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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.)
koganbot: (Default)
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 [livejournal.com profile] braisedbywolves:

ExpandCool is as dead as God )

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.

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Frank Kogan

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