Notes On Being Cool

Barber’s shops and cafes. What does my city do? It does barber’s shops and cafes. As though there were a burgeoning hipster culture being smuggled up through the debris of flailing High Street brands and tourism. Barber’s shops and cafes and places selling vaping paraphernalia. There IS a burgeoning hipster culture!

I am not a hipster. Fashion, I’m rarely for it. I’m the ‘what’ve you got?’ kind of rebellious twit who thinks coolness is a temperature thing rather than a style thing. Which is really cool, right? Oh, wrong.

I remember a conversation I had with a couple of eighteen year olds when I first turned up to university in my early thirties. We were talking bands we’d seen live, bands we’d like to see live and when I told them one of the first bands I saw in concert was The Tubes they went into raptures. “Man, The Tubes! You’re so cool!” I did try to point out that I wasn’t in the band, that they were just one of the bands touring when I was a teenager and who came close enough to my hometown for me to get to the gig. I was fortunate to see them, sure, but it didn’t make me cool. Will teenagers now be considered cool in twenty, thirty years time because they’ve seen Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift in concert. No. That’s the answer you’re looking for: just NO.

Cool is for refrigerators. Style is hard to make your own in an increasingly globalised economy. Chimpanzees sometimes throw their own shit around. The comment about chimpanzees has nothing to do with the rest of this paragraph but probably does illustrate how very far removed from coolness I am. I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo.

Yeah, Radiohead lyrics. Cool huh?