PAGE TURNER: Split Second Decisions

I'm delighted to report that the BookADay website has come out of hiatus. I'm even more pleased to see that my review of Blink has gone live. And I'm a little embarrassed because Brandi's first post back talks at great length about me. Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm a glory hound. But I try not to be a self-promoting glory hound. So a hearty welcome back to the BookADay team, and if you must read about me, just skip to the review.

On the subject of Blink, one of the examples that author Malcolm Gladwell uses to demonstrate experts making successful snap decisions if the story of a singer/songwriter named Kenna. Self-taught, Kenna doesn't have a particular format or genre into which he readily fits. A review at PopMatters.com called him "new-hip-wave-synth-hop." But industry experts who heard his songs and saw him in concert immediately declared that Kenna was the next big thing. Label managers who heard his demo would insist, "Sign him!" Everything looked promising for Kenna.

Until he fell into the hands of market research. Quite simply, Kenna tested poorly. Audiences who heard a 20-second snippet of a Kenna song were put off by the fact that it didn't have an immediately familiar sound. Because market research said Kenna wouldn't fly, radio stations wouldn't play his songs. Basically, Kenna is the poster child for an industry that no longer trusts its own instinct. If you wonder why our movies and TV shows and popular music is so uniformly poor, it's because statistics have been misused to marginalize the unusual. If market research dictated what you had for lunch, you'd only ever have a chicken sandwich. With no mustard.

Anyway, after I'd had access to iTunes for a while, it occurred to me that I could actually listen to some Kenna. Decide for myself. So I looked it up, and sure enough, there was his album, New Sacred Cow. So I listened to a few snippets. And my reaction? Not all that impressed.

Still, I did keep coming back to the title track, so my wife suggested that it wouldn't hurt to plunk down a dollar to buy it, and that would at least remind me to go back and listen to the other tracks again. So that's what I did, and we listened to the entire cut. And my reaction? This is a great song.

"New Sacred Cow" now sits in the #3 slot on our "Top 25 Most Played" playlist, behind a Christmas song and some electronica song that my wife likes that was in a car commercial. I think it's only a matter of time before it moves into 1st. And I was feeling really proud of myself for being better than market research. So I told this story to my Whirled News Tonight colleague Marla. And she pointed out that I hadn't liked the other songs enough to download them based on a 30-second snippet. I had made a judgment based on what was familiar to me, and only one song made the cut. "You did exactly what Blink said you would do," she said.

Of course, she was absolutely right. My inexpert ear had nearly condemned Kenna to my personal musical oblivion. If market research had come to me, I'd have given them answers that really weren't very informed at all.

Clearly, my judgment is not as dependable as I had hoped.