More Than Rich

There is a version of this story that sounds like a success narrative. Kitchen recording setup, USB microphone, noise complaints from neighbors, almost evicted. Xbox Live connection with a producer named Matt Burks — known as SKRUBZ — who was working in dubstep and drum and bass. A remix of a rap track called Where The Party At, Pt. 2. A strange hybrid of genres that probably should not have worked. And then, years later, discovering it had gone viral in ways that Joseph Anthony Reyna had not been watching for.
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That is the version with the clean arc. The reality is more specific and less dramatic. It was a recording made under real constraints by someone who did not have a studio or a label infrastructure. It moved through peer-to-peer networks, found communities, built traction — and the people who made it did not know it was happening until the numbers were already there. That lag, between creation and institutional recognition, is one of the more honest things this experience taught me about how culture actually moves.
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Decentralized Virality
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What gets called viral is usually described in terms of reach — how many plays, how many shares, how many countries. But the mechanism underneath it is remix culture and peer-to-peer amplification. Content moves because communities find uses for it that the creator did not plan. The song travels into a context, serves a function in that context, and spreads through word of mouth that is invisible to anyone not already inside the network.
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What the experience of Where The Party At, Pt. 2 made legible to me is that traction can occur entirely outside institutional awareness. The structure was decentralized. No label was pushing it. No publicist was pitching it. The distribution happened through the same infrastructure that was reshaping every other creative industry — and the corporate systems that would eventually have opinions about it were, as they almost always are, late.
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This is not a critique of institutions as much as it is an observation about structure. Creative ecosystems move faster than organizations built to manage them. The distance between what is happening in the culture and what appears in the institutional record is a structural feature, not a failure of attention.
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More Than Rich
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When I was young, I asked my mother whether we were rich. Her answer was direct: We are rich in spirit.
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That answer stayed with me longer than most things I was told at that age. Not because it was reassuring in the way such answers are meant to be, but because it reframed the question. It proposed that the category of value being measured mattered more than the measurement.
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There is a concept in sociology called cultural capital. It refers to the non-financial social assets — knowledge, skills, network, taste — that give a person standing or influence within a field. The term has academic weight, but what my mother was pointing to was something older and more direct: that contribution, participation, and creative presence are forms of wealth that do not register on balance sheets but accumulate across time.
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The song More Than Rich came out of that framework. The podcast took its name from the song. The phrase functions, for me, as a shorthand for a way of understanding value that is not reducible to quarterly metrics.
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Music as Evidence, Not Identity
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It is worth being precise about what the music represents in this context.
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Where The Party At, Pt. 2 was not a strategy. It was a recording made in a kitchen by someone who wanted to make something. Swish was more intentional — a track built for a specific niche, basketball highlight reels and athletic warmups, positioned for a use case rather than a general audience. More Than Rich became a theme because it named something I was already thinking about.
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None of this is vanity. The music is evidence of participation in digital culture at a specific moment in its development. It is proof that I understand, from the inside, how creative work moves through decentralized networks — how it finds communities, how it builds authority outside institutional channels, how its value is often recognized late by the systems that eventually want to monetize it.
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That understanding is not separable from the work I do now.
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The Hybrid Position
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What I bring to conversations about creative industries, digital infrastructure, and the relationship between culture and capital is not a theorist's perspective. It comes from having operated inside the system being analyzed.
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I understand both the chaos of creative production — the kitchen recording, the USB microphone, the noise complaints, the genre hybrid that should not have worked — and the structured systems that creative industries eventually run through. I can speak about how remix culture generates value before institutions recognize it, because I watched that happen from the production side. I can speak about the gap between cultural traction and institutional acknowledgment, because I lived inside that gap.
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That is the hybrid position. Not musician turned strategist, but someone who has never fully separated the two — who understands that the same structural questions showing up in intellectual property law, platform governance, and media economics are the same questions that were already present in a kitchen recording setup in 2012.
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The phrase is More Than Rich. The point is that value takes forms that current metrics do not capture. The work — across music, research, and systems thinking — is an attempt to account for that.
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Explore the music catalog at joecattt.com/music, including Where The Party At, Pt. 2 and Swish. Learn more about the work at joecattt.com/about.