How we moved on from ‘rebel cool’
What drives us to think of some things as cool? In this excerpt from their new book, Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World, neuroscientist and philosopher Steven Quartz and political scientist Anette Asp bring
In 1989, Sub Pop signed a local band to a contract by offering an initial advance of $600. The band was Nirvana. Sub Pop released Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach, later that year. Dissatisfied with Sub Pop’s distribution of Bleach, Nirvana signed with David Geffen’s label, DGC, in 1990 and began production on a second album with the producer Butch Vig, who would become one of the most highly regarded music producers of all time.
In late 1991, they released the first single and lead track from the album, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in an attempt to build some momentum for the album and for the song “Come As You Are,” which was anticipated to have the most crossover appeal. The band’s ambitions for the album were relatively modest, but soon “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was in heavy rotation at college and rock radio stations despite the worry of many in the music industry that no one could understand what frontman Kurt Cobain was saying.
The accompanying video also went into heavy rotation on MTV (which had originally planned on adding subtitles to the video). The song would go on to become Nirvana’s biggest hit, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard singles chart the same week the album reached No.1. Nirvana won Best New Artist and Best Alternative Video for the song at the 2002 MTV Music Video Awards.
The success of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is often regarded as a turning point in the relation between mainstream and alternative cultures. The grunge movement, like punk before it, depended strongly on the authenticity of its music, which in turn depended on its unwaveringly countering mainstream sensibilities.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” itself captures the contradictions in the apparent tension between these two cultures. The song seems caught between a strong ethos of authenticity, commitment and sincerity and a more postmodern sense of irony that makes the pretence of such a stance absurd.
Soon after its release, members of the media were quick to call the song the anthem of Generation X and named Cobain the generational spokesman. Writing in the New York Times, Simon Reynolds noted that the song “provides a catch-all catharsis that fits in perfectly with the directionless disaffection of the 20something generation.”
A few years later, on April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered by an electrician in an apartment above Cobain’s Seattle home’s garage, dead from, apparently, a selfinflicted gunshot wound, with heroin paraphernalia strewn on the floor nearby. The reasons for Cobain’s suicide are no doubt complex, involving a family history of depression (and the strong suspicion that he suffered from bipolar disorder), chronic stomach ailments, and a long battle with addiction. But the story line that got the most attention was the explanation of Cobain’s death as a tale of co-option.
Think of the psychedelic bus the Merry Pranksters drove on their LSD-fuelled escapades: Tom Wolfe made it a symbol of counterculture rebellion in The Electric Kool-Aid Ac
id Test. Years later, Coca-Cola replicated the bus to sell its Fruitopia drinks. In the case of youth subcultures such as punk and grunge, the narrative is that these subcultures start out as legitimate threats to “the System.” They are disruptive and cause moral panic. That is, their symbolic resistance exposes some deep internal contradiction in society and threatens its very core. In response, the dominant “hegemonic” culture absorbs the subculture, turning it into a generator of harmless products that people mistake for the real thing.
The idea of selling out is central to the co-option story. The “culture industry” lures rebel musicians and other artists into its mainstream fold with offers of financial success and fame. Nirvana’s success was big enough for many of its fans to accuse the band of selling out.
In Cobain’s case, this narrative continues by suggesting that the inherent contradictions of the struggle to be authentically alternative after finding mainstream success undid him. Perhaps there was no better symbolic expression of this apparent contradiction than Cobain’s appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Corporate magazines still suck.” Rolling Stone, like MTV, was part of the dominant capitalist culture.
These contradictions appeared again in Rolling Stone later that year when they dubbed 1994 “mainstream alternative’s greatest year,” with eight alternative albums topping Billboard charts that year.
After Cobain’s death, musicians with a less serious style eclipsed grunge music. In particular, a spate of post-grunge alternative Britpop groups emerged, such as Oasis, whose album would make the Vatican’s list of the 10 best rock albums of all time. If there’s a stronger sign of the demise of alternative music than making a Vatican top 10 list, we can’t think of it.
A view that’s especially popular among anti-capitalist critics, such as Naomi Klein and Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn, is that rebel cool became contemporary cool through a process of co-option. The story goes like this: rebel cool was threatening the social order, so capitalists co-opted it by making consuming itself appear rebellious. Now being a rebel actually drove capitalism. This is the “conquest” of Thomas Frank’s Conquest of Cool. Once rebel cool had been co-opted, contemporary cool emerged as a commodified fake cool.
The result was that the social order — as hierarchical as ever — didn’t really change. There’s a real tension between this co-option view of cool and Malcolm Gladwell’s second law (that cool can’t be manufactured).
Co-option critics view people as passive dupes who are controlled by looming social forces, and are essentially as passive as brains in a vat, to echo the critics’ often-invoked Matrix analogy. Cool is manufactured and pumped into the System, providing just enough titillation to keep people plugged into the controlling computer. In contrast, Gladwell offers a radical version of consumer appropriation: consumers transform and re-create the meanings of products, and in so doing erase what ever might have been the “intended” meaning of a product — intended by its makers and their marketing department.
Appropriation is the antithesis of co-option. In Gladwell’s case, cool products are the result of a complete appropriation, so that manufacturers and brand managers have essentially no control over the meaning of their products.
There’s no doubt that appropriation plays a large role in our consumption. Consumers construct social meanings for a product that its makers never anticipated and that diversify over time.
A conversation we had with two British brand managers for the wellknown cognac company Hennessy illustrates the point.
