okay, Malice and SoWhat convinced me to just go ahead and make the post even though i haven’t gotten it ironed out in my mind to the extent that i want to (but then again, do i ever?)

so… we were talking about Cool.

i said it’s the enemy of funkiness and freedom, citing the first time i watched Run-DMC’s “walk this way” video.

i didn’t really know Steve Tyler was at the time, but this is what i thought about him:

a) “he looks crazy”
b) “he takes drugs and might even be a homosexual”
c) “he looks like he’s having a lot of fun, and i want to be like him!”

on the other hand, Run and D - who up until this time had been cold as ice to me - looked like a couple of squares with their poses and their very apparent reluctance to commit to the song (i wasn’t surprised when years later i learned that they didn’t want to do the song… they didn’t look like they wanted to be there at all).

hell, years later they looked like squares again when Kid Rock pulled in Aerosmith and Run-DMC to join him onstage at the VMAs. Kid said that he came up with this routine where him, Steve and Run would throw the microphones amongst themselves in some sort of symbolic gesture. Run, being committed to the codes of Cool, refused to do it because he thought it was silly and embarrassing. Steven Tyler said “hey, i’ll try anything.”

Cool is about conformity. it’s like high school, where you lived in terror of being ridiculed for wearing the wrong clothes, listening to the wrong music, being seen associating with the wrong people.

Cool is about fear.

George Clinton was not a proponent of Cool… all those references to putting on his sunglasses so he can be cool were satirical, weren’t they? i mean, that’s how i always heard them, anyway…

but of course, in “mommy, what’s a funkadelic?” he talks about running off to New York City and getting his hair processed, and wearing slick suits and thinking he was cool…

“I was cool,” he says. “I was cool. But I had no groove, no groove. I had no groove.”

anyway… as SoWhat pointed out, today the standard of Cool is hip-hop (which George once said he thought was the corniest bunch of motherfuckers he’s ever seen “they kinda reminded me of white people… or suburbia black people.”)

i want to talk about the concept of Cool in black music, with emphasis on hip-hop. i think Warren Coolidge’s perennial rant about the narrowing of black music will most certainly come into play too, since Cool limits the ideas of what is or ain’t “Black”

also, consider the below quote by k_orr:

“That's almost what black cool is about.

This idea is generated by blacks, developed by blacks, and gate kept by blacks. And although coolness is not inherent in people, you still have to subscribe to the idea.

So if you're not Dunks or Ones and a throwback, you're DKNY or Kenneth Cole'd out.

If you're not dipset and lil jon'd, you're playing that John Legend.

You might be able to bring up TV on the Radio, but God forbid someone that you know and holds your coolness/blackness in high regad see you actually stand in line to see TvOTR. You'd prolly be right next to some pierced up Beckies, and holding a conversation with some Weezer looking mf'er.”

discuss.