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coolness and uncoolness
on cringe
When Nirvana sat for their first Rolling Stone cover photoshoot, Kurt Cobain did so while wearing a t-shirt he made himself that read “corporate magazines still suck.”
According to Courtney Love, he made the shirt to wear because he was embarrassed to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, thought that his friends who weren’t famous would give him shit for it, and really wanted to impress the folks from K Records, an Olympia, Washington-based record label that Kurt idolized as the epitome of coolness.
I think about that a lot. Kurt Cobain was being photographed for the cover of Rolling Stone. He was the frontman for the biggest band in the world. He was richer than he could have ever imagined being. Millions of people around the world idolized him. And all he wanted was for some people who ran a boutique indie label in a college town in Washington to think he was cool.
I have a theory that I think makes as much sense as anything for understanding how people—especially people who have enough money to live comfortably—choose to act in the world. It goes like this: The easiest way to determine what someone is going to do is usually to figure out who it is they’re trying to impress.
It explains Elon Musk, who is richer than any human being has ever been, and who chooses to spend his time providing direct customer service to twitter users with names like “catturd2.” It explains Mark Zuckerberg, whose principles, despite a bunch of rhetoric about uniting the world, seem to revolve mostly around getting invited to hang out with Dana White and Joe Rogan. I don’t think they care much about getting richer. I think they care mostly that the people they think are cool think they’re cool, too. You really can’t overstate how important it was to national cohesion that powerful people thought Obama was cool.
(The book Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, has amazing details about his extreme desire to impress a bunch of right-wing influencers, but my favorite involve an investor named David Sacks. Sacks is a relatively influential twitter user who basically fills the same role for Musk that Flava Flav filled for Chuck D in Public Enemy—Elon says something, and then Sacks says “yeah, boyeee!” Anyway, it’s clear from the reporting in the book that Elon Musk can’t fucking stand David Sacks, based on the way he treats him in the text messages they obtained from court records. Elon Musk is insecure and needy, but he does not crave the validation of David Sacks. He craves the validation of catturd2. It’s like on The Office when Andy transfers to Scranton and immediately begins sucking up to Michael, and Michael can’t figure out why he doesn’t love having a pathetic sycophant when he thought all he wanted was to be liked.)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all of that lately, and so I figured this would be a good time to examine the ideas of coolness and cringe in music. Accordingly, this issue’s playlist is full of songs or artists that I’ve been embarrassed to admit I love at various points in my life, but am going to cleanse myself of this shame by sharing them instead of denying them. Here’s the Apple Music version, and Spotify is here.
“Faith I Do Believe,” Rusted Root (1996)
Let’s start with this one, since Rusted Root—if anyone remembers them at all—are best known for a song called “Send Me On My Way,” a baffling little pop ditty that it’s genuinely impossible to imagine being a hit song here these thirty-some years later. (In 2021, the editors at Jezebel convinced a young writer for the site to listen to the song on repeat for a full day and write about the experience.)
Anyway, I love Rusted Root and have since I was a young teenager. They were folded into the jam-band scene despite not being particularly guitar-centric, mostly because their songs have an American-centric approach to what in the nineties was called “world music,” and that’s the sort of thing that people who like to do psychedelic drugs together in parking lots before the show starts seem to enjoy, and also because some of their songs are on the long side. “Faith I Do Believe,” the opening track on the band’s second album, is an example of the former, but not the latter, as a relatively compact four-and-a-half minute rock number that opens with finger-plucked strings that go in counter-intuitive directions. Lyrically, it’s a mess, as all of the band’s songs were—its singer and songwriter, Michael Glabicki, wasn’t so much a bad lyricist as a completely uninterested one, happy to substitute randoms syllables in place of actual words (you will never identify what he says in the verse after “I would like to reach out my hand” because it’s not a word in English or any other language), and “in faith I do believe” is silly and redundant (faith and belief are the same thing!). But I never really cared about any of that, because it sounded like a revelation to me when I first put the CD of the band’s Remember into my little boombox when I was a teenager and I still think it sounds great now.
