The Death of Cool

In the summer of 2023 I wrote a song called ‘360’

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In the summer of 2023 I wrote a song called ‘360’ which ended up on my 6th studio album ‘brat’. At the end of each chorus I sing the line “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia” in reference to actress, artist and muse to Josh Safdie amongst others, Julia Fox. I always loved this line firstly because it plays into the focus on internet culture which perseveres not only throughout this song and album but throughout my entire career and secondly because in a way it’s oxymoronic. Whilst Julia is undoubtably famous, she is inherently tied to elements of the underground. Although she is often seen and recognized and out, her approach to fame and celebrity are nuanced and avant garde and sometimes brutally honest in a way that is particularly distinct and not the norm. So yes, she’s everywhere, but she’s everywhere for a certain crowd. She is not Target or Amazon or Mcdonalds, but she could quite possibly be your favorite reference baby, even if you don’t realize it. But if Julia Fox did have a custom Mcdonald’s meal and a clothing line with Target and little Julia drones were delivering everyone’s Amazon packages, would this mass exposure make Julia Fox uncool? I honestly don’t think so because I’m sure she’d find a Warholian way to make it all make sense.

I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality ‘just because’ is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever. Disliking something purely because of its widespread popularity or links to commercialism comes with a distinctly art school type energy that is super triggering to me. This is probably because I was absolutely ridiculed during my first crit as a student at the Slade School Of Fine Art when I stuck 10 drawings of neon colored ponies riding dynamite sticks to the wall using blu tack and then stood back and did that thing of trying to let the work ‘speak for itself’. Most of my fellow class mates laughed and threw deliberately reference heavy seemingly high brow questions at me to which I basically had no answers for. Most except for my friend Matt Copson who told me afterwards that he quite enjoyed the whole experience. I’d argue he’s probably one of the more successful artists to come out of my years at the school. Real recognize real I guess.

My fascination with the combination of high and low has always been a big driver within my work. People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious. I enjoy the in-between space that this creates. There’s definitely something antagonistic about it and whilst I like that my work can sometimes lead to these sorts of conversations and yes, sometimes shock tactics are funny to me and bring me joy, the integrity of the initial work always has to come first for me to be truly interested in the work itself. If creating something does not come from a truthful and meaningful place within the artist, if it doesn’t in ways wear it’s heart on it’s sleeve, then in my opinion the work is totally fucking DOA.

The apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place. Before I go too much into that let me just state that of course I would much rather be considered ‘cool’ by a select few group of people than known by everyone. And yes, I know it’s inherently lame to care about that kind of stuff, but I’m just being honest. My penchant for ‘coolness’ probably points to my deep routed insecurity (or perhaps I’d even go as far as calling it a fear) of being boring. To be boring is to die right there on the spot. Give up, give in, go home, stay home, end it all. Boredom is something I dread to feel and dread to inflict on others and therefore I guess that means I equate “coolness” to being fascinating and interesting 24/7. A 365 party girl was born.

A few years ago I went to see a friend of a friend’s band perform in London. The show was fine, sold out, the crowd were relatively engaged but at the same time something was missing. I went home and felt weirdly depressed after the show. The next day I called up A. G. Cook to express how I was feeling and as we spoke on the phone I began to realize that I felt depressed because what I had witnessed had felt really safe, really nothing and honestly kind of boring. He laughed and I think found it funny that I was so bothered by the feeling the show had left me with and we discussed why this was. I said “There was no spark! No magic! No distinction! But people were still enjoying it and I don’t judge them for that!”. That last part was obviously not true, I was TOTALLY judging them to be honest. What we watched was technically ‘good’ don’t get me wrong. It was functional and running smoothly but there was just absolutely no style. The audience watching didn’t feel like they belonged to a community that was unbelievably important to them, there was no sense of rabid fandom, it was just people standing and watching and bopping along. They were present but equally not really there at all. It felt like they’d decided to pop to the show on a whim and check it out. The whole thing was one big shrug with a huge air of indifference. Everyone felt unaffected. Everything felt vague. It was not cool.

Watching this show was a pivotal moment for me in terms of the way I thought about coolness. This show taught me that coolness is something I value, because without it everything sort of feels random and nondescript. The second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies. That is the death of cool.

However on the flip side I find that when something that starts off as specific and niche and a true expression of a person then becomes popular, it still has the potential to suffer a death of it’s initial cool but not because of popularity alone, more because of the things that sometimes happen en route to popularity. I feel like I experienced this first hand with ‘brat’. After releasing the album into the world, in ways the narrative was no longer in my control. Sometimes that was fun and exciting but other times I would find that people would boil the ethos of the album down to something that just wasn’t anything to do with it at all. It began a game of he said she said. Other people’s interpretations began to become fact, brands began to adopt a visual aesthetic that was clearly tapping into the album’s aesthetic but each time would get it slightly wrong, slightly off. The more time passed from the album release the more and more bastardized the representations of the album became. These representations were replicated and reproduced and deemed as truthful. This is when I feel that things become broad, things become passé, things become boring.

But you know what who knows, maybe I need to face the boredom and sit in the silence? Maybe I’m trying too hard? Maybe I’m moving too fast? Confusion is sometimes cool anyways and maybe its cooler to have a Salvador Dali fake than a Salvador Dali original? I remember in the middle of the brat album cycle one of the vinyl plants accidentally printed 10,000 copies of the album using the wrong hex code resulting in a load of albums in the wrong shade of green. That in itself felt inherently brat, a bastardized version of the album born from a mistake, but kind of a good one. Maybe if you spin it in the right kind of way with the right kind of confidence and a baseline level of taste anything can be cool? Maybe cool can live forever?