LE SECRET DE COOL
How much cooler does that read in French.
The business of cool is serious business but nobody ever says so. Because it’s just not cool to talk about cool. And yet…
Please, please Mr Advertising Man,
please make ME look cool!
That’s the unspoken plea in virtually every creative brief since my first copywriting job for Leo Burnett in 1988 for Shangri La Hotels. (My other two clients were Gucci and Carlsberg – I knew I’d arrived) In business, cool is an unspoken taboo. It’s like disclosing how much you earn, your deleted browser history and the fact that you actually do like country and western.
For instance, New York City isn’t cool anymore. A packed city full of empty luxury towers. Poor doors. Entire blocks owned by Russian oligarchs. Steampunk condos. Bad Mexican food. Taking pictures of celebrities riding the subway. Kudos to Adrian Kudler for saying it first. Whilst that’s a shank in the kidney for anyone cool left in NYC, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are off to LA. Perhaps the gravitational pull of their enormous reserves of cool definitely could singlehandedly throw the entire cool balance of the US out of whack. Yet while New York isn’t cool anymore, LA is still pretty cool. Amazing weather is cool, lower rents are cool, good burritos everywhere is cool, being the creative capital of planet earth is cool… and being totally laidback and chill as the world makes the same hacky jokes about you over and over for decades is extremely cool. But what does cool actually mean? In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. Yet this doesn’t explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool, and why is it so cool to be cool?
Well… Thorsten Botz-Bornstein posits that aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation. Think about that next time you’re doing an eye roll.
Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. The aesthetic is spread by hip hop for example, which seems to have become the epicenter of a global mega music and fashion industry. Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioural tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become the most visible manifestation of mainstream cool. Cool is also like porn. I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it. Yet in spite of the ambiguity, we are capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. Cool is not linear. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool.
Stoicism is cool right now, perhaps for good reason. In ancient Greece, the Stoic philosophers supported a vision of coolness in a turbulent world. Stoic indifference to fate can be interpreted as the supreme principle of coolness, and has even been been viewed as such in the context of African American culture. For me it’s much simpler. Having spent 30 years getting paid heaps to make shit cool, I’ve discovered there’s a very big difference between looking cool and being cool. It’s like the difference between fashion and style. Most people thinking that just buying branded clothing will make them look cool. Newscheck! Real cool is a revelation of a deep personal truth. A personal cache of cool is an incredibly valuable asset: people hire you because of it, will sleep with you for it and trust you because of it. There’s no faking it. For me, the secret is simple. It comes from self work and self worth. I firmly believe that self esteem is the emotional immune system. It comes from a true realisation of your assets and defects. Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. No one on this planet can be better at being you, than you. Isn’t that cool?
