Whatever happened to the idea of ‘cool’? Who was cool back in the day? Who’s cool today? And why does it now mean the opposite of what it used to?
For us ’60s teenagers, the coolest rock stars were a cut above the rest. They radiated a sense of effortless talent, devil- may-care nonchalance and a cavalier disregard for the establishment. They gave the (artfully engineered) impression that they put no thought or consideration into anything they did or said and just made it all up as they went along.
Jimi Hendrix was the epitome of cool – decadent, debauched, apparently living beyond the law in a series of impossibly chic military jackets. Bob Dylan, absurdly cool – detached, unknowable, brilliantly wrong-footing the irksome queries of media ‘squares’. The Doors’ Jim Morrison appeared to roll out of his satin sheets at the crack of noon, dress like Byron, and loaf about writing bacchanalian verse while flooring bottles of expensive wine.
Julie Driscoll, the gorgeous pre-Raphaelite siren on ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’, rarely gave interviews and floated around in a veil of silk scarves. And Bob Marley occupied another universe entirely, a herb-scented Shangri-La with its own religion and radical political agenda.
None seemed to crave commercial success. None courted publicity. None seemed eager to please.
Fast-forward 50 years and cool means something very different. It isn’t about being idiosyncratic or unreachable or against the grain. It’s about being conventional and successful. About fitting in.
Dave Grohl, leader of the stadium- filling, hard-rock noisemakers Foo Fighters, is considered unimpeachably cool for being able to amass colossal wealth while still dressing like a cash- strapped student and remaining an approachable, glad-handing ‘regular guy’.
Taylor Swift’s coolness is based on much the same: her user-friendliness, the way she dresses like a hip auntie at a fancy-dress fairy party and her ability to date any fellow celebrity she fancies and then spill the beans about it in song. Her life’s an open book. A complete absence of mystery is a big part of the appeal.
Lady Gaga’s impeccable cool comes from her being a 21st-century renaissance woman – a nakedly ambitious effort to reach as many markets as possible as an artist, musician, entrepreneur, philanthropist and movie star.
But the coolest pop star on the planet, by all accounts, is the 37-year-old Barbadian superstar Rihanna, despite the fact that she hasn’t released an album in nine years. She owes her universal admiration to the fact that she launched luxury fashion, beauty and cosmetics businesses now worth £2.8 billion.
And she owns half their value, making her the only female musician who’s a billionaire – thus by today’s mercantile metric, the coolest role model by a country mile.
In fact, it’s all come full circle. When Rod Stewart released Atlantic Crossing in 1975 and made no bones about wanting to leave parochial Britain to make a killing in the States, his cool status was cancelled overnight. The fact that he’s playing Glastonbury this summer tells you it’s been reinstated.
