The Death of the Cool

Here is a vaguely half-baked essay that never made it to the press!

Somewhere along the line, a cosmic scale shifted. Mother Justice and Father Fate and several more distant personified relatives of ethereal human concepts (Third Cousin, Twice Removed Five Second Rule, probably) decided to slide one small abacus bead to the left. It had no tangible effects on the real world until 2011, when two incredibly consequential acts changed the course of popular rock music forever.

1. February 2, 2011. Jack White, on the official Third Man Records blog, announces the breakup of his trademark band, garage-rock duo The White Stripes. The announcement wasn’t unexpected, considering their hiatus starting in 2007, and they guaranteed that the choice was one not of animosity or burnout, but of artistic preservation; the lofty goal of quitting while you’re ahead and leaving your legacy intact. White would go on to form new groups and even continues to release music as a solo act, but would never again capture that oh-so-special aesthetic. The red and white, the peppermint stripes, Meg White’s cataclysmic Bonham-on-a-binge backbeat, and Jack’s guitar, which lurched like a beast from the Detroit refuse, it’s first breath of life a Tesla Coil arc firing on the command of Zeus himself. There will never be another band like them, for it must have taken all God had to make them in the first place.

2. November 2, 2011. In a dorm or cafe or some other unassuming place (as most history is made in unlikely locales), William & Mary newcomer Will Toledo uploads a collection of songs to Bandcamp. Scrappy is an understatement; the vocals are pitchy and awkward, the guitars are buried underneath a fuzz that is definitely accidental, and the lyrics skip right past eyeliner and band uniforms emo and goes straight to “here’s a hotline you can call” self-abuse. Yet, it clicks. There’s no better way to describe what happens in the twelve minute suite of “Beach Life-In-Death” or the anxious rambling of “Nervous Young Inhumans” or the soaring, searing intensity of “Cute Thing.” It just clicks. Evidently, based on it’s meteoric rise through internet forums, into the hands of Matador Records, and finally resting in the top ten essentials of any half-decent 2010s indie list, it clicked for a helluva lot of other people too.

These two moments, in my mind, indicate the greatest shift in rock music since The Ramones. The genre which, above anything else, from bile-soaked ramblings and acid-fueled freakouts of Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix, to the cold technicality and spacebound rhythms of Pink Floyd and Yes, to the swaggering, preening Van Halen and Queen, the fallen angels of Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, and even the cigarette-hazed detachment of The Strokes and Interpol and, yes, The White Stripes, has prioritized “cool” over any-and-everything, had its prime directive swept out from under it. Or, to put it bluntly:

Cool was dead. Long Live Cool.

What is “Cool?”

An article in The New Yorker entitled “The Coolhunt,” comes to a single, three rule definition.

1. “The act of discovering what's cool is what causes cool to move on.” It’s a beast whose tail you can’t grab, man, no matter how many times you shadowbox the idea. Try if you wish; the proverbial graveyard is littered with the bodies of those who thought that they’d finally grabbed the tail of the beast. 

2. "Cool cannot be manufactured, only observed." Sad as it is for us plebeians to hear, Paul Newman was just born that way. We imbued him with some of that power, yeah, but the majority of it was all him. Dress him in MC Hammer pants and that grin of his can still massage parts of your brain normally dormant.

3. "[Cool] can only be observed by those who are themselves cool.” You’re either in-the-know or you ain’t. Simple as.

Pithy it ain’t. That’s the trouble with “cool.” Its very essence is otherworldly, slipping through the fingers of any forces trying to grasp it. You know it when you see it. 

That doesn’t particularly codify it in any sort of useful way, however, so allow me to present my own rules. This is a theory in the abstract, not in the scientific. If you can think of a counter example, then come and find me on the street for a good noodle star.

To be “cool,” an aesthetic must be created and followed with near-religious belief. It can build off, but never bow down. The subject must take no prisoners and make no concessions. The vibe is God. How this manifests is always a little narcissistic in nature: Michael Jordan, high off the crowd noise, chomping on a Cuban cigar and flashing his Jordans at the camera is a prime example.

But, then again, there’s an element of zeitgeist and the audience in cool. Sean Connery’s portrayal of James Bond has rapidly shifted from Every Man’s Greatest Dream to Every Woman’s Worst Nightmare. Times change, and the lifespan of cool makes a fruit fly ancient. Cool must create the moment, ride the wave, and get off while the getting’s good.

