Guitars, Rap Music, and Writing Sales Copy

What the frick?!

Some of you commoners may recall John's post regarding the copy writers that play guitar a few weeks back. Being a player myself, I found it really interesting that so many of us hold music dear to ourselves.

I don't even know how to read music, in fact, I just learned with TAB and started learning scales from there. But, I learned to play some decent solos fairly quickly WITHOUT agonizing over the theory of it first...

...Which I believe is where many people get stuck, when they first start.

I had a DVD product, which had TABs, Notation, and Illustration of a guy playing simple riffs. Each riff was broken down into a smaller chapter, which I put on repeat until I could play it well enough to do the next "level" well.

I think the same is true for writing sales copy. Just get in there, make your mistakes and stop theorizing too much. Knowing the basics is good, but nailing it comes from the school of hard knocks and seeing a gradual improvement in your skills over time.

I know a few writers who have devoured every course out there, spent hundreds of dollars and months of their time and have yet to put pen to paper.

As for rap music, love it or hate it you have to admit that the story-telling in them is outstanding (I've been a fan for a long time, and I just read a post on Copy Blogger about Eminem LMAO). Not that garbage that gets peddled for rap on the mainstream these days, but the real artists who go unrecognised and underrated...

One such example is Lupe Fiasco, who blows me away every time. If you listen to his albums, you'd find that all the songs are interrelated somehow, and that almost all of them have a literal and metaphorical meaning to them.

The wordplay is hectic too. You can definately get some creative juices flowing after hearing a line like ".... because he never prayed to God he prayed to Gotti... I'm thinking Golly, God Guard Me, from the Ungodly"

From "Hurt Me Soul"...


I also was going to post up a link to page to "test" your brains lol... it was a left/right brain test which also gave you core learning patterns which I thought was interesting. It was from a university so the tool wasn't some junk questionnaire by an outdated site.

I'll find the link, but let me know how interested you would be in it too.

Hope you got some ideas out of this.

Think outside the box!

- Dean