On "Being Cool"

Let not the last post fool you. I hold a considerable amount of contempt for most of humanity, especially those residing in the United States. I don't even hold particular animus for teenagers, after all older generations made the world they grew up in and they have to live in it. Then there are the baby boomers, so many trees have given their lives in the service of plumbing the secrets of this singularly obnoxious group of entitled, spoiled, greedy, rotten, depraved, drug-addicted assholes that there is no way the youth of today could compare as a waste of material.

By contrast Jessica Wright wrote a great analysis of her own millennial generation, stating:

To be a millennial is to hear constantly about how awful your generation is.
And to agree, kind of politely.

Depending on where you cut off the arbitrary generational lines I'd have to agree with Wright, they are nice. William Strauss and Neil Howe put the dates at 1982 and 2004, which I guess makes 1965 to 1981 Generation X. Yeah, how unhelpfully nonspecific. Not to mention that the very size and diversity of the US makes even the broadest generalizations problematic.

So is it even the generational status that makes one "cool?" Probably not. I just walked outside for a minute and heard a loudmouthed old guy screaming and swearing about... nothing. From a block away. Grumpy, loud, and obnoxious; definitely not cool.

That brings me to the young man I wrote about in my last post. It was not my intention to offend the band Decrepit Birth, or Jungle Rot, or any other group that unfortunately got into the metal game after more than half a century of band names. I used to always think Pink Floyd was a great name because it meant that some normal name was still available for another group. But this guy is all "death metal" clearly to compensate for being small. And the first time I met him he spent at least an hour going through The Misfits' boxed set and railing about how lame they were. This is where being judgmental and ignorant crash into a wall.

I get it, each high school class or generation or whatever has to prove it is harder than the last. Since most are puny runts as freshmen they have to jump on something else to make them feel "cool." But this definition of cool is not what I had in mind. This is the juvenile cool that leads practitioners to mindlessly put down others' tastes. "THEY SUCK!" "THAT'S GAY!" Perhaps the latter not so much anymore, I hope anyway.

To the point as simply as possible. No Misfits, no Decrepit Birth. Each new thing has to have built on something. For my Dad it was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, for me it was Slayer. The Misfits practically invented the whole death metal horror speed thing. Sure you can give British bands like Venom or Motorhead a lot of credit too.But Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only, and the other misfits injected the kitschy violence and death imagery of B-horror films that has become the standard of the genre.

Ignorance is one thing, informed judgment is important but being a judgmental prick when you do not have a clue is just screaming and swearing from across the block like some grizzled old man.