of their life doing it.
People want to be around that, they want to follow that, they want that magic to rub off on them.
Frank said recently that the Solana NFT ecosystem is more fun than that of Ethereum - a lot of the NFT world is now seeing that first hand because of DeGods.
But will all of this amount to sustained success? Unclear.
The recent y00ts mint didn’t go as planned (read: well) for reasons that seem best summed up as organizational dysfunction. The same skill set that likely makes Frank and the team fun to party with, means they leave something to be desired as detail-oriented executors.
Frank and his team are still super young. They’re bros in a way that will no doubt turn off some people and could even prove their downfall.
But for the time being, they pay lip service to all the right things (we’re in this for the long haul, we’ll mess up, but we’ll never stop working, etc.)
They’re da gods right now, and time will tell if they can go the distance (Hercules reference).
**Insert caveat with all the middleground scenarios here about bro culture and frats and all of the ickiness and, for some, trauma that it invokes
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