Preaching to the choir (is easier than preaching to the congregation)

It never ceases to amaze me how clumsy human beings can be with words. Sometimes squeezing the mass of thoughts and emotions whirling in one's head into a coherent sentence is simply too hard, and we instead just blurt out whatever thought is currently floating in our stream of consciousness. This can lead to misunderstandings, frustration and bad decision-making.

Poor communication is a problem that plagues all of us, in almost every sphere of life. I'm sure all of us can relate to being sent to redo a piece of work for the n-th time by a boss who doesn't quite seem to be able to tell you what it is exactly that he or she wants. But while a communication breakdown in regular life can be fixed with relative ease by sitting down with the person question and nutting out exactly what it is they (and you) mean, poor communication in the realm of art (particularly music) can be fatal.

With any piece of art you only have as long as you can hold the audience's attention to make your point, and a lot of thought and refinement goes into ensuring that your message is conveyed with economy of thought and word. Yet there are limits to the amount of explanatory information you can encode into your work; there is a point at which you have to leave it be and hope that you are understood for what you are trying to say.

More often than not however, when you are trying to convey a truth to an audience that is not accustomed to it, this delicate balance between explicit and implicit content is impossible to achieve and the true meaning behind your work goes straight over the heads of your audience. A lot of people simply give up at this point and resign themselves to preaching to the choir - those who hold similar ideas and thus know how to decode and unpack the implicit messages built into highly specialised work.

But every now and then there comes across a piece of work that breaks all boundaries and manages to take the messages and truths guarded by one subculture into other cultural pools. Bands such as Nirvana and Radiohead could be offered as examples; both of them successfully exported previously alternative forms of music into a mainstream context and led to a general surge in interest in their respective genres.

It is with these trailblazers in mind that I continue to write, hoping that the messages I put in my songs manage to transcend the genre and audience of hip hop (and more specifically the sub-genre of alternative hip hop) and speak to a broader audience. It's a daunting task, and one that I go into with no illusions about. Sometimes the most difficult part isn't even constructing effective cross-over songs; it's convincing others that an effective cross-over is even possible (and worthwhile).

But I'm determined not to stop in my attempt to communicate and be heard, both in life generally and in music. Whether my words end up being picked up only by the alternative hip hop community or even just by me, I will not give up on my quest to make authentic music that transcends boundaries and categorisation. For those who set their sights lower, I have no disrespect. But my eyes are fixed on higher things.