The Coolness Factor
Posts tagged cool
As posts are coming to a close, I would like discuss a little closeted (or so I hope) obsession of mine. I mostly am into Old Rock and new indie music but there is a pop group I have come know and love. They are called One Direction and they are a British boy band. Now they only formed about 2 years ago but already have a number 1 album in the United States that got to number 1 the first week it was released which no British artist has ever been able to do, not even The Beatles. Now girls are obsessed with them. They bring crowds of thousands and their world tour sold out in only a couple of minutes.
These five boys like to point out in interviews that they aren’t the average boy band. They aren’t clean cut, they don’t wear matching outfits and they arent this kind of nerdy image of boy bands that we have always thought, and you can tell this in interviews and performances. They drink, 1 smokes, the pose for high fashion magazines (as seen above) they care just enough about their music, they all have great voices and they don’t try to seem perfect, they just are themselves. Are they reinventing the boy band image…to make it seem cool to be in a boy band? They like to say they aren’t a boy band they are just boys in a band but lets be honest, a boy band is a boy band. They are being compared to The Beatles and Beatlemania because their image and the attention they get isn’t average with boy bands of the 90’s. I believe they are a cool boy band even if it is a boy band and I think they are reinventing the image and the name. They aren’t the average image of a boy band that has always been nerdy.
I would just like to point out when I was searching things to talk about on tumblr, I typed in cool people and they tried to finish my sentence with cool people smoking. I don’t exactly know why people like to look at pictures of people smoking, thinking its cool. People who don’t smoke usually don’t for health reasons but they are probably the ones looking up the pictures of the people smoking. Why do you have to be cool and smoke? Is it the whole idea you know that smoking kills you and you only live once so you don’t care? But why are people looking at pictures of cool people smoking? To vicariously through them even if they don’t like the habit. Do uncool people who don’t smoke like the habit but are just too chicken to do it? Do they care about living for the future to much? I think its cowardness. Just, if you don’t want to smoke, don’t live though people who actually do. I think that might be the epitome of uncool.
As we were discussing cool over the past semester, I feel like we didnt really disscuss aesthetic cool. My definition of aesthetic cool is when you look at a picture and you just know that picture is cool by the way you feel. Take this picture for example. The colors are dark in the background but there is just this little hint of sparkle and of light. Its on a beach with no one there and its mysterious. It makes you think of what the beach means to you, why its dark why no one is there. This picture because of all of its certain aspects makes you feel a certain way and you know its a cool picture because of some of the details I just described. Aesthetically cool can be overlooked a lot of the time but its there and I feel that if an image or a video can make you feel coolness, cool can be an aesthetic feeling.
“ The only true currency we have in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we are uncool.
-Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, Almost Famous ”
I feel in this quote what PSH as Lester Bangs is trying to say is that in some way, people always strive towards to be cool or popular but it usually does not work and that most people in the world are uncool, thats just the way things are. Because most of us are uncool, we have a sort of connection with each other. Like the cool people we want to be are on one side and were on another. I also feel that the character is trying to say we should accept our status of being uncool. Because if everyone accepts being uncool then maybe all of the uncool people will be cool without trying. That our status will change. Maybe thats why we see an uprise in nerd chic these days. That the hipster outcasts are being labeled as cool. Maybe if the uncool people that makes up most of society accepts the status they can have their chance at coolness. Just a thought
Look at This Fucking Hipster
I realized over the semester, I became really interested in hipsters. I compared the “Beat Generation” hipsters with our own new arising generation of hipsters. I emphasized in my last essay how the hipster movement now is just a fashion statement, they don’t have a lot of views or ideals they stand for, unlike past hipsters. Could we really call this new generation of hipsters a movement? Probably not. Our new generation of hipsters tend to like to do the opposite of what is mainstream, as most hipsters do. But do they really look cool or hipster? or do they just look ridiculous. Are people trying to be hipsters so badly…that they cant achieve being a real hipster? Check out this website for a chuckle and ideas.
In my presentation, I briefly touched on how we, in our C position, constantly judge people either in real life or on the internet. I thought to myself, what if people did not judge each other. What if judging didn’t exist? That no one ever could have an idea or a judgment of another person. Obviously, this is not a realistic situation. I just thought that if people didn’t judge each other, would cool even exist? Without judging or having opinions of other people, no one would know or realize if some one was cool or different because they would have no opinion on the person. If we cant recognize other people, we wouldn’t recognize other things and other opinions in the world. Cool wouldn’t even be an idea or concept. I know we all rag on Facebook about how girls judge each other all the time and that is not very nice to judge other people. But if people didn’t have opinions of each other, then cool or many others things wouldn’t even exist. So we need come to the realization that judging is just a way of life and it cant be stopped. Its not a very nice part of life, but it is something everyone has to deal with. Im not promoting judgment but It wont ever stop, its impossible.
How To Be Cool?
I would just like to state as I read these steps, I felt a lot more nerdier. Continuing on, as I realized over this semester, being cool cant be taught or listed. There is no pure definition. Thats why this class was difficult. There are so many different forms of cool. There are so many different philosophies and factors like your C-position you have to take into consideration. I do realize though that cool depends on where you are, how you act and how others perceive you. Thats as general as it gets. If you are someone who has to list rules and steps on how to be cool and try to teach people how to be cool. Hate to break it to you, you probably are not very cool yourself.
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of the real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of the spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people.”- Karl Marx
At this time, very religious people are not very common to find in our C position anymore. At this moment in time, people do not always turn to religion and being religious isn’t seen as common or cool. We turn to religion when we have lost our spirit or our sense of self and need something to look towards too. It seems like our generation is in the predicament of constantly recycling ideas and loosing are sense of originallity. We are loosing are sense of what makes us a original and different generation. We are also loosing the prospect of looking to the future when we feel that everything that will come up in the future already has happened in the past. Nothing can be new or shocking anymore. Because we have lost this sense of our selves and are future, are we going to start turning towards a higher figure to help us find our sense of selves. To have another figure except ourselves telling us what might happen or what will be. Will being religious and looking towards religion during are lost time will be common in our C position? Will religion become cool again?
