But he was cool

This piece in last week’s Times mag­a­zine caused some ruckus on my twit­ter feed the first Fri­day in April, but then died down. Read­ing it, you can see why: it’s a cliché mas­querad­ing as a rev­e­la­tion, so pretty much right in line with most of the edit­ing, espe­cially on the pop cul­ture side, in the mag­a­zine since Hugo Lind­gren took over at the top and the for­mat was redesigned.

The arti­cle thinks it’s about being a cool music fan, but it’s really about just try­ing to be cool, and fail­ing at it. And cool in the worst way, the way that hasun­for­tu­nately taken over long before the Gap was able to use images of true cool­ness to sell khakis: cool defined by what you buy, cool through the Kool-Aid you drink from your cor­po­ra­tion of choice. This is cool in the deca­dent base­ment of late cap­i­tal­ism, cool as being the coolest zom­bie besieg­ing the mall in Dawn of the Dead. Cool that’s best left in the hands of peo­ple who haven’t left high school yet, or who can’t leave high school behind. It’s not saved by Amanda Marcotte’s apolo­gia either, that just makes it all worse.

Fanboys/girls love music, but they don’t do it any favors. Part of the prob­lem is pop music itself, which is a Moe­bius strip genre, regur­gi­tat­ing itself in reg­u­lar cycles, and so there’s con­stant pres­sure to be out in front of what might be com­ing, be an “early adopter” or a “knowl­edge guardian.” That last choice of words is bizarre and dis­com­fit­ing to me. In the sec­u­lar mar­ket­place and the fre­quently socially/politically lib­eral cutting-edge of pop, there’s lit­tle embrace of the super­sti­tious and smug Amer­ica we’re sup­posed to call peo­ple of faith. Yet a “knowl­edge guardian” is noth­ing more than some­one don­ning the revealed hip­ness of cool, a gnos­tic but with­out a spir­i­tual cen­ter that pro­motes shar­ing. Peo­ple like this are sup­pos­edly against the cor­po­rate state yet they pro­tect their secrets — it’s the only way to make one kind of con­sumerism supe­rior to another.

My expe­ri­ence with this kind of think­ing tells me that, as writ­ers, Molotkow and Mar­cotte have a prac­tice of thought that veils them from the fun­da­men­tal nature of music. The prac­tice of writ­ing (not pub­lish­ing) is anti-social, it’s done alone. The prac­tice of music is social, and before it became an abstract or even pop­u­lar art, music was a social activ­ity. Priests guard knowl­edge to main­tain their social power which they fear los­ing, musi­cians seek ever more lis­ten­ers to develop theirs, because music, which can’t be held or owned, becomes more pow­er­ful with each per­son who lis­tens to it. It’s not a com­mod­ity or a lim­ited resources, it’s cul­ture, and it’s in everybody’s soul.