Musician, cultural theorist, and jukebox saboteur Brian Eno says that it’s cool to be uncool. The cool vs. uncool distinction is no longer meaningful, he says, largely due to the explosion in access, hybridization, and genre bifurcation across every aesthetic plane.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

If anyone is cool enough to tell us when we can stop worrying about being cool, it’s the coolest 61-year-old on the planet.

This is good news for me, since I am approaching that age where I care less and less, with each passing day, about what’s cool, much less how to define the term. The inexorable uncoolness we swore we’d outrun at any cost, even as it devoured our parents, is nipping at my heels, and I’m okay with that.

Were this a critical essay, I’d have to go to all the trouble of defining what cool even means, and triangulating Eno’s argument against others, but fortunately I can just link to his essay and consider how it refracts the points made by an older one that’s always been a favorite: “Against Cool” by Rick Moody (not available online, but it is in the 2004 edition of the Best American Essays).

And with the time I saved, I can now go listen to Another Green World. Thanks, laziness!

Homer: You know what the song says: “It’s hip to be square.”
Lisa: That song is so lame.
Homer: So lame that it’s… cool?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Am I cool, kids?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool, not caring, right?
Bart and Lisa: No.
Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we’ve tried everything here.
Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.
Bart: Well, sure you do.
Lisa: How else would you know?