There's a Lupe Fiasco song called The Cool. The second half of the chorus runs:
You're breaking the rules, making your moves, paying your dues
Chasing the cool.
We've all chased the cool. Most of us couldn't describe what the cool is, but we know it when we see it, and most of us want it. There's an entire industry based around the idea of the cool, entire social groups are divided, run, and driven according to the unwritten rule of the cool. The cool is everywhere; schools, bars, offices, high streets. And yet it's hardly what we could call meritocratic, the cool defies lines of race, genre and wealth. Some people work full time to attain it and end up with nothing, others have it without even trying. But how are our attitudes to the cool formed? How astute are we at recognising it ourselves, and how much of our appreciation of it is to do with what we are told.
To put it simply, I'm suspicious about the genuineness of the tastes of my fellow men.
I'm suspicious that there are multi-million selling artists who produce music which is far inferior to many deal-less artists. (I appreciate taste is a personal matter, but seriously)
I'm suspicious that fashions rise out of nowhere, and suddenly people wear things they'd never have dreamt of wearing a few months previously.
I'm suspicious that in blind taste tests, budget brands so often topple luxury food brands, and yet droves of middle-class consumers still flock to the expensive options.
The question. Have we lost the ability to decide for ourselves what we like? Are we really so suggestible as to base all or most of our tastes upon what others like, rather than our own naked inclinations?
You'll say 'Come on, that's f**king obvious,' but knowing this doesn't exactly stop us does it.
There's an excellent illustration of how fickle we are, provided by an article which ran in the Washington Post. The article was based around an experiment whereby a busker in the Washington Metro was filmed over a 45 minute period as he played the violin for passers by at rush hour. Only 6 people stopped to listen, 20 gave him money. In all he made $32.
This would hardly be extraordinary were it not for the fact that the violinist was world-famous concert soloist Joshua Bell, on a violin worth $3.5 million, playing one of the most challenging pieces ever composed for his instrument. He regularly sells out concert halls, where tickets retail in excess of $100.
The experiment seems to confirm that taken outside of a frame of reference where we expect it, we fail to recognise beauty. The music, taken outside of the concert hall, fell upon deaf ears. The same would almost certainly happen if great works of impressionist art were placed alongside amateur art on the wall of a resturant. Very few people would recognise in that environment what in one of the great galleries would be revered as genius. There's a pub near me with a print of a work of art on the wall of the toilet, a pastel piece of a badly proportioned dog sitting on a beach. A few of us were divided on whether it was a child's painting, or a work by a known artist, and eventually decided it was almost certainly done by an amateur.
I opened a magazine recently to find the same picture in an article on art. Turns out the picture was Dawn after the Wreck, one of J.M.W Turner's most famous works.
Take this principle back to the cool. If we are really that suggestible, how much of what we see as cool is only viewed that way because we've been told it's cool. Either by the television, the magazines, or even people themselves. If people around me tell me somebody is cool enough times, will I start to believe it? I hope not, but who am I to think I'm not as suggestible as the rest of them, the same people who passed Joshua Bell playing Bach on the metro and thought he was just a bum.
Words from Moby:
"I had an epiphany a few years ago when I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends."
You know how when you stop fretting about how to make it with the opposite sex and just relax, you suddenly find they're attracted to you? Maybe if we stopped letting other people decide for us what was good, what music was worth listening to, which people were worth knowing, what clothes were worth buying, we'd turn round and find ourselves having arrived at a genuine cool.