“Used to Love You,” John Legend (2004)
I was super into John Legend when he debuted in 2004 with Get Lifted, a Kanye-produced collection of jams that sort of bridged the gap between neo-soul and what was happening in music by the mid-aughts, when the vibes were less crunchy than they’d been in the nineties. I didn’t know that he was going to go on to become one of music’s greatest cornballs, although I should have (”Ordinary People,” the album’s hit single, was a good clue!). Anyway, I’m not a big fan of latter-day John Legend records, but every time I dare revisit Get Lifted, it holds up. “Used To Love U” is a classic of early Kanye production that de-emphasizes Legend’s trademark piano in favor of a bass-forward approach that slaps.
“Campfire,” DRAM and Neil Young (2017)
Neil Young is one of the certifiably coolest human beings walking around, and DRAM—the weirdo-rapper whose breakthrough hit was called “Broccoli”—is one of the more interesting artists working right now, so a collaboration between the two of them is… well, it’s a novelty song, and novelty songs are inherently uncool. “Campfire” features Neil Young rapping extremely awkwardly (“I said my brother / from a-nother mother”) as the two both tell sad stories about people going through hard times whom they tried to help, or something? It’s a silly song, but I like it anyway.
“White and Nerdy,” “Weird” Al Yankovic (2006)
Weird Al makes music for twelve year olds, or at least he did when he released music regularly. (He hasn’t released an album since 2014! An entire generation of twelve year olds never got Weird Al. How sad!) Anyway, this one really doesn’t need much explanation, as Weird Al is inherently goofy, but also legitimately very talented as a musician, and capable of sometimes elevating a song that’s pretty good but also not an all-timer, like “Ridin’,” into something eternal.
I’ll share two Weird Al anecdotes: First, in 2010, the ultra-hip British festival All Tomorrow’s Parties tapped Canadian art-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor to curate its winter festival, and the first act they booked was Weird Al. They did this, I think, for a few reasons: It’s a funny troll to get asked to put together a lineup for an extremely cool festival and start with a polka-playing parody artist known for wearing Hawaiian shirts everywhere, and also I think they really loved Weird Al. He’s the sort of artist who’s so deeply uncool that you can kind of follow the horseshoe alllllll the way around until he becomes somehow extra-cool as a symbol of defying consensus taste. It ended up being Weird Al’s first European show, if I recall correctly.
Second: “White and Nerdy” was a legit hit on its own terms, Al’s only top-ten single. And Chamillionaire, who performed “Ridin’” with Krayzie Bone from Bone Thugs N Harmony, acknowledged how good Weird Al is at rapping in his response to the song. “He’s spitting just like Krayzie Bone on the second verse. It’s actually very funny if you listen to what he’s saying. The way Krayzie is harmonizing, he does the same thing. I didn’t know he could rap like that.” Also, Key and Peele star in the video, which was released six years before Key & Peele.
“Little Broken Hearts,” Norah Jones (2012)
Here’s a sketch from MadTV about how uncool Norah Jones is. Her 2012 album, Little Broken Hearts, is nonetheless a masterpiece. Last year’s Visions was quite good too. Sorry.
“Mother,” Pink Floyd (1979)
Sometime last year, some friends of Kat’s and mine from L.A. came into town to hang out for a few days, and they wanted to see live music, and they asked me what was going on in town. Levitation, a cool music festival, was happening, so I mentioned that, and glanced at a few other listings for that day, including one for a Pink Floyd cover band played Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety because it was a lunar eclipse. “That one,” they said immediately. “Let’s go to that.” It was not what most of my other friends would have picked.
