What's cooler than being cool?

How can our culture turn around from the dead end it’s reached with Cool?  This is something I think about a lot.  We’ve been stuck for way too long re-processing the same cultural material, in this hyper-ironic state of mind, and the feeling of stagnation is overpowering.

Marshall McLuhan would say we’re in a Narcissus phase.  In Understanding Media, he described what he called the “cooling” process, in which a culture uses play, parody, and miming to assimilate new (“hot”) information.  Cooling serves a healthy cultural purpose, but it can become unhealthy if overindulged in.  This often happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new form of media.  In the hyper-cooling phase that follows the invention of a media form, people, not yet “understanding” the new form, become fascinated and enslaved by the extensions of themselves in it.  This enslavement occurs because people make the crucial mistake of thinking that the new media is separate from “real life,” when it is actually a part – an extension – of life and of people themselves.

In the present day, the hypnotizing media is the internet.  Because of the internet, the speed of culture and its cooling has gotten so fast that living with media is like watching a video of life that’s on a split-second time delay: disorienting, disturbing, and discouraging – but hypnotizing.  Hypnotizing because the split-second delay gives the false sensation of watching something fake, something different from our lives – a fantastic show that we don’t want to miss.

McLuhan would say that we’re making the same mistake as Narcissus, who, he emphasizes, did not fall in love with himself, but with a reflection of himself which he genuinely believed to be another person.  Similarly, what we haven’t realized, in relentlessly parodying, recycling, and remixing pop culture, then consuming it again, is that this parodied, recycled, remixed culture isn’t some “other” culture, separate from our own, better than it – it IS our culture.  Our problem, then, isn’t the common diagnosis of self-love, but rather self-alienation and resulting self-hate.  Who but a really, really messed-up person could look at her reflection in the mirror and think to herself, “That person isn’t me”?  But that’s exactly what our culture is doing.

And it’s clear that, subconsciously, the culture knows that it’s messed-up.  Because just as Narcissus’s initial happiness at meeting such a beautiful creature quickly turned to anger and disgust when he found his image unresponsive, the initial attraction we felt when discovering ourselves on the internet turned quickly to ugly, hateful tearing-down when we started experiencing how empty it is to feed upon oneself.

McLuhan doesn’t provide an answer for how to overcome the problem of over-cooling.  He does mention something called a “break point,” however, which seems to be the point at which a trend tips and reverses to the other direction.  We simply have to be approaching such a break point now.  How will the tip happen, though?

I’ve been trying to figure this out by extending the metaphor of cooling, asking myself, what happens when something over-cools?  The short answer is that it freezes.  That would translate into the speed of internet “cooling” breaking the speed of the internet itself.  Literally that’s impossible, since it would mean images of real-life events would have to appear on the internet before they occurred in real life.  Conceptually, however, that’s just the right idea.  We have to put things on the internet, and out into the internet-adapted culture generally, before they “happen.”  Meaning, we have to put things out there that aren’t real -- that are, in other words, art.

And entertainment has started doing just that.  The NY Mag article about Gossip Girl pointed out that the most ground-breaking thing about the series is how all the gossip surrounding its actors’ real lives may be being manufactured by the same person who writes the show for the characters.  So that would mean that the gossip reported on the internet is actually being written ahead of time.  This is an old trick, of course – the film studios figured it out a long time ago.  This has also been happening on the super-scripted reality shows like The Hills.  Again, a kind of art sneaking in under the guise of life.  We say this kind of behavior is somehow reprehensible, but I think it's just what we need.

Because like I started thinking here in reference to the internet, I think that our almost-frozen culture is also paradoxically the “hot”test it’s ever been.  The question of which extreme the temperature is actually at doesn’t matter: the sensation is the same, and all that matters is how we conceptualize it.  Are we going to keep thinking of our fake culture as “cool,” and tricking ourselves into thinking that as we constantly disparage it we’re talking about something better than ourselves?  Or are we going to assert that we are part of it – very much a part of it?

What’s “cooler than being cool” is, as we all know, “Ice Cold.”  I think what Andre 3000 wrote about in "Hey Ya" was actually a quite profound message about the redemptive pain of breaking through alienation by embracing it.  In the video, Andre 3000 is the quintessential alienated artist in the act of transcendence.  He's supposed to "act like [he's] got some sense," but all he knows how to do is "play," because that's the only way he knows of dealing with the complete ridiculousness of the adulation of his public (both in the studio and through T.V. screens) -- by inciting it, embracing it, and raising it to even-crazier heights.  He does this by putting on a false persona -- not just one, but actually 6 personas (1 of them repeated 3 times), each with its own costume and personality and style of seduction.  The seduction is both overtly fake (the over-the-top suaveness of the singer, the girl who runs up on stage to hug him but then ends up mainly wanting to wave at the camera) and intensely real and personal (the sweet girl in the yellow top blowing a kiss to the keyboardist, who shyly smiles).  Both modes coexist and make each other possible -- embolden each other, perhaps.

The video parallels the love story in the song, which is itself a metaphor for the alienation in modern life.  The song is about romantic ambivalence: "But does she really want to / but can't stand to see me walk out the door" (these thoughts incoherently running into each other, they're so mixed-up).  There's this terror of committing to something, for fear that its disappointing reality ("separate's always better when there's feelings involved") will make the fantasy crumble ("got it just don't get it till there's nothing at all").  What makes love the exception?  There's no straight answer to that, other than not to try to pin down an answer.  Instead of listening to the words of the song, we should just dance; and instead of introducing Andre 3000 to our mother, we should just have sex with him.  We should just live -- and living necessitates a little fakeness, a little superficiality, but also a little faith, just like love.

In the video, the bizarre instantaneousness of media communication drives home the miraculous coexistence of superficiality and depth: real-life Andre 3000 transforms into a still image of himself on a poster waved at him by a fan; Polaroid pictures develop images of what's currently going on before our eyes.  But again, this can only happen (actually not, according to the Polaroid Corporation) if we "shake it."  Andre 3000 demands this participation, not just by actively seducing his audience, but by weaving a really infectious call-and-response into his song.  Even uptight Catholic school teachers can't resist the excitement of involving oneself in this kind of "play."

"Ice Cold" means that state of extreme “so-hot-it’s-cool”ness which "Hey Ya" is about, which is the best kind of coolness -- the kind in which you’re actually going out on a limb and owning what you create.  Instead of pretending you’re somehow above what we all do now – put on personas, wear costumes, fake attitudes, create brands for ourselves – generally “be superficial” – you’re identifying with it and even asserting that what seems “fake” is, in the world of modern media, actually the realest thing there is.