What If There Were A Coolness Rating?
Is Michael Jackson cool? Who is cooler – Dolly Parton or Ricky Martin? Is Katy Perry cool or a fool? We all know the answer when it comes to Britney; or do we?
Paul Lamere asked these tough questions and more. "Imagine if there was an objective measure for coolness – a number that could be attached to each artist that indicated how ‘cool’ the artist was," he postulated. "We’d be able to do all sorts of interesting things with such a ‘coolness index’. We could make a ‘music makeover’ playlist that would take you from Miley to Miles in 12 songs (consider it a 12-step taste recovery program) or we could create a music rehab playlist that takes you from Amy Winehouse to Kate Nash.
But of course, the concept of cool is too hard to nail down." Or is it?
Last.fm has published a list of tracks that were most frequently deleted users scrobbles (public playlists). Tn other words, these are tracks that Last.fm listeners didn’t want other people to know they had listened to.
But Lamere did not stop there in his coolness quest.
He mined Last.fm data for artists marked "guilt pleasures and came up with the top 100 which included:
- Katy Perry
- Ashlee Simpson
- Spice Girls
- Lindsay Lohan
- Mandy Moore
- Jessica Simpson
- Backstreet Boys
- Hilary Duff
- Metro Station
- Britney Spears
- Justin Timberlake
- Taylor Swift
- Rihanna
- The Pussycat Dolls
- Kelly Clarkson
You may notice a bias for (or is it against?) woman on this list.As Lamere said, "It is hard to be cool and female".
Of course the next step is to figure out what is cool; so he can build the true "coolness index" and be able to tell how cool an artist is. "I think that is going to be a harder problem" he admitted, "but I have some ideas". You can ioin him Paul Lamere on his journey via his Music Machinery blog.
Oh well, I think he is immersing himself into an unsolvable task, because whatever it is that is cool in one minute can be uncool in the next. It’s like in fashion when they say “red is the new black” or “white is the new black” or “grey is the new black”. A few years ago, I made a compilation for a friend entitled “Cool music VS Uncool music” including tracks from the coolest and the least cool artists and sounds from my entire CD collection, mixed together on one continuous playlist over 3 CDs. And it sounded cool. Therefore, I figured “Uncool is the new cool”.
The term “cool” used in music comes from the jazz genre, so to figure out what cool actually is, digging into the archives of socio-cultural studies of Afro-American heritage should be helpful.
But if you just want to have a laugh, watch this video and listen to the lyrics of the song:
Paffendorf – Be Cool
as a brother, I am used to making things cool, not being told what is.
It’s not that being female and cool is hard. It’s that having breasts and getting undeserved promotion is easy.
C’mon… this is the 2000s… don’t you know that everyone’s cool now? Which is to say that no one is truly cool any more.
[what Enigmue meant to say was]
ENIGMUE said…
As a Brother, I am used to Hollywood creating mores and ectoplasms for me to follow that lead me to believe that I’m cool, through a Jewish white man’s eyes.