This is the razor’s edge we were balancing on entering the new millennium. The cool du jour was irony, sickly and twisted from a decade of overuse. Pavement and Nirvana’s dirty fingerprints left a singular impression on the scene at large; not their protests of the corporate rock world which forced you into a Hot Topic shirt and a Saturday Night Live spot, but of a weaponized irony which worked as a shield, an detached apathy which left one floating moreless in the world. If you can only be observed as cool, and you can spook cool through the pursuit of it, the only way left was through a sort of negging in which you had to play your interest off and pray for results. We mocked Creed and Nickelback for the same reason we now  mock NF and Logic: they’re just trying too hard to be totes gnarly. 

With this sense of ghostlike existence (not acted upon nor acting upon, but merely floating) we entered the new millennium. Then the towers fell and suddenly sullenly acting like nothing mattered when bodies and ash fell from the skies like an inverse Rapture seemed a little shallow. This was the first of many shifts towards the back alley stabbing of “cool,” and it rode in on a Canadian cold-front…

The Fire

I, personally, hate Win Butler. I hate his stupid “we live in a society” lyrics, I hate his dumb, reedy voice, and I hate his proto-stompclapheyho, “ask me about my ‘Steampunk 4 Life!!!’” pin, have the daughter back an hour before her dad says because took her to Makeout Creek and read Emily Dickenson instead of boning debut record “Funeral.” It reminds me of my high school cafeteria, which had a terribly tuned piano in the corner of it, which would, through its mere presence, entice entire legions of theater kids to shittily plonk their way through showtunes, belting and hawing like so many terrible Jerry Lee Lewis-es, expecting this to be their future Gaga moment. “I just knew he’d be a star,” the fictional interviews with their classmates twenty years later which play through their head on loop, “the way he stumbled his way through ‘Born To Run’ while I tried to eat a chicken quesadilla three tables down.”

Sometimes dorks are the heroes though, as sad as it is, and through that cloying mess of violins and gang vocals that was “Funeral” his band Arcade Fire slathered on a salve to ease the U.S. He wrote about love; that dumb adolescent twee love of holding hands on a small-town swingset and flashlight morse code communications between homes. In the same year, My Chemical Romance’s “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” (a measurably better album) had a different side of the same stories, instead speaking to the angsty emotions bubbling forth from that teenage love. The only similarity to the two was the commitment: both Gerard Way and Win Butler were lame, but they also didn’t care. They also weren’t influential, in my eyes; sure, vastly important to the grander landscape of rock in the 2000s, but they weren’t The Strokes, they weren’t Deftones, and they weren’t Queens of the Stone Age, all of whom had immediate swarths of imitators nipping at their heels (although, one could argue that one band attempted to fuze these two differing angsts and sonic palettes, that being Panic! At The Disco, but then one could also argue that you don’t get any bonus points for Jenga-stacking garbage onto itself). 

No, no, as hip-hop led us into the 2010s while reckoning with it’s own interpretation of their genres core themes (OF Tape Vol. 2, Take Care, The Money Store, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy dropped within the same time frame we’re talking, for context), rock needed it’s own reinvention, too torn between too many styles and no North Star. Enter Will Toledo.

Finally, The Point

Twin Fantasy is a record about caring, and not caring, and trying really, really, hard to seem like you aren’t thinking about either of those ideas as hard as you are. It’s a gay love story seeping in confused feelings and codependency, and the entire thing has stylings of the music which wouldn’t have touched grand, sweeping ideas like “love” without a smirk and a remark on how it’s just a chemical process or something. It is totally at odds with itself, and that’s the beauty of it.

At the end of the day, when every microniche has five forums debating it’s minutiae, it’s a little hard to find the will to be detached. When you’ve got thousands of people chomping at the bit to find underground voices after a decade of indie dominance, it’s a little hard to be cynical about the power of music. When there’s no more cultural cache, and it’s just you and the art and the consumer, there’s no point in being cool. This is what Twin Fantasy is a love letter to; exposing every flaw in your armor, stripping yourself down to your barest parts and interfacing them with another’s barest parts, not because it’s beautiful or because it’s tragic or because sex rules, but because it’s the only way to survive in the world we’ve crafted. Twin Fantasy, in a rebuttal against its own title, killed the fantasy of rock.