I’ve been thinking about music a lot. I love music—shocker, I know—but I always find it hard to pin down, to narrow down exactly what I love about it and to find artists that fill that me niche. Maybe there is no such artist, after all, I’m the only me, but then again, there’s so many musicians you’d think there’s at least one out there that doesn’t miss. The closest I’ve come to finding musical perfection is MF DOOM. He’s unmatched, in my opinion.

For a long time I’ve had this idea in my mind, it’s not crazy or anything but it’s a bit weird. It’s this band, I call it “Rouge, it’s the colour of the mask” and it’d be two people—a writer-vocalist and a producer—and they’d make hip-hop about the current state of affairs.

I think that peak music is made when people are united in the pursuit of a vision. DOOM and Madlib, BROCKHAMPTON… I’m sure there’s others but I’m blanking on it right now. There’s plenty of amazing individual artists (Michael Jackson, to name perhaps the greatest) but I really do think that bands are just better. I guess because there’s more humanity, more people so it’s more people-like, and that’s what makes music (art) great; people make art. That’s really all that needs to be said.

Still, this hypothetical band would make conscious hip-hop, as it’s called. I love Kendrick Lamar and he’s notorious for operating in this space; he’s really good at it too, but there’s something missing from his music that I just can’t put my finger on. I think it’s that he works alone. I say alone but really, he’s never alone, he has tons of featured artists on his stuff and he’s not a producer at all, as far as I know, so there’s always gonna be someone working with him to make the final track, but that’s not good enough to be truly great. It’s great, yes, but it’s not truly great. I think the issue is the consistency. Because he works with several producers on any given project, they can feel disjointed, even if not at the surface level—Kendrick is amazing at keeping his albums feeling connected—but when you delve deeper it feels disjointed, like it was made by a bunch of people that didn’t really talk about what they were doing, that didn’t have a same, unified vision. It’s one person’s vision being executed by a bunch of talent, rather than a bunch of talent executing a shared vision.

Topics that could be tackled include the environment, the rise of the alt-right in Europe (and world-wide), and living a comfortable life in a fundamentally unfair system—living with the reality that some suffer so that you may thrive, and the questioning of whether some must suffer for others to thrive. Stuff’s complicated, but I think music is a fantastic platform, or medium, for these topics to be breached. See, music is something you can put on in the background and let wiggle itself into your subconscious, but it’s also something you can sit down and dissect. I really feel like literature doesn’t have this, it misses this big aspect of inertia. You really need to focus when you read, the medium demands attention. Good music will make you pay attention, but it’ll never require it. This reminds me of that one Outkast song, Hey Ya I believe, wherein André3000 says something along the lines of “you don’t want to listen, you just want to dance,” and he’s right. People don’t want to listen, they just want to dance. You can’t write a book that people will dance to, but you can write a song. That’s the difference, that’s what makes music such a powerful tool for both dissemination and the exploration of complex topics. You can write a song that people dance to, but that as they listen they may just understand what you’re saying, they may engage with it even as they engage with something else. I love music.

I keep drifting away from the point. The band I was talking about, it would make conscious hip-hop tackling relevant, current topics. Well, that’s all dandy, but so what? I guess the what I’m wondering is why is that not already a thing? I mean, is it such a niche interest? It doesn’t feel like it, then again, I’m me so nothing about me feels particularly niche even when it obviously is. The most likely possibility seems to me to be that I have just not found—come across—this band. It’s out there, I just haven’t heard of them yet. I don’t know, I’m holding out hope, at least. I’m a musician actually, not by profession or vocation but just in a matter-of-fact sort of way: I know how to play music and I have played music for a long time. Maybe I could make the band. Then again, I don’t have a producer and I don’t know how to produce. As I spent some time establishing, at least one other individual would be required for this to work at all, and my antisocial nature is rather unlikely to result in me coming across that particular golden goose.

There’s also something else, and reading Babel is getting my mind wondering about this more than usual: language. I speak a couple languages and, while similar, they are categorically different. I find English poetry to be dreadful, simply put. I would hate to write in English. The problem with that is accessibility. English is the de facto lingua franca (sorry about the Latin) of the world, so writing music meant to be for the world in any other language feels like a missed point. How to reconcile English’s barbaric lack of grace with its reach? Mayhaps impossible.

Speaking of Babel, I’m actually reading a translated edition of the novel. Hilarious, I know. It’s not even a very good translation, or at least it hasn’t been up to now. The problem with bilingualism is that I can imagine what the original might’ve been and the translation really upsets me at times. It’s not terrible, mind you, it’s just clearly imperfect. It’s beautiful though, which in a way I can almost excuse the technical shortcomings. Technical. Really, talking about this after reading Babel makes me feel so silly; there’s so much discussion about what makes a good translation and they never seem to reach a meaningful conclusion. I already knew this, to an extent, but having it shoved in my face is rather painful, especially when I have to read the discussion about translation via a translation.

By the way, look at this monstrosity: twelfths. That’s 5 consonants in a row. Crazy. I saw that on TikTok a few days ago.

I’ll read more Babel today again.