And don’t answer with “If you have to ask…”
All right, I’m not talking about the best band, necessarily, because that’s been asked many times and always results in a huge chorus of “The Beatles!” I’m not talking about which band is your favorite, because we sometimes like things for their sheer lack of cool. I’m talking about sheer coolness factor. It’s sort of hard to describe what I mean, because it’s difficult to characterize coolness in general, but humans seem to have a built-in coolness meter that automatically recognizes the coolness of, say, The Simpsons and the uncoolness of old men in white khakis and black socks. It’s also difficult because coolness is such a fickle mistress to court. Ten years ago, slap bracelets were extremely cool, but now they’re completely uncool except in a possible retro-pastiche kind of way.
So, what are we left with? I want to know which band is the coolest band that you’ve ever heard of. Of which you’ve ever heard. Whatever. Anyway, it can’t be based on popularity (there go the boy bands) or how many times the faces of the band have been on the cover of Rolling Stone (Sorry, Limp Bizkit). My other requirement is that they must still be cool. I know that some band can achieve a peak in coolness and burn out and it is more important, in my estimation, to be permanently cool than it is to be briefly, extremely cool. With this requirement, I’m sorry to say, we can safely throw out The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and the psychadelic bands of San Francisco. I’m sorry, but if your parents listened to it, it is no longer cool. Hmm, I just realized that the posters on this board have a wide variety of ages, so I’m going to revise that last statement. If the parents of the generation whose music is too loud-- That is, if the people who are complaining that modern music is too loud-- listened to it, it is no longer cool. So, well, I think I’ve defined the parameters well enough, so I’ll offer my nominees.
Joy Division- Hmmm. I can see that this explanation thing is going to be difficult, because, as I said above, it’s hard to quantify coolness. Okay, well, Joy Division pretty much led the ultimate cool band lifestyle. They played their music with a completely different approach that would later be canonized. Even though they lived in an era where the alternative scene was all hopped up on punk agression and chutzpah, they played ethereal, gloomy music. And, in the coup de grace of band coolness, the lead singer killed himself just as the band got big. Granted, the surviving members went on to form New Order, itself a monument to coolness, but Ian Curtis’s death ended Joy Division forever.
Tool- I know I made all those comments about the longevity of cool, and Tool hasn’t been around that long, but the cool things they have done with the brief time they’ve spent as a band (Not all that brief. A check of allmusic says twelve years) have put them directly in the pantheon of cool bands. They never appear in their videos. They very rarely have photos taken of the band. Even in their stage shows, they downplay their individual personas in favor of a multimedia light show. In spite of this (or perhaps because of this), they have an extremely devoted following. These people are devoted enough that the lead singer disguises himself onstage so that he can go out in public without being recognized (to be fair, he also just likes to dress up). Add all this to the fact that they could rock your face off, and you have the makings of a cool band.
However, when the gods write down the cool bands in the stars, the one that will be at the top of the list, I’ve no doubt, is
The Velvet Underground- I don’t know if they’ve done anything that’s not cool. They wore all black. They wore sunglasses onstage. They could play “Sister Ray,” “Sweet Jane,” and “Pale Blue Eyes” all in the same night. The owner of the club at which they played their first gig told them not to play “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” so guess what was the song that opened the second set? They hung with the Factory, played in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and released an album with songs about heroin, kinky sex, and waiting for your drug dealer in 1967, before Sgt Pepper’s came out. They released four completely distinct (as in, different from one another and everything else out there) albums that were critically unimpeachable before imploding in a fallout of creative differences. “Creative differences” is one of the hallmarks of coolness. Now, as if all that’s not enough, The Velvets are still the coolest band on the planet! They’ve never been popular enough to become mainstream, but every kid who decides to wear black and tells everyone it’s not because he’s depressed, it’s because “it goes with everything!” owes every CD he owns to the Velvets. Did that sentence make sense? Anyway, the point is that they were cool in 1965, they’re cool now, and they will probably always be cool.
