Rules Of The Game #14: The Death Of The Cool

[koganbot]

Latest column. Britney, Bowie, and the unavailability of cool.

The Rules Of The Game #14: The Death Of The Cool

Key sentence: "But where coolness - or any knowledge - stumbles is when it becomes the attribute of a particular class."

So what's been your experience with "cool"? Is there such a thing? What would it be now?

Links to previous columns. (And they've finally added the paragraph breaks to last week's column. Comments didn't make it through, however. LVW got the italics too, but missed them this week, and I'm not going to press the matter.) UPDATE: That link "to previous columns" no longer works, but I've got the whole set here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

(Also, here's a link to that Michael Ventura article I refer to, "Hear That Long Snake Moan," about the African sources of cool, and the New Orleans source of everything. Ventura cannot be accused of understating his case.)

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I still don't quite trust people when they go on and on and on about how uncool they are and how they don't try to be cool and aren't bothered...it seems to be saying "I am very cool indeed" but just using different criteria (subtext: oh look at all those fashion victims who try so hard to be scene, aren't they uncool").

I have too much suspicion, and love/hate relationship with Shoreditch, to be stereotypically London-cool? But people call me a hipster and who am I to argue. I dunno. I think I'm cool, anyway.

The Death Of The Uncool

[koganbot]

Well, yeah, that's another problem, people who think they're being defiantly uncool, which usually translates into drabness and stupidity.

But I wouldn't know how to be uncool any more than I'd know how to be cool.

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

I agree that people can try too hard to be uncool as well as cool. It's what makes the words redundant (although they are meaningful because so much revolves around them, and not just for teenagers) - whatever you try to be, you must think it's cool or you wouldn't try. Therefore I don't think we should ever criticise people for wanting to be cool, but we can definitely criticise people for having bad taste in their choice of what to see as cool, or for trying to be what other people say is cool rather than what they individually aspire to.