#isitcool

stupid graphic thing

I think that when I was younger, I was very aware of myself. I felt as though I had some strange animal stirring within me all the time, and I couldn’t understand it. My peers didn’t understand it either, which wasn’t helpful. When I look back at that time, I see this confusion as a dark, unnamed scribble in the middle of my forehead that perplexed me endlessly. I know now that scribble was my inability to express my intense emotionality. When I became a musician, I learned to shape my sensitivity into something positive and light. At this point in my life, my huge outpourings of emotion are channeled either into creating new art or cultivating loving, healthy relationships with the people around me. Not to say I am constantly joyous, but I have mastered that part of myself by consciously molding my identity. That is where cool remains alive in me, in my ability to shape, control and invent who I am. The concept of self-invention is cool’s largest contribution to society, and is evident in people like David Bowie, Prince, Courtney Barnett, Father John Misty, and countless others. These people, by creating novel, nuanced, exciting, atypical identities for themselves, keep cool alive. That’s why I believe that cool is bound inherently to the creative mind. As long as creativity exists, it will continue to reinvent itself, and therefore cool, for many years to come.

My study of the Cool began with David Bowie. The androgynous, shimmering king of glam rock sashayed into my life when I was twelve years old. At that point, I had only just begun to explore the world of music. My fingers wrapped around the neck of my uncle’s dusty old bass guitar like a child’s hands on the trigger of a gun; I had no idea of the power that I wielded. But then, David Bowie descended upon me. The Bowie gospel was delivered to me from the iTunes of my music-savvy, Manhattan-born uncle. In between complaints about the gentrification of Williamsburg and tales of the prostitutes and drug dealers that used to rule Times Square, my uncle handed me one of the most important mix CDs I would ever receive.

Julien Baker is the anti-Melanie Martinez. Julien Baker is a singer-songwriter and guitarist from Memphis TN. I first discovered her when when I was hopping from NPR tiny desk to NPR tiny desk (I really tend to do that a lot). Her portrayal of youth and femininity is so much more honest than Melanie’s. The viewer can see Julien’s youth. in the glow of her skin, in the soft brown questions of her eyes, in her honest, natural face that has clearly just graduated childhood, in the lightness of her speaking voice. Julien looks young, but she doesn’t need to use exaggerated symbols and caricatures of youth to do so. Julien and Melanie are actually both 20 years old, but the way they portray themselves is so radically different that one would never guess.

A follow up to my last post about Melanie Martinez.

Melanie Martinez personifies the tradition of sexualizing young girls that exists in our culture. When I first discovered her I was shocked. Not only did her music immediately repel me, but the way she presented herself shocked me. In her photoshoots, Melanie is often surrounded by artifacts of childhood: children’s toys, dolls and tea sets, lollipops. She can even be seen sucking her thumb or a pacifier. Her music video “Cry Baby” depicts Melanie waking up in a crib, sitting in a high chair, playing with toy trains and being fed baby food with a spoon.

She incorporates childish articles of clothing into a very womanly style of dress; she wears overalls, big bows in her hair, sailor dresses and peter pan collars, but she often pairs them with a full face of makeup and a sufficient amount of of her bare skin. I have no problem with women exposing themselves and having full control over how they wish to appear. I show skin all of the time. But, Melanie’s shameless blend of adult female sexuality and symbols of childhood is alarming to me because it reflects a social phenomenon that is much more sinister than sucking one’s thumb past the age of 6.

Melanie descends from a long line of girlish women in music. Women in music have always had to overcome massive societal hurdles attached to gender stereotypes. In order to exercise power within a male dominated environment, women in music have taken on many different roles. Some abandon the qualities that society typically associates with women and try to become one of the boys, while others rely on hyperfemininity to bolster their portrayals of themselves. Some women who incorporate hyperfemininity into their identity include Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears, and Courtney Love. Love was known for her “kinder-whore” costume: a ripped, tattered, too-small babydoll dress and smeared lipstick. I wouldn’t be surprised if Melanie listed Courtney Love as an influence of hers.

Debating between multiple ideas for my final paper at the moment…

Cool and Gender

Talk about how and why cool defies gender

Discuss figures of the cool and how they observe gender and incorporate it into their identities

David Bowie

James Dean

Weimar Republic

Hedwig and The Angry Inch

Cool and the Notions of Good And Evil

Talk about how we often associate the figures that we have learned about as good

Picasso=good, Bob Dylan=good, James Dean=good

If issues of good and evil are irrelevant to the cool, why do we so often view figures of the cool as heroes?

How does cool age?

Is cool a stance one must develop at a young age?

How does cool progress later in life?

Can one be cool after the age of 50?