But you know what? It was a great time. The band was good, and those Pink Floyd songs that I spent like twenty years pretending I was too cool to still like sound fantastic. When you’re a teenager, being into older stuff is cool because it all comes with a sense of discovery, like you’re an archeologist unearthing artifacts from before your time. As you get older, some of that stuff feels more like going to a tourist trap and seeing the Sydney Opera House with one hundred people from one hundred different countries. But the Sydney Opera House is a marvel of engineering and architecture, and Pink Floyd was very good. I’ve been on a mini Pink Floyd kick ever since—I bought a copy of The Wall on vinyl!—and “Mother” is one of their prettier songs, and I’m glad I had reason to revisit it. (Also, if you’re interested, here’s a version of the song performed by Natalie Maines, which she recorded for a documentary about the West Memphis Three.)
“Motorcycle Drive By,” Third Eye Blind (1997)
Stephan Jenkins is the Third Eye Blind guy and he is not, in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of musicians who’ve been around him, a pleasant person. I didn’t know he had such a bad reputation until the first time I interviewed him, I guess it was eight and a half years ago, after his band played a show in Ohio during the Republican National Convention. The performance was genuinely funny, with Jenkins trolling the crowd with stuff like “raise your head if you believe in science?” I scheduled a call with him to talk about it, made the mistake of asking him if he expected the audience to perceive him as one of them because he’s a middle-aged white man, and he got furious at me for making that objectively true observation, and then everything I said only made it worse; I may at some point have intimated that his band was not regarded as particularly cool and that most of their hits came during the final gasp of late nineties alt-rock, which is not a heavily valorized era in pop music. At some point in the call, he started yelling at me, “Would you say that to Radiohead?” and it was both pretty funny and also a real bummer!
Mostly it was a bummer because there are Third Eye Blind songs that mean a lot to me, and “Motorcycle Drive By” is one of them. It’s good writing—”the sun is always in my eyes / it crashes through the windows as i’m sleeping on the couch / when i come to visit you” is evocative, emotionally powerful, and economical storytelling—and a pretty melody and also, at one point, he does a Cyndi Lauper-like “ai-yai-yai,” which sounds great. I can still listen to it, even though every time I have been in a room with Stephan Jenkins since that phone call in 2016 I have worked hard to remain on the other side of the room.
“Softer, Softest,” Hole (1994)
I didn’t like Hole when I was a teenager because I wanted to impress the boys who thought it was funnier to talk about how they sucked to make the girls who liked them feel bad. “Softer, Softest” escaped that because I had a nice memory attached to the song, but I don’t think I actually listened to Live Through This on its own for the first time in like 2004. Turns out it’s great!
History has, I think, been kind to Courtney Love, but maybe it only feels that way because people were so incredibly unkind to her for such a long time. Anyway, Hole were deeply uncool around the time Live Through This came out, unless you were a specific kind of teenage girl, which I obviously was not. Boys hated them and gave their fans shit for, I dunno, being girls, I guess? So dudes had a vested interest in walling off “cool” so that Hole couldn’t fit inside. But they were also in the mainstream and big rock stars and Courtney had a tabloid kind of life both before and especially after her husband died, and so bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney were always cooler because they required more effort to learn about. Time has a flattening effect, though, and now all of those bands are equally accessible to anyone with a Spotify account, and Hole’s songs are great punky pop songs with hooks that go forever, and I’m glad I grew out of being an insecure teenager to make time to get to know them.
“Vindicated,” Dashboard Confessional (2004)
I remember when Dashboard Confessional was cool. It was three weeks in early 2001, after Chris Carraba released his first EP but before the full album came out and people started making fun of him for being whiny and sad, which is a fucked up thing to do, let sad people be sad! Anyway, I liked him in those three weeks and then pretended not to like him in the years that followed, and then I mostly lost interest in his music. But “Vindicated” is a banger, a big ol’ power ballad he wrote for the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack where he does that thing in the final verse where he raises his pitch half an octave and it all sounds epic
“Lost Stars,” Keira Knightley (2013)
All movie soundtrack songs are at least a little bit cringe. I don’t make the rules. It’s extra true when the song is sung by an actor, rather than a working musician. It’s extra extra true when the song was composed by a one-hit-wonder songwriter from the late nineties whose lone hit was itself a satisfying ball of cheese. But I’ve listened to “Lost Stars,” from the movie Begin Again and performed here by Keira Knightley (although the soundtrack features several versions, some of which are sung by Adam Levine of Maroon 5, which is not helping anybody’s case for coolness here), as composed by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, around 600 times, according to Apple Music.