They relayed how surprised they were when Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy’s 2001 hip-hop song “Pass the Courvoisier” resulted in a surge of sales and made the United States the largest cognac market in the world. The company’s traditional marketing — think stuffy British gentlemen’s club — had been oblivious to this new market, which had appropriated cognac, now termed “the yak” and mentioned in more than one hundred hip-hop songs. That consumers actively participate in creating the social meaning of products figures prominently in DotCool.
People really do seem to love dark tales of co-option. But for co-option to be real, youth subcultures must first have genuinely, if symbolically, resisted and protested the status quo. Just as people were explaining Cobain’s death in terms of the latest subversive subculture to be co-opted, a new generation of sociologists was beginning to question whether the whole “resistant youth subculture” framing of the alternative-versus-mainstream debate wasn’t a big mistake.
Were youth subcultures really as political, subversive, and oppositional as the influential Birmingham neo-Marxist school of thought claimed? When researchers actually talked to punks, mods, and rockers in the mid-1990s, they heard a different story.
In particular, many people didn’t see their lifestyle choices as acts of political resistance, and there didn’t seem to be much coherent political ideology within subcultures.
The Birmingham school’s emphasis on class-based struggle and symbolic political resistance turned out be a caricature.
As a result, by the mid-1990s the very idea of youth lifestyles as oppositional subcultures began to fall out of favour. Looming social structures such as the class system no longer determined a person’s lifestyle. People were now active consumers who constructed their own sense of identity, not passive dupes.
Consumer culture could even be liberating, because it offered a dazzling panoply of lifestyles to choose from once the hierarchical and economic barriers to participating in it broke down. Indeed, rather than enforcing class identities, consumer culture gave young people the opportunity to break out of them.
Popular co-option stories treat contemporary society as though nothing much has changed over the last 50 years (or 150 years, for that matter). Co-option requires a dominating social structure to do the co-opting. But by the mid-1990s, rebel cool and the oppositional consumption it drove had helped transform the wellordered status hierarchy of postwar America into an increasingly pluralistic, fragmented social landscape.
For this reason, by the 1990s rebel cool was tilting at windmills. The socalled mainstream was no longer the dominant culture. In fact, the mainstream itself was disappearing. Although consumers and cultural critics alike invoke “mainstream culture” all the time as a dominating force, today it’s more of an intellectual conceit.
Mainstream culture is supposed to represent the consensual values of the majority, but wherever you look for it today, you find fragmen- tation instead.
It’s hopeless to try to extract a mainstream, consensual religious culture from this deep fragmentation. Not only is culture fragmented, it is increasingly polarized.
The fact that we continue to invoke the rebel instinct even though there’s no longer a cultural hierarchy is crucial for understanding the shift from rebel cool to DotCool. In particular, the creative energy of rebellion underlies the shift from cool as a signal of opposition to one of unconventionality. And it opened the possibility for invoking the rebel stance ironically.
Your rebel instinct triggers when you feel that a person, group, or institution is subordinating you (even if no one actually is). There are a few different ways we might feel as though we’re being subordinated.
We may invoke the rebel stance ironically by invoking it with the awareness that no one is actually subordinating us. Alternatively, we may invoke it by romanticizing or aggrandizing our own situation. There has long been a temptation to romanticize the rebel as a hero, and a hero needs an oppressor. For example, from Hesiod’s eighth-century BC poetry to Ridley Scott’s 2012 science fiction movie, the Prometheus heroic rebel myth has been a particularly pervasive cultural theme. Prometheus defied the gods by giving fire to man, for which he suffers Zeus’s eternal punishment. Of course, the Prometheus myth depends on Zeus as an image of institutional tyranny.
The image of Prometheus suffering for his actions was particularly popular among Romantic artists, who invoked the image as an analogy for how they felt they suffered for their art. Today, many anti-consumer ap- peals in particular evoke such images, especially in romanticizing acts of anti-consumption symbolic protests.
It’s one thing to be against the System and offer symbolic resistance in the form of culture jamming or an alternative lifestyle. It’s quite another to provide a road map to a different system.
Echoes of negative rebellion reverberated during the Occupy movements when the anthropologist and activist David Graeber argued that the movement shouldn’t issue any demands — doing so would recognize the legitimacy of existing political institutions. The alternative he endorsed was anarchism: a truly free society with no political institutions, based on mutual aid and self-organization, that would lead to a post-violent world, however hazily conceived. In his words, “Unplug the machine and start again.”
Beyond the tempting heroic imagery of the rebel, invoking the rebel instinct — even when it means imagining a dominant foe — remains a powerful way to galvanize group identity. Since this promotes in-group co-operation, it’s a strategy that’s increasingly used to mobilize movements. In fact, this often reaches absurd heights in politics today as groups try to pin the mantle of hierarchical cultural dominance on their opponents while trying to secure the role of heroic rebel for themselves.
During her vice-presidential candidates’ debate with Joe Biden, for example, Sarah Palin described herself and John McCain as “mavericks” so many times that it became instant self-parody (and “conservative maverick” is an oxymoron). Despite the lack of cultural hierarchy today, political manoeuvring to label opponents elitist has likewise become a popular strategy, from conservatives invoking the mainstream liberal media establishment and even the “hipster elite” to hipsters deriding the mainstream.
To truly understand the transition from rebel cool to DotCool, we need to keep in mind that social pluralism, fragmentation and the proliferation of lifestyles over the last three decades mean that the rebel instinct is now typically triggered in the absence of cultural hierarchy. In particular, the values cool came to signal shifted in response to the new social selection pressures of life in a knowledge economy and its more pluralistic society. Excerpted from Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp. All rights reserved.