What Do New Coke, KENNA and My Old Band Fingertight Have In Common?

I was bopping around on Youtube last night and my feed suggested video of a guy doing a drum cover of my favorite Kenna song.  You probably dont know who Kenna is and this post is sort of the whole explanation of why that is.  In the related videos was a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell titled "The KENNA problem" and since I'm a fan of Malcolm's podcast Revisionist History and it was about Kenna, of course I clicked it.  It's  kind of a long video of a guy with a weird afro giving a lecture in 2003 but if you take a few minutes to watch it explains why my band Fingertight and I'm sure countless other cool bands and artists never went any further than they did.   Furthermore, if you didn't know me or my blog you would probably have never heard of my old band either... and for the same reasons you've never heard of Kenna.   This video talks about what happened.  What Gladwell describes happening to Kenna happened to my band. 



I remember seeing the Kenna video he mentions on MTV2 while we were recording the demo that got us our record deal. We all fell in love with it and kept trying to find out more about this mysterious artist known only as Kenna. We didnt know if it was a guy or a band. The video was a very cool animated short film that seemed to fit the song perfectly.  Even with some of the industry connections we had at the time, we couldn't  find anything because he never got a deal or never made a record.  After we were signed to Sony music/Columbia Records we did a showcase with the other artists on Sony at the time they were getting ready to release and as it turns out Fingertight and Kenna just so happened to be on the same label at the same time. To our surprise one of the other artists performing that night was Kenna.  It was insane to us that this guy with such an awesome song and a video on MTV2 was essentially at the same level as us a whole year and a half later.  As history would show, both our record and the amazing Kenna record never made it commercially.  We never got the mainstream push we'd expected after all the praise from within the industry. One story I've told before was how we literally had the DJ's and staff of several radio stations loving us. They wore our t-shirts. They would all go to our shows in their respective cities only to find out that they couldn't play us on their stations because we did not pass the stupid blind taste test, the market testing Malcolm talks about in this Youtube video. That is why we never got the official push to national radio playlists. It was very frustrating. I never really understood fully why our song seemed to fizzle out after such admiration from people who's job it is to judge what music is good or not. This pretty much explains it.  Just like New Coke, people were only give a sip. A sip of Kenna and my old band.  What Kenna and Fingertight had is common was that we were both hard to classify in a nice little box.   We wanted to be diverse and unique. We saw that as a strength but in a plastic instant gratification world, it ended up being our's and Kenna's downfall.  With just a quick sip no one was ever allowed to appreciate the full complexities of our music.  

Valerian and the Movie of a Thousand Minutes.

...You'll never get back.

Back with you again with another movie review for a movie that's been out for a while.  I remember seeing the trailer and thinking "wow this looks crazy I gotta go see it" and then never went to see it.  Finally the other night I got around to watching Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining but I don't have to tell you this movie, according to the critics, kind of sucks.  All the reviews are in and they're mostly worse than the makers of this thing hoped.  Some people were into it I guess. I mean, like I eluded to before, it wasn't totally garbage but I did have some problems with it...because of course I do.

She's right there front and center on the poster. 

First of all it was just waaay too long. 2:17 is insane. Felt like 3 hours and I was just on my couch, not trapped in a movie theater with morons. Another problem was the computer generated Pearl people. Right after the space station montage were taken to the planet Mul (Mule) and are introduced to this alien race all happy and gallivanting in their C.G.I. paradise. 10 seconds in I was like "Aaaannnnd now were watching a cartoon" Over it hollywood. The next issue I had was the completely out of place and pointless Rihanna video jammed into the film. It was totally stupid and took away from the movie as a whole. We get it she's a shape-shifter but cutting this whole sequence could have brought the movie under 2 hours. One last thing that specifically bugged me was the aliens that were "fishing" for what.. people? In a place where none of them were supposed to be in a forbidden red-zone and a whole cave city with a cartoonish sign reading "NO HUMANS" or whatever. Oh which by the way is 10 feet from the entrance to a whole city center where hella people are. Again, stupid and not believable. This whole diversion from the main plot could have been removed too. Now that I'm remembering this movie more I also had issue with the 20th century school busses 600 years into the future on some far away alien world was a little ridiculous. –Unless they were built specifically to make Earth tourists feel nostalgic –or the school bus design just hasn't changed in 1000 years. (because they've kind of looked the same since the 50's if you really think about it) Other than those things and the ending being somewhat predictable I enjoyed it as a not-too-serious sci-fi adventure. It was a fun look at the future and it was neat to see all the different aliens and stuff. Although I think it could have gone even more towards a 5th Element vibe and gotten away with it. I think it would have worked better. I didn't even hate the 3 little shyster Doghan Daguis guys.