Where is the cool?

Cool isn't really a thing anymore. That sort of effortless swagger used to be lousy in rock and roll. If you look at old pictures of The Veivet Underground they just look like the hippest motherfuckers on the planet. Recently, while listening to Regulate by Warren G and Nate Dogg, I realized that at some point, that cool had moved over to hip hop. Public Enemy had it for a little while, then there was g-funk and now it's gone from there too. Hip hop is either big and boisterous or it goes the Kanye West route of anger and emotional fragility. Gone is the laid back attitude that has defined "cool" since "cool" began. 

As near as I can tell, the last song that had any heat behind it that harkened back to the days of hipness was "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem. Plenty of other songs these days have that same attitude of "No problems tonight, we're gonna have a good time" but none of them have that ease about them. Most popularly, the Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling" comes to mind. However, it suffers from a party atmosphere. This isn't the Andrew W.K. definition of partying (which is just wherever Andrew W.K. is, there's a party) but rather the type of planned, contrived party that usually turns out to be totally lame. Frat parties aren't cool, bachelorette parties aren't cool. They're about being big and wild and cheap drink and yelling "woo!" Being fun and exciting are great, but being cool isn't about that.

On the other side of things, you have the side of music that's about wearing your heart on your sleeve. It's this notion that has really revitalized hip hop in the past few years. Ever since Kanye West released 808s And Heartbreaks and made it cool for rappers to have feelings, it's been all the rage. The type of cool I'm talking about is more laid back though. Apathetic has a bad connotation, but it's close enough. It's not about not having those emotions, but about putting them to the side. Anger acceptable, but rage isn't. It's Brando in The Wild One. It's the song "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed. It's the people that you're too afraid to hang out with.

So cool isn't cool anymore. It looked for a while like the Strokes were the sure successor to the throne, but their music hasn't been what it used to be for some time now. Everyone compared them to the Velvet Underground back when they first hit the scene (if you haven't noticed, The Velvet Underground is pretty much the gold standard for this type of cool) but that feeling has since faded. Like Interpol, another band with cool to spare when they first got big, they have since fizzled out and now make music that's good, but lacks that spark. Will cool ever be cool again? Is this just an antiquated, crazy notion of cool that makes no sense in a modern context? Maybe I'm just missing something that really is cool I sure hope that's the case.