Quote of the Day | May 15, 2008: Calculated Adult Coolness

From Chuck Klosterman's 2003 "low culture manifesto," Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:

When I say calculated adult coolness, I'm referring to the kind of coolness that generally applies to people between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six. This is different than mainstream teen coolness and aging hipster default coolness, both of which reflect an opposing (and sort of pathetic) consumer aesthetic.

Cereal ads are directed at kids, but they barely work on young people; the kind of advertising that works on a teenager are bandwagon spots for things like Trident and khaki Gap pants. Those ads imply that these are products everybody else already owns. Teenagers claim they want to be cool, but they mostly just want to avoid being uncool.

It's the same for aging hipsters, an equally terrified class of Americans who slowly conclude that the key to staying relevant is by exhibiting default appreciation for the most obvious youth culture entities; this is why you often hear forty-seven-year-old men with ponytails saying things like, "Oh, I'm totally into the new stuff. That new Nickelback record is just terrific."

Aging hipsters and corduroy-clad high school sophomores are both primarily concerned with dodging lameness. However, there is a stretch in everyone's early adulthood where they can choose (or choose against) creating their own personalized version of nonpopulist cool, which may (or may not) succeed. This is accomplished by embracing semioriginal, semielitist cultural artifacts that remain just out of reach to those who desire them -- the so-called "Cocoa Puffs of Power."

We all relate to Sonny the Cuckoo Bird. We pursue that which retreats from us, and coolness is always a bear market. Coolness is always what others seem to have naturally -- an unspecific, delicious, chocolately paradigm we must pilfer through subterfuge. It drives us, for lack of a better term, coo coo. And part of the reason we struggle is because there is no hard-and-fast clarity about what qualifies anything as cool. It needs to be original, but only semioriginal:

It would be legitimately inventive (and kind of "out there") to casually walk around with the petrified skull of a orangutan under your arm for no obvious reason, but this would only seem cool to a select class of performance artist. A better choice would be a T-shirt featuring the cast of After M*A*S*H.

A cool image also needs to be semielitist, but it can't be wholly elitist: What you display should be extremely hard to find, yet could have been theoretically found by absolutely anyone six months ago (had they possessed the foresight). This is why calculated adult coolness would reward the possession of, say, a can of Elf soda pop, yet frown upon the possession of, say, four ounces of weapons-grade uranium.

The impact of this understanding comes later in life, usually at college, and usually around the point when being "weird" starts to be periodically interpreted by others as "charming" and/or "sexually intriguing."

. . .

The desire to be cool is -- ultimately -- the desire to be rescued. It's the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society. It's the desire to be advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, mostly because they all lived the same pedestrian life. Without the spoils of exclusionary coolness, we're just cogs in the struggle.

Tags: Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Coolness, Fame