the writing has proliferated as psuedo popular culture. the artists and the musicians concern themselves, perhaps distilled into buzzwords and cachet. those that in my periphery, they interest themselves but lack the willingness to truly engage, reorientate. who can blame them. it is of the source that these things are supposedly outside of control. structural ill. i find myself surrounded by effective cosplay. very effective, astoundingly so. power pop and anglophilia, post punk, post hardcore post rock, never quite post genre and precisely referential. historians of condition-movements long past, joy of revival. no shame, but worse, ouroboros of the mouth taste, wormholed into dimensions of sweet dreams by burnout journalists, zines and the currently fulfilling promises of a real-deal-in-person-euth-seen. how do i proceed? we ought to discard all notions of cool. the lineage of the term offers us acumen into it's entrapment of decision making and preference. to be clear i am writing about a very specific lineage of culture that has been retrospectively spun into an entire socio-cultural universe, encompassing the "birth of cool" from the late 30's in bop jazz and it's further developments, through the mythoanthology of rock music, selected works of electronic music, 90's reissue culture, culminating into the myriad of revivals and stagnation and finally the ultra fragmented, infotech corrupted landscape of tastemaking and creation that was the noughts to the now. im missing a bunch of shit i know. this is in large a matter of class and communication. record store curation, rate your music, pitchfork + the entrails of a withering music journalism industry, and the shadow of the obscurity obsessed millennial hipster generation have left us with a few slightly deviated but ideologically united notions of what is "cool" and thus worth creating, presenting as and pursuing. in the past notions of "good taste" where connected to class due to the intellectual understanding required to appreciate the intentions and affect of certain sorts of music. think the dirtbag association of motley crue and the hardrock/metal genres, compared to the self proclaimed high art sensibilities of abstracted and disaffected art rock, or the conceptually elevated avant garde and modern classical practices etc. of which the former is distinctly "uncool". it used to be that your introduction and interest in these modes of creation where determined by your surroundings, the people you come into contact with and the communities you find yourself apart of, often by chance or destiny. jim orourke had a wacko music teacher that introduced him to reich and the NY avant garde, and Anthrax was formed hy some shithead highschoolers who though Anthrax sounded "sufficiently evil". (not to say these encounters dont happen anymore) in today's age with the advent of discogs, rym and generally widespread access to music history, the ability to have self determination in formulating your musical perspective is the most democratic it has ever been. yet, the communication technologies that connect us to this written and pictorial history of art music culture have the same homogenizing/decontextualization effect that can be observed with language. (eg: british man saying "goofy aah", white suburban kids saying on foe nem grave) regional variety collapses, and the existence of a canon that lingers over the collective's cultural intake materializes further. given western culture's decades long tendency towards recursiveness and revival, the pathways and incumbent desires of developing musicians and music enthusiasts are further and further wrapped around this self assembling and self affirming; canon. what began as a term used in tight knit circles of black jazz musicians to indicate a complex mix of desirable factors, spread into the beatniks, and then further spread into "counter culture" and rock adjacent usages, has come to mean something universally but vaguely understood and utilized by practically the entire population of english speaking peoples. its evocations and possibilities long since packaged and sold as an aesthetic/attitude, with capital having fully formed itself into the crevices. in the process creating and appearing as, the idea of cool manifests as a sort of aesthetic magnet, pulling those who have taken the pill towards itself, promising a easily digestible replication of all of that awesome history, but also all the artifice and perversion that is a result of the cultures existence under capitalism. all while offering a emotionally sheltered and aloof pedestal for the arbiters to stand on. the difficult thing about this is that it is extremely difficult to delineate intuitive response from a intentional move towards the cool. curators and outsider art hipsters use knowledge to reorientate/abstraction fractured scene, what new looks like now is fundamentally different to what how new was created back then. phony communism, replication of social hierarchy. is this a bad thing? global south perspective