I was finishing up reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink this morning (really good, yeah, you can borrow my marked up copy) and in one chapter he mentions this musician named Kenna as an example of the space between what market experts (in this case, music execs) think is amazing and how the actual market reacts to it. It was all very interesting, about the power of our rapid cognition and how different that can be from what we think is helping us choose something over something else. Anyway, that's not really the point. If you want to talk about the book, we can, but you know...on with the tale.
So I wiki the Kenna guy and read about him, take a brief detour into a wiki article about Ethiophia (Kenna is Ethiopian-born). I then took a little stroll through an article about how difficult it is to classify musicians into genres (Kenna is a typical example). Did you know that some musicians say that race is a huge indicator for which genre they'll be placed in? Anyone who knows something about this, what do you think? It seems true if I were going on knee-jerk reaction, but don't know enough about it all to really judge.
Then I read about the Grammy Awards and their genre system if it can be called that. Finally, I bought two of Kenna's albums on iTunes--Make Sure They See My Face and New Sacred Cow.
What a different reading experience it would have been if I weren't near my computer, or hadn't decided to check it out. I learned a ton today about topics I never even cared about before. I'm not sure how much of it I understand, mostly because I only took two hours to read some stuff, and am pretty sure that makes me the least educated person on the topic of musical classification ever.
Kenna is good stuff, I'm half way through New Sacred Cow and listened to all of Make Sure They See My Face. What do I know though, I'm just part of the market!
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