I loved the New Radicals, and the band’s breakup was always an interesting story—basically, Alexander hated fame and being famous and quit just as his career was blossoming, and decided to produce instead, which he did to modest success. He never recorded songs he wrote again, but then wrote pretty much the entire soundtrack to Begin Again, and it sounds like a lost New Radicals album, which was very exciting to me. Keira Knightley sings the song well, although Adam Levine sings it exactly like a New Radicals song, which sounds good, too. Anyway! Good song, and a good movie, too. It’s one of the only examples I can think of about a grown man and a grown woman who meet, strike up a close friendship, and do not have any romantic overtones despite the intimacy of their connection, which is really important and good to see! Somehow this soundtrack was never released on vinyl, which if you work at Epic Records and want to rectify that, please do feel free.
“Intergalactic,” Beastie Boys (1998)
My friend Lindsay is a very kind person but she hurt my feelings once by calling the Beastie Boys “corny” in front of me. I tried to hide it but I think she knew.
“Ich Bin Ein Auslander,” Pop Will Eat Itself (1994)
Basically all white-guy nineties rap is uncool, up to and including Eminem’s first album, which even the endorsement of Dr. Dre doesn’t rescue from the fate of being a lil bit cringe. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander,” whose co-sign comes from Trent Reznor, never had a chance. (The title translates
But I love this song, which is tense and spooky and rapped in an authentic British accent (and, in the parts where there’s a dialogue, in a Cookie Monster voice). It’s a response to anti-immigrant violence and rising fascist sentiment in the UK in the early nineties and was important in helping me understand why those things were bad as a kid! The rest of the album is even cornier and I think I probably still have all the words memorized. Anyway, Clint Mansell, who does the non-Cookie Monster raps, is now an acclaimed film composer, proving that there exists a potential second act for everyone.
“Five To One,” The Doors (1968)
Pretty much everything I said about why Pink Floyd becomes uncool as you age out of being a teenager is also true about The Doors, but also their music wasn’t anywhere near as good, and the cult of personality around Jim Morrison is just incredibly embarrassing on top of everything. But “Five To One” is such a perfect embodiment of 1968, a menacing revolution anthem with a bassline that moves as-needed by the song and Morrison ripping his vocal chords apart to threaten everyone over the age of thirty with the warning “they’ve got the guns, but we’ve got the numbers.” There are other Doors songs I have some affection for, but “Five To One” is the only one I’d objectively defend as a masterpiece.
“10,000 Years (Peace Is Now),” Live (1991)
Really can’t tell you how much Live meant to me when I was a young teenager, and how deep lines like “if all of the ignorance in the world passed a second ago / what would you say / and who would you obey” sounded to me. I’m honestly still not entirely sure what “Peace Is Now” is actually about, because the lines the singer drops throughout are all fairly obtuse even as they’re strident and declaratory (“selfishness and separation have led me to believe that the world is not my problem / for i am the world / and you are the world”), but the vibe—that the things holding us back are products of our own flaws, and we can overcome them together—sounded nice to me, and it still does. I think it helps that this band preceded so much of both the earnest and irony-drenched nineties alt-rock era; Mental Jewelry, the album from which it comes, was released just three months after Nevermind, and so it sounds more like it’s exploring the possibilities of the form than trying to settle into a carved niche. I don’t know if this song is good, exactly, but it’s interesting in a way I still appreciate, and seems like a fitting one to close on.