Over the past weeks I was blasting carbon copy rappers. No apologies for that, I will always blast them as long as it is clear cut who they copied. However I must admit today that even the not so carbon copies may be innovated carbon copies. See in an exam, the foolish copycat will copy everything verbatim up to your name and candidate number.
The clever copycat will innovate your answer. Facebook is surely not the first ever social network to ever surface, and yahoo was before Google search so Google did not invent search engines. The two clearly innovated the concepts. In fact the first search engine was W3Catalog in 1993, an active search engine today which some of you are hearing for the first time today. Today I will tell you this, “An innovation on an imitation will surpass the original.”
Whatsapp messenger similarly did not create the first mobile chat program. It just brought a chat program without too many authentications or a login. Something that was friendly to data and was as good as an SMS, but yet was an innovation of an SMS messenger in that you could communicate in real time. The first chat service came into existence in 1980 and over the years was innovated till we had Skype which made video calling easier for a large number of home users.
They say the midget on the giant, see’s much further
What happened to innovation? I see rappers daily copying exact rhyme schemes and song concepts. Even Alicious WeMaskiri copied Dance With The Devil by Immortal Technique on his song Simbarashe and Tendekai “Madzitatiguru” Tati did a juxtapose audio to get this to point out this issue. We have the biggest telecommunications companies in Zimbabwe copying each other’s marketing schemes, including naming of brands. Their banking products have the same names.
I suggest that being able to hide your imitation is dependent upon how you innovate the original. Sit down and find flaws on the original and innovate it, you automatically become a better brand and overtime you will dominate over the first brand. The first brand must never relax.
If you have a good brand, people will always copy that brand so you must sit down and experience your own brand in their shoes, write down what’s missing. After you take down what’s missing, make a plan to make it available even if it means hiring an expert to do it for you. You may sing good conscious music, but do bad choruses and hooks. You may actually be popular while doing this in your circles, till a lyricist as hard as you, raps things of the same depth but allows Crimson Blu to do a beautiful chorus. He takes advice from experts on social media engagement, studies a course in internet marketing and gets a good designer to do his sleeve design.
It is a bad decision to be a DMX fan, shave your head bald, wear armless t-shirts with tattoos, bark and use a hoarse voice while talking about the street, with a little rhymes on hell and heaven, crack cocaine and speeches for interludes. You are not good at being DMX, you can only be good at being you. How can you follow a man who has his own imperfections yet men still fall while trying to follow an image of perfection? Being you is seeing the great work done by DMX and being inspired to build from that and telling your own reality. Our realities differ; you also have your own God given voice that no one else has. Use it.
Now imagine how hard it would be to trace a DMX with an Afro, perhaps ,maintaining all other variables (hoarse voice, armless t-shirts) minus the barking. The subject matter would be DMX, the look would be K’naan, but not completely K’naan. Tell me now, will anyone say to you , “Ja Rule, you remind me of DMX?”. This is an issue that causes much debate in forums sometimes but artists that carbon copy different aspects from different people and give us a bit of their own image, are generally unique.
It’s like the electric jug. One has a chance to buy an electrical element and dip it in a bucket. One has the opportunity to have a separate jug. But he who finds an element, a jug and a bimetallic strip to make a thermostat can make this sophisticated looking gizmo we call an electrical jug and it can sell for double the price of all those other things combined. I’m sure you get the concept by now.
Retarded copying is strictly prohibited in Hip-hop. Happy music creation.
Get Madzitatiguru’s audion on Maskiri below.
