Hip to be Square: On the Shifting Boundaries of Cool
Matthew Gonzalez gives his tailored thoughts on the subversion of cool
Words by Matthew Gonzalez
Defining what is and isn’t cool is one of those things that can be difficult to do but easy to recognise. Coolness seems to be instinctual, a gut feeling. It’s also binary; someone normally is either cool or not. To describe them as ‘kind of cool’ is a charitable act to avoid an insult. The word itself, as we use it in this context, is a product of the early 20th-century jazz scene and over the decades, it evolved to eventually describe what it means today.
At its peak, people like Andy Warhol, Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra, Tyler Durden (Fight Club), and The Dude (The Big Lebowski) all epitomised coolness. Being cool meant that you were top of the social hierarchy; that you possessed some combination of rarefied qualities that the rest of the population didn’t have. Its existence meant that when social value was assigned to everyone the top of the curve was set by those who were cool, the rest were graded accordingly.
For most of its existence, being cool was an exclusive privilege but things have begun to change. Coolness has started to become democratised. Case in point: Mad Men’s Don Draper, arguably one of the most iconic characters of 21st-century television, was introduced to audiences in the same year that Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory was. Both have had lasting global impacts on pop culture and have shaped what it means to be cool in the 21st century. In order to better understand how we got here, it’s time to look at how in the 21st century almost anyone can be cool.
Broadly speaking, there are a few common threads that help create the narrative of traditional coolness. It generally must appeal to a person’s sense of aesthetic tastes or else be a desirable personality trait with an added element of allure. Just because someone was nice and well presented didn’t automatically make them cool. Coolness, at its core, needed to be very exclusive to maintain its social value. The basic logic being that if everyone was cool then no one was. This thinking helps explain why coolness was so narrowly defined for so long; it was exclusionary by its very nature. This is what helped create strictly defined cliques and subcultures.
One of the best pop cultural references for this phenomenon is the 80s film, The Breakfast Club. Each character hailed from their own respective social clique, a clique in which they were liked and had friends. But their assigned social value ultimately takes hierarchical precedent when the group is forced together during a Saturday detention. By using the traditional ‘cool’ metric, each character was distilled down to one particular aspect of their identity to be evaluated for their social worth and judged accordingly. Ultimately, The Breakfast Club attempted to critique the traditional lens through which we look at and evaluate others. It tried to challenge the notion that being cool was only reserved for the proverbial captain of the football team or the rich, preppy girl.
Coolness existed long before we had a specific four-letter word to describe it. Before that, someone might be described as confident, rebellious, charismatic, independent. These terms, and others, would eventually create the archetype of cool. But this is where things have begun to change. While these adjectives still make up a part of what is considered cool, new traits have been incorporated into the identity of cool. Empathy, passion, nerdiness are all traits that can now also make someone cool.
Dan Harmon, showrunner from the cult TV series Community and Rick & Morty recently said in an interview that ‘the internet revolution was in everyone realising that they are a nerd.’ His words perfectly capture how coolness has been turned on its head. For the most part, it is now cool to nerd out about coffee, cycling, baking, you name it. If you are passionate about something, people now recognise and admire it.
Individual authenticity has never been cooler. One of the biggest shortcomings of archetypal coolness was that it was quite flat. The icons of the past were largely known for one thing. It may have been their acting, singing, artistic ability, or athletic prowess but that was their singular public identity. Don Draper would have been mocked if it was revealed that he was a passionate baker because that would have undercut his otherwise homogenised façade of coolness.
By contrast, it is now celebrated when someone is geeky about something. Ted Talk speakers from all walks of life capture our attention about some of the most esoteric subjects. There are Instagram accounts with tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers dedicated to DIY repair, vegan cooking, and model rocketry. Ultimately, if you are happy with who you are then, by all measures and by any conceivable metric, that’s pretty cool.
