scoring average ratings and eight scoring below average. The
conclusion was even more blunt this time: “Kenna, as an artist,
and his songs lack a core audience and have limited potential to
gain significant radio airplay.”
Kenna once ran into Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2,
backstage at a concert. “This man right here,” McGuinness said,
pointing at Kenna, “he’s going to change the world.” That was
his instinctive feeling, and the manager of a band like U2 is a
man who knows music. But the people whose world Kenna was
supposed to be changing, it seemed, couldn’t disagree more, and
when the results of all of the consumer research came in,
Kenna’s once promising career suddenly stalled. To get on the
radio, there had to be hard evidence that the public liked him
— and the evidence just wasn’t there.
1. A Second Look at First Impressions
In Behind the Oval Office, his memoir of his years as a political
pollster, Dick Morris writes about going to Arkansas in 1977 to
meet with the state’s thirty-one-year-old attorney general, an
ambitious young man by the name of Bill Clinton: