Kenna - New Sacred Cow (3)

Talk of this album constitutes almost an entire chapter of Galdwell's Blink. Apparently, many distinguished figures in the music industry heard Kenna's music and were deeply impressed, but when focus group testing was done, the audience was unimpressed, and radio stations were very reluctant to play Kenna's stuff. Gladwell uses this as an illustration of the fact that focus group testings aren't as meaningful as the judgments of experts and can be very misleading, but I beg to differ. Maybe the fact that one of those impressed experts was a member of U2, those toe curling dogooders, should have tipped me off - I am absolutely with the focus group on this one. This is lifeless, uninpsired music and doesn't speak to me at all. Maybe an entirely different argument could be made from this - about how too much expertise can drive you into the obscurity of private passions no non-expert can understand or appreciate. Or maybe U2 is just full of shit. I like that theory.