It’s been apparent for years that some people are cooler than others and it has to stop. No UK political party has ever addressed it, not even Corbyn’s Labour, so it’s clearly not a vote winner, which once again is cool people’s gain. And the rest of us? Well, we’re just left on the slag heap of credibility.
These days its harder to determine who’s cool thanks to art students and hipsters who dress like children fumbling in the dark with access to nothing but high-waisted jeans, 70s beanie hats and shoes rounder than Cobbler Smurfs. I saw someone with a rolled-up cigarette inserted through her ear apparently pierced for this exact purpose. She’s clearly someone who wants the people to know that she smokes, even when she isn’t. Is that cool? She clearly thinks it is. Of course, it’s hard to define cool, through doing so you instantly lose touch with what it is.
It’s hard to know when the mass-concept concept of being cool arrived; it was probably with Elvis in 1958. However, in light of being unable to sing, or growl like an anteater warning predators away from its nest, I concluded that the quickest route to cool was to dump my Level 42 records and start writing a novel, or at least carry a notebook on me at all times. And for a while it worked, I thought I had it, without needing to inquire what it was. I was cool until I noticed I wasn’t.
It was obvious when the façade dropped, like an ice sheering off glaciers in global warming documentaries, it was when I found myself excited at the news coming on the radio. I had already noticed tremulous anticipation at buying a newspaper and opportunities to get annoyed at the world is provided, but excitement for a three-minute radio bulletin was something new. This was deeply uncool, so I kept it to myself. Not that I was punching the air like I’d scored a hoop (or whatever its called) in basketball, but there was a definite wave of contentment that I recognized from the anticipation of PopMaster at 10:20 am on Radio 2 weekdays. My next thought was that I’m turning into Alan Partridge. I must never blog about this I thought to myself, and even wrote that in my notebook.
The thing with cool is that for something so subjective, its incredible objective. You could show any participants a list of things and they’d be an 80% accuracy rate on what was cool. For example, everyone knows stable doors are cool, particularly if you’re a horse; they provide the opportunity to be inside and outside at the same time. Stable doors are probably the nearest we’ll ever get to a teleportation device and are imminently more achievable. A VW Golf Mk 1 GTi with sunken rear window and golf ball gear stick handle is cool, while an Audi A7 with wing mirrors the size of a Mk 1 golf and a public display of an inferiority complex two inches off your rear bumper at 90mph with Trump-esque disregard for the rule book, is not cool.
So what’s uncool? Putting your iPhone in your pocket and missing is clearly uncool, as is painting yourself into a corner of a room and waiting for the paint to dry until you can leave. Even Dire Straits, a rather well-produced band with a tendency for lengthy guitar solos and a level of sincerity even rejected by Bono, remain uncool and are only allowed in public under security protection as an entry on a guilty pleasure playlist.
It might be worth asking my seven-year-old what he thinks is uncool, but I know he’ll just point and no matter how hard I pretend he means the table behind me, it’s clear he means me. The only response is to retort with snappy analysis as to how uncool he is too, but that’s just childish, which is definitely uncool and will just prove his point for him, meaning you’ve lost an argument to a child not yet able to tie his shoelaces. This means a plummet into the lower reaches of the uncool charts last visited by MGMT with their 2nd album.
Like midnight piñata, cool is a hard thing to hit and let’s be clear, printing stickers with ‘So cool I’ve been putting the arty into party since 1987’ is not cool. If you’d put 1989, well…
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Originally published on Idle blogs of an idle fellow
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