Bob Lefsetz is prolific (not to mention one of the most passionate bloggers I’ve read). He sometimes posts up to 3 items a day on his Lefsetz Letter, primarily dealing with what he believes is fundamentally right and fundamentally wrong with the music industry. I respect his passion and his independence.

The content of his blog isn’t for everybody, and his word usage is sometimes …well …colourful. My interest is purely personal as opposed to professional, although I sometimes draw parallels between his characterizations of the “big boy” record labels in these Web 2.0 times, and traditional mainstream media’s and Corporate Canada’s approach to reaching diverse audiences.

Case in point: a recent post on Bob’s “Letter” contained a quote from President John F. Kennedy’s Commencement Address at Yale University in 1962, and it has stayed with me:

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Mythology distracts us everywhere–in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs.

(You can read JFK’s full address here.) Certainly, mythology can distract and thereby perpetuate the notion of enjoying “the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

Over the course of an average working day/week, we quite often come up against popular myths within the context of multicultural marketing and reaching diverse audiences. I’ll talk about these myths in a couple of posts to come.