Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [73]
When I first heard about the triangle test, I decided to try it on a group of my friends. None of them got it right. These were all well-educated, thoughtful people, most of whom were regular cola drinkers, and they simply couldn’t believe what had happened. They jumped up and down. They accused me of tricking them. They argued that there must have been something funny about the local Pepsi and Coke bottlers. They said that I had manipulated the order of the three glasses to make it more difficult for them. None of them wanted to admit to the truth: their knowledge of colas was incredibly shallow. With two colas, all we have to do is compare two first impressions. But with three glasses, we have to be able to describe and hold the taste of the first and then the second cola in our memory and somehow, however briefly, convert a fleeting sensory sensation into something permanent — and to do that requires knowledge and understanding of the vocabulary of taste. Heylmun and Civille can pass the triangle test with flying colors, because their knowledge gives their first impressions resiliency. My friends were not so fortunate. They may drink a lot of cola, but they don’t ever really think about colas. They aren’t cola experts, and to force them to be — to ask too much of them — is to render their reactions useless.
Isn’t this what happened to Kenna?
6. “It Sucks What the Record Companies Are Doing to You”
After years of starts and stops, Kenna was finally signed by Columbia Records. He released an album called New Sacred Cow. Then he went on his first tour, playing in fourteen cities throughout the American West and Midwest. It was a modest beginning: he opened for another band and played for thirty-five minutes. Many people in the audience didn’t even realize that he was on the bill. But once they heard him play, they were enthusiastic. He also made a video of one of his songs, which was nominated for an award on VH-1. College radio stations began playing New Sacred Cow, and it started to climb the college charts. He then got a few appearances on television talk shows. But the big prize still eluded him. His album didn’t take off because he couldn’t get his first single played on Top 40 radio.
It was the same old story. The equivalent of Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun had loved Kenna. Craig Kailman heard his demo tape and got on the phone and said, “I want to see him now.” Fred Durst heard one of his songs over the telephone and decided that this was it. Paul McGuinness flew him to Ireland. The people who had a way to structure their first impressions, the vocabulary to capture them, and the experience to understand them, loved Kenna, and in a perfect world, that would have counted for more than the questionable findings of market research. But the world of radio is not as savvy as the world of food or the furniture makers at Herman Miller.
They prefer a system that cannot measure what it promises to measure.
“I guess they’ve gone to their focus groups, and the focus groups have said, ‘No, it’s not a hit.’ They don’t want to put money into something that doesn’t test well,” Kenna says. “But that’s not the way this music works. This music takes faith. And faith isn’t what the music business is about anymore. It’s absolutely frustrating, and it’s overwhelming as well. I can’t sleep. My mind is running. But if nothing else, I get to play, and the response from the kids is so massive and beautiful that it makes me get up the next day and fight again. The kids come up to me after the show and say, ‘It sucks what the record companies are doing to you. But we’re here for you, and we’re telling everybody.’ ”
SIX
Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading
The 1100 block of Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview neighborhood of the South Bronx is a narrow street of modest two-story houses and apartments. At one end is the bustle of Westchester Avenue, the neighborhood’s main commercial