Blaq Kush - The Infinite Money Glitch

"Looking for a place where money wasn't worshipped only to be reminded of how money is worshipped," begins the chorus of The Infinite Money Glitch's title cut. If money is modern society's most popular religion, Blaq Kush commits with his latest EP an act of heresy akin to writing and illustrating a Quran coloring book complete with caricatures of the holy prophet Muhammad; counterfeiting as an act of subversion. Here's something I could never get a straight answer about from my high school economics teacher: If prices go up only when people are willing to pay more, doesn't that make all monetary value imaginary? Years, perhaps decades, before digital currency, Alan Moore said something about the subject, which has stuck with me since. He said money is basically magic but not all that clever or convincing a form of it. 

Artificial intelligence has likely already cracked the stock market. That said, everything anyone ever needs to know about post-industrial capitalism can be learned from the aptly titled 1970 documentary film, Finally Got the News. At the 14-minute mark, an offscreen voice states, "They give you little bullshit amounts of money for working—wages and so forth—and then they steal all that shit back from you in terms of where he got his other things set up, his whole credit gimmick society, man. Buy shit on credit. He gives you a little bit of shit to cool your ass out and then steals all that shit back with shit called interest, the price of money. Motherfuckers are non-producing, non-existing industry motherfuckers who deal with paper. There's a cat who will stand up and say to you he's in mining, and he sits in an office, man, on the 199th floor in some motherfucking building on Wall Street, and he's 'in mining.' And he has paper certificates, which they embroidered: stocks, bonds, debentures, obligations. He's 'in mining,' and his fingernails ain't been dirty in his motherfucking life. And the motherfuckers who deal with intangibles are the motherfuckers who are rewarded in this society. We see that this whole society exists and rests upon workers." 

As Blaq Kush puts it, "You are the money." And it's here that producer Antonym begins to reveal the project's soul, an unmined rare earth mineral magnetism that can never be bought, sold, or minted. From there, Kush takes the metaphor personally. On "A Dollar Travels," he is quite literally the money. Name your price or not, we listeners get so much more than we pay for.