“It was over – I was dead,” declared rapper Kane Mayfield. He was speaking from his home in what he calls “diet Florida” (in Georgia, just across the border). “You see the date?” he asked me, showing me a Vice article from 2015. “I was dead.”
At the time, Mayfield had just put out his debut record The Return of Rap, which “deftly [mixes] uproarious punchlines and storytelling verses with social commentary inspired by imprisoned civil rights activist H. Rap Brown,” as the article attests. And he was making good money – eight grand a night, he told me.
Still, he walked away from music – and he stayed away for six years. The former financial advisor went to sell timeshares in Florida, and then he moved to Mexico. When DJ J-Scrilla – better known in web3 circles as the digital artist Rare Scrilla – called him and told him about Bitcoin, he and his wife had just lost a child, and he was at his nadir.
“Why don’t you try this,” Mayfield remembers Scrilla saying, “and I was like, you know what – what the fuck is the worst that can happen? I’m already in the worst part of my life.”
Fast forward a few years and now Mayfield’s helping drive innovation in Bitcoin ordinals – unique assets inscribed onto tiny Bitcoin pieces called satoshis. In January, using ordinals, he released The Ides of March, a multi-artist, multidimensional experience that blends Bitcoin with hip hop, ancient Rome, the metaverse and a new on-chain sampler. It’s the latest proof that Mayfield is many things, and dead is not one of them.
In March,Kane Mayfieldreleased one of 2015’s most accomplished independent hip-hop albums,The Return of Rap, deftly mixing uproarious punchlines and storytelling verses with social commentary inspired by imprisoned civil rights activist H. Rap Brown. The album was the culmination of the Long Island native’s decade in his adopted home of Baltimore, where he moved in 2005 and aligned himself with the local label Mania Music Group. As Mayfield likes to say, “I came to Baltimore for the weekend, and ended up staying for ten years.”