lmao.

Trolling hard!!!

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lil-nas-x-mschf-satan-nike-shoes/index.html

Rapper and singer Lil Nas X is launching a controversial pair of "Satan Shoes" featuring a bronze pentagram, an inverted cross and a drop of real human blood.
The black and red sneakers, part of a collaboration between Lil Nas X and New York-based art collective MSCHF, were made using Nike Air Max 97s, though the sportswear brand has distanced itself from the design.

In an emailed statement to CNN, Nike said it was not involved in creating the modified sneakers. "We do not have a relationship with Lil Nas or MSCHF," the company said. "Nike did not design or release these shoes and we do not endorse them."
Launching as a limited-edition "drop" of 666 pairs, each shoe's air bubble sole contains 60 cubic centimeters (2.03 fluid ounces) of red ink and "one drop" of human blood, according to MSCHF. They are priced at $1,018 a pair, a reference to the Bible passage Luke 10:18 that reads: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."
A MSCHF spokesperson said the blood had been provided by members of the art collective, adding: "We love to sacrifice for our art." The group also confirmed to CNN that Nike was "not involved in this in any capacity."

The 'Satan Shoes' will launch Monday as a limited-edition release. Credit: Courtesy MSCHF

The shoes sparked outrage online over the weekend, and attracted criticism from a number of high-profile political and religious figures, including South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and the evangelical pastor Mark Burns. The latter described the sneakers in a tweet as "evil" and "heresy." Some fans of the "Old Town Road" rapper, meanwhile, tweeted their support and desire to own a pair.

Oversized hospital bill paintings sold to pay off medical debts
In response, Lil Nas X (whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill), posted a video to his official YouTube account titled "Lil Nas X Apologizes for Satan Shoe," which has now been viewed over 1.8 million times. But after a few seconds, the apparent apology cuts to a scene from his new music video, "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)," showing him dancing provocatively with a devil character. The rapper is then pictured snapping the devil's neck, before removing his horned crown and assuming it himself.
MSCHF is known for its irreverent "drops," a series of tongue-in-cheek art projects unveiled once every two weeks. In 2019, the collective released limited edition "Jesus Shoes" -- also made from Nike Air Max 97 sneakers -- which featured a steel crucifix and "holy water" sourced from the Jordan River.

Other drops have seen the collective sell a laptop installed with some of the world's most dangerous computer viruses for over $1.3 million. In February, meanwhile, the group ripped apart four Hermès Birkin bags in order to create a collection of sandals priced between $34,000 and $76,000.

Devil worship not to be played with people will learn one day

**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

I'm not even religious, but I don't need that energy in my life.

What sort of energy does it bring?

and I don't fully understand where my superstitions come from. There seems to be a chaotic energy to actual satanic stuff, that's not really for me though.

I mean, I can watch a Lil Nas X video and not be compelled to murder kittens or anything (especially since it's mostly camp/trolling), but also not what I choose to rock with on the regular. Rocking a pair of shoes w/satanic symbols and a drop of blood seems kind of weird, though. Not what I'm looking to get out of my athleisure footwear.

I see it as largely benign. There's just no aesthetic appeal for me, but that's about the beginning and of my issues with it.

>and I don't fully understand where my superstitions come
>from. There seems to be a chaotic energy to actual satanic
>stuff, that's not really for me though.

I'm curious about this. I don't see/feel "energy" apart from the hysteria that generally results from. The only demonstrable power I can see from it, is an ability to make people clutch pearls.

So from my standpoint, that chaotic energy is just the reaction of the people themselves, not a product of the imagery.

>I mean, I can watch a Lil Nas X video and not be compelled to
>murder kittens or anything (especially since it's mostly
>camp/trolling), but also not what I choose to rock with on the
>regular. Rocking a pair of shoes w/satanic symbols and a drop
>of blood seems kind of weird, though. Not what I'm looking to
>get out of my athleisure footwear.

This whole episode is all over social media and I haven't seen a single human being talk about the actual song.

This joint right here goes:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=KhA_ujkj4fo&feature=share

but yeah I think he has very quickly entered the cocaine fueled controversy seeking phase of his career before even putting out a full length album.

**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

bout damn time he put out some new shit.

Gotta hear that song a few more times to see how it grabs me, but people are mostly talking about the video for this last one, so I guess that succeeded in generating interest

may I remind you about the monster energy drink lady?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bntfUA6TmLs

like music video and super bowl halftime show breakdowns... I don't know why but they tickle a weird spot in my brain. Even this Monster Energy lady - the dumb part of my brain is like 'she makes some really interesting points..'

**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

it's like the way people love true crime stories/podcasts

I already love making and learning about historical-cultural connections

like, here's a fun one:

The actress Julia Roberts' mother is Betty Lou Bredemus who is also an actress. In 1965 Betty Lou had a local kids' TV show in Atlanta that was really popular as well as an acting and writing workshop for kids 5 to 18. The workshop was hugely successful and popular. Among the student population were the kids of Martin and Coretta King. The King and Roberts family became friends with the King family even helping them out financially when things were thin.

When MLK was assassinated in 1968, his children were at the workshop taking classes.

She had a second daughter who died Feb 9, 2014, Betty herself passed on Feb 19, 2015.


etc etc etc

I wish the devilry imagery was a bit more creative.

"But rest assured, in my luxurious house built on the backs of people darker than me, I am sipping fine scotch and scoffing at how stupid you are." - bshelly

One of my old employees said he spent $60 for a Supreme water bottle and I almost fainted lol.

Every generation will have trendy things that the previous generation just won't get, and I'm at that point I suppose.

to cover a scratch/dent

and i have had folks offer me $100 for it at the gym

like after they saw me drink out of it and shit lol.

idk it weirds me out when random people try to buy stuff straight off me

too much.

They’re comfortable as can be.

don't all Nike shoes have a little drop of blood in them?

Likely from the little hands that assemble them.

https://www.complex.com/sneakers/nike-sue-satan-sneakers-lil-nas-x-mschf-air-max-97

This joint has been huge..

https://youtu.be/6swmTBVI83k

The devil that he was grinding on had on the shoes. I wonder if he was number -1/666
... "A Beautiful Struggle"
https://m.facebook.com/jamelabullock
Www.reverbnation.com/jamela

MELa
Musically.Entertaining.Lyrically.Alluring.

Gimmick rap. Wonder what his next stunt will be

I liked Old Town Road. Haven't heard much of his other work, but this joint was extremely forgettable for me. I didn't even wanna listen back once.

Folks usually come with a video like this when they either have a song they REALLY want ppl to hear or they're just out of attention-getting ideas. Seems like the latter here.

They were an early pandemic find for me and I went down the wormhole of their drops/zines. Some of their stuff is legitimately interesting, other stuff just seems like some kids with a lot of time/money on their hands.

NYT SWIPE: How to Run a Business in 2020

Gabriel Whaley and his colleagues do whatever they want all day. Sometimes, they even make money.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/style/millennial-entrepreneur-startups.html

In recent years, stars have lent their names to all kinds of sneaker collaborations. Puma had Rihanna. Reebok had Gigi Hadid. Adidas had Kanye West. Nike had … Jesus Christ?

Not exactly. In October, a pair of “Jesus shoes” — customized Air Max 97s whose soles contained holy water from the River Jordan — appeared online for $1,425. They were designed by a start-up called MSCHF, without Nike’s blessing.

The sneakers quickly sold out and began appearing on resale sites, going for as much as $4,000. The Christian Post wrote about them. Drake wore them. They were among the most Googled shoes of 2019.

The only thing that didn’t happen, said Kevin Wiesner, 27, a creative director at MSCHF, was a public disavowal of the shoes by Nike or the Vatican. “That would’ve been rad,” he said.

Now, in the MSCHF office in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a pair stands like a trophy.

MSCHF isn’t a sneaker company. It rarely even produces commercial goods, and its employees are reluctant to call it a company at all. They refer to MSCHF, which was founded in 2016, as a “brand,” “group” or “collective,” and their creations, which appear online every two weeks, as “drops.”

Many of those drops are viral pranks: an app that recommends stocks to buy based on one’s astrological sign (which some observers took seriously), a service that sends pictures of A.I.-generated feet over text, a browser extension that helps users get away with watching Netflix at work.

As Business Insider recently noted, the present and future profitability of these internet stunts is dubious. Yet, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, MSCHF has raised at least $11.5 million in outside investments since the fall of 2019.
ImageA pentagram serves as both décor and an ad-hoc meeting space.
A pentagram serves as both décor and an ad-hoc meeting space.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

In the high-risk, maybe-reward world of venture capital, the group’s antics are well known. Nikita Singareddy, an investment analyst at RRE Ventures, compared MSCHF to Vine and Giphy. All three, she said, offer “lots of delight” and encourage content sharing.


“Sometimes investors are a little too serious about monetizing something immediately,” Ms. Singareddy said. “With MSCHF, there’s faith that it’ll pay off. There’s an inherent virality and absurdness to all the projects that they’ve created, and it’s something people want to share and ask questions about.”

For starters: What is it?
‘This Is How We Live’

The MSCHF office says as much about the company as any of its products.

A giant white pentagram covers the entrance floor. On a visit in December, an inflatable severed swan’s head dangled from a ceiling beam, and a rubber chicken bong — a recent drop — sat on a coffee table, full of weed.

“My mom thinks we make toys,” said Gabriel Whaley, 30, the chief executive.

MSCHF has 10 employees, nine of whom are men. The company Twitter and Instagram pages are private, so most of its direct marketing takes place not on social media but through text messages from a mysterious phone number.

Though the team used to run a marketing agency, working with brands like Casper in order to fund MSCHF projects, they stopped taking on clients last year. Now, they pretty much do whatever they want.

