I liked that line from Woody Allen that 80% of success is showing up. I think a hit song is successful mostly because of access and concentrated replaying of it. Michael Bloomberg enters the Democratic race and spends one hundred million dollars on advertising, I wonder why he would do that? Maybe a certain percentage of people passively consume advertising, absorb the message and just like start repeating the ad like it is their own idea they somehow started to think. There were many interviews in the early days of Blue Rodeo taking off. I noticed Greg, Jim, producer Terry Brown and even the John Caton, our manager, had different perspectives on why the band achieved success. Back then people would cite the songwriting or the production or the work ethic and those lines of thought had merit but I recall the record wasn’t added to radio stations, wasn’t a big splash, had come and gone and then Much Music added the Try video to high rotation. POOF we were added to radio everywhere and things took off on a new level. Power of TV or power of advertising on TV. I just ordered a t-shirt online that says SKIP AD. In my Masters exam the other day, one of the questions I was asked was based on my experience last year with a course on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which I didn’t find so inclusive. I mentioned that I wished I could teach it and then one of the examiners asked how I would do it. I said I would give examples from current time, hedging my bet on everyone’s understanding because Marx’s language, circa 1860, isn’t so easy to follow despite the fact that the same dynamics are alive and well. Another examiner asked me to elaborate on art and power and I spoke about the perspective of Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wah Thiong’o who wrote about the war between artists and governments. He said the artist’s power is performance whereas the state tries to perform power but now I realize I might have saved my breath and instead described seeing the Nina Hagen video for New York, New York, in the busy Eaton Centre 30 years ago and feeling the world stop all around me while she forever altered my universe without ever meeting in person. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"