Please help me figure out what I mean by "cool."

[koganbot]

Please help me figure out what I mean by "cool" (and by "rock" and "swing" and "punk").

I posted this in response to a post by braisedbywolves:

I wrote several thousand words with my 1987 Pazz & Jop ballot explaining to Xgau why I thought cool was as dead as God. There've been several somewhat different ideas of cool. One is the African-derived one of grace under fire, which isn't cold coolness, in fact can have an intensity and passion; Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Ventura (from whom I filched this idea) related it to the concept of soul. But anyway, in the Afro-American/beatnik American/Jewish American version, cool is a way of surviving in a distorting and destructive institutional environment (such as slavery!) and it includes a subterranean kind of mockery - a critical detachment from the situation that the overseers don't necessarily understand as criticism, a ju jitsu moves where you use your adversary's own motion to get around him. In Clancy Sigal's terms (he wasn't talking about cool specifically, but about why white people sometimes want to act black) it's a way of fending off the billy clubs, both rubber and figurative.

But in my own experience, a lot of the cool people were cruel people, were the bullies and the sarcastics - yes, they were dancing around the truncheon or even taking it on the chin and standing up to or outside of authority for sure, but using needles and knife-thrusts that they'd aim at anyone at hand, anyone vulnerable, not just at the truncheon-wielders. And some of their "cool" was just boring nastiness, and fear, actually - fear of anyone's engagement, passion. It was a coolness that ended up trapped in its shield, so to speak. And so it seemed in its bad aspects not a way to knowledge but a turning against knowledge.

Anyway, cool died for me in about 1970, age 16, about the time I stopped being intimidated and impressed by the freaks but also started liking them more, as individuals (and they, as they got older, were more willing to show their own scars and vulnerabilities).

But also in the culture, for positive reasons - the civil rights and gay liberation movements and so on, the institutionalization of bigotry being less accepted, so some things confrontable head-on rather than obliquely - the need for cool was lessening. But for negative reasons the cool models were disappearing anyway, the freaks fucking up and flipping out and the counterculture becoming Moronsville and black militancy becoming black self-destruction, and drug addiction blossoming. That's a crude picture for sure, and I think that anyone growing up needs to develop a certain coolness in adolescence, a way of stepping aside and developing a critical mind, because you have to figure out where families and schools aren't working for you; but there's the ambivalence, because what you're detaching from is also what's genuinely nurturing you.

Anyway, back to my crude picture, and forward to 1987 and my first Pazz & Jop ballot (not long after my first appearance in a commercial publication; I was a late bloomer), I was writing this lengthy screed to Xgau, most of which I don't remember, but the basic point was that I could no longer discern a "cool" path to knowledge, a way that coolness made anyone hip to anything anymore; I didn't see a cool area on the musical map or a functional way to grace under pressure, and the music that was moving me and teaching me was being made by fuckups like Spoonie Gee and Michael Jackson and by frazzled nitwits like Teena Marie, people who were desperately and passionately involved (I think that's a phrase I nicked from a piece on the Shangri-Las by Richard Goldstein back in 1965). And I was saying that I believed that the old punk rock I had once loved still had something to offer the world, its legacy, which was that we'd known we were fucked and had made an issue of it.

Anyway, I didn't fill out your poll because either I never was cool and hip or I still am. Let's hypothesize that I'm still cool and hip. But whatever knowledge I have - what I can make you hip to, what can step us outside the twisted, distorting stupidity of most music criticism - isn't that, say, I post a Britney leak or tell everyone to hear Ashlee (that's a well-worn path, anyone can do it, to champion pop rather than hipster heroes while still practicing the same old oneupmanship), but that I'm willing to be a dweebily earnest intellectual type who will write a textual analysis of Britney's web postings and of Ashlee's lyrics, will try to take in and communicate their knowledge, using old analytic techniques that would get me a pat on the head from Brooks and Warren.

But in this post I was making a basic mistake, thinking of a particular type of insight or practical behavior - "coolness" - as a group or class characteristic; this confusion pretty much saturates my screed. Of course the "cool people" as a self-defined group aren't going to be all that cool, most of 'em, just as not all swing swings or all rock rocks, and why so little punk rock had much to do with what I originally liked about punk, and why so little "critical thinking" is intelligent. So once again, maybe you guys can help me write my next piece figure out what I'm talking about. And I think there may be an analogy here, "coolness" getting uncool as it is assigned to a particular group of people, FM rock failing to rock as it becomes tied to the well-coalesced freak group c. 1968, punk getting worse shortly after becoming the music of the punk rock movement, etc.