“The cool thing that we have going for us is we set this precedent that we’re not tied to a category or vertical. We did the Jesus shoes and everyone knows us for that, and then we shut it down,” Mr. Whaley said. “We will never do it again. People are like, ‘Wait, why wouldn’t you double down on that, you would have made so much money!’ But that’s not why we’re here.”

The point, he said, is to produce social commentary; the “story” the sneakers told was more important than turning a profit. “There are several youth pastors that have bought a pair, and even more who are asking, like, ‘I love sneakers, and I love God. I would love a pair of these,’ and that wasn’t the point,” Mr. Whaley said. “The Jesus shoes were a platform to broach the idea while also making fun of it: that everybody’s just doing a collaboration now.”

In order to prepare each drop — be it an object, an app or a website — MSCHF’s employees log long hours. Most mornings, Mr. Whaley gets to the office around 7; the rest of the team arrives by 10. They often stay late into the evenings, conducting brainstorms, perfecting lines of code, shooting live-streams or assembling prototypes. Weekends, Mr. Whaley said, aren’t really a thing.

“It’s not just a full-time job,” he said. “This is how we live. The distinction between your work and normal life doesn’t really exist here, and it’s just because this is what we were all doing whether we were getting paid or not in our former lives. So nothing has really changed, except we have more power as a unit than we did as individuals.”

Though Mr. Whaley eschews corporate titles, functional groups exist within MSCHF: idea generation, production, distribution and outreach. In their past lives, most of the staffers were developers and designers, some with art backgrounds, working at their own firms and for companies like Twitter and BuzzFeed. The oldest employee is 32, and the youngest is 22.

Some C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 companies have tried to mentor Mr. Whaley and “shoehorn” MSCHF into a traditional business, he said. They insist MSCHF is building a brand, that it needs a logo, a mission, a go-to product that people recognize.

But MSCHF doesn’t have a flagship product, or market its releases traditionally. “It just happens that anything we make tends to spread purely because people end up talking about it and sharing it with their friends,” Mr. Whaley said.

That’s part of the appeal for V.C. firms. With software companies, for example, there are “very clear metrics and paths to monetization that are tried and true,” Ms. Singareddy said. For MSCHF, that path is less obvious.

“Some of the best investments, even early on it wasn’t clear what the result would be, but you’re making an investment in the team,” she said. “That’s what makes a company like MSCHF so exciting. Venture is about taking reasoned risk — it’s a true venture capital opportunity.”
Banksy for the Internet

Mr. Whaley talks a lot about what MSCHF is and who the people who work there are — and aren’t. Running ads on subways, or trying to build a social media following, or landing a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list isn’t who they are. He cringes at the word “merch.” (“The day we sell hoodies is the day I shut this down.”)

To observers, critics and followers, the company’s portfolio may amount to a very successful string of viral marketing campaigns, a series of jokes or something like art.

“I don’t see anybody doing exactly what MSCHF is doing,” said Frank Denbow, a technology consultant who works with start-ups. “Everybody is able to get a one-off campaign that works, but to consistently find ways to create content that really sticks with people is different. It reminds me of Banksy and his ability to get a rise out of people.”
Image
Surrounding Mr. Whaley are movie posters in which his colleagues’ faces are Photoshopped.
Surrounding Mr. Whaley are movie posters in which his colleagues’ faces are Photoshopped.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

On Twitter and Reddit, users trade theories and tips about MSCHF’s more cryptic offerings, such as its most recent, password-protected drop, Zuckwatch — a website that looks like Facebook and appears to be commentary on data privacy.

Among these ardent fans, the drops are treated as trailheads, or entry points, setting off mad, winding dashes in search of cracking the code.

Other followers, less devoted, may only know MSCHF for its Jesus shoes, which Mr. Wiesner said have been knocked off by sellers around the world. He is happy about it. “If we can make things that people run away with, that’s absolutely the dream,” he said. “Most of what we make is us personally running away with stuff.”

Ahead of the presidential election, MSCHF’s employees plan to take on more political projects. (A drop in November, involving a shell restaurant, enabled users to mask political donations as work expenses; it was promptly shut down.) The company also hopes to expand beyond apps and objects to experiences and physical spaces.

“Everything is just, ‘How do we kind of make fun of what we’re observing?’” Mr. Whaley said. “Then we have as much fun with it as possible and see what happens.”

Checked all the boxes..

Gay : Check

Country : Check

Hip Hop : check

Satanic : Check

I dont know what else he can do at this point

maybe show a baby bump....

yeah, he is definitely an interesting case study.

had he not done this stunt he could have been on sesame street

Which is Sesame St. adjacent. So the kids already love him.

Dont forget he also faked like he got breast implants

https://www.distractify.com/p/did-lil-nas-x-get-implants

Well, maybe a little stretch. 😜
... "A Beautiful Struggle"
https://m.facebook.com/jamelabullock
Www.reverbnation.com/jamela

MELa
Musically.Entertaining.Lyrically.Alluring.