I once read a book that claimed it would answer the question it called “the grand mystery of culture”: Why do certain cultural practices—fashion styles, food trends, artistic movements, etc.— become widely adopted, then abandoned in favor of new ones every few years? As someone who's done a lot of screaming into the wind over the past decades about skinny jeans, I obviously picked this book up and read it.

Its answer was basically that since people are always seeking status and social capital, the masses copy the practices of elites, who then move on from those practices when mass participation renders these practices uncool by definition.

It’s…a theory. We’ll call it Theory A.

It makes a kind of sense. In this theory coolness has to do with exclusivity. And it’s true once something is so widely popular as to be considered basic, it can scarcely claim to be very cool anymore. But this book’s logical holes kept me up at night. (You can read my Goodreads review for more about that.) I never did get my answers about skinny jeans. I think I’m getting closer now, though.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the book’s theory is the wrong one. Let’s just say the answer to ‘why certain things become cool as others become uncool’ is the exact inverse theory. It is actually elites who copy the cultural practices of the masses, and the masses who move on when elite participation by definition renders those practices uncool. ←Theory B.

Since these theories contradict one another, you can only pick one. Which one do you think I pick? Those of you who guessed B win a special prize.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way. Cool is obviously subjective, highly personal, psychological as well as systemic, even spiritual, and largely subconscious. Cool is very hard to define. We know it when we see it though.

Maybe it’s easier to define by its opposite. Someone who is trying to be cool is a perversion of concept almost painful to behold. But people who try and fail to be cool are useful because they provide multiple planes from which to view coolness. We can see what they’re trying to convey, and what they’re failing to convey, what they think is cool, what they think others think is cool, and what we think is cool. We can get greater clarity, though we’ll never see something subjective and personal with total clarity of course.

Let’s examine the figures of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They think they’re cool, that much is clear. To me, this makes them deeply uncool to a painful to watch degree. Absurdly, they each want to claim some kind of countercultural status. It’s a claim as baseless as it is infuriating, given each of their roles in powerfully, insanely, shaping and controlling the direction of culture on a more literal level than should even be possible. How can you swim against the currents when you are literally powering a jet turbine that pushes the water a particular way? *rubs temples* Perhaps in part because of this essential contradiction in who they are and who they claim to be, (or perhaps because of mommy issues who knows?) they both seem angry and fearful, and beneath that deeply insecure, that is, another basic antithesis of cool. This insecurity and anxiety emanates from both men palpably. It’s an anxiety I recognize, perhaps in myself on some level.

Despite their bottomless power, they’ve failed at the simple task of embodiment. They experience little of the human reality that is the basis of all culture, and it shows.

The claim to “cool”, to counterculture in particular, from people who are literally controlling the culture, while having nothing to do with the facts of living in culture themselves, who we know would never in a million years endorse anything truly countercultural because doing so would threaten their status and power, two things it’s ABUNDANTLY clear they value above all else, …is uncool to the point of repulsive. I’m getting angry now, hold on I need to calm down.

They just want it so bad. Coolness. Culture. But they will never have it. They will try. God will they try. Best we can do is pray they don’t take us all down with them in the process.

So if I’m right that we can best define coolness through its antithesis, it would reason that to be cool you must be in some way countercultural. And you have to embody your countercultural values… with some real stakes on the line.

I don’t think smoking is cool for the record, but I think this is why smoking, culturally, came to be a bit of a shorthand or stand-in for the idea of coolness for a time. It’s the element of embodiment. The living and breathing of it.

If we had to pick just one answer to explain ‘the grand mystery of culture,’ the obvious one has been there all along. It’s the story from mythology, when Zeus, despite living among goddesses, goes down to sleep with mortal women. It’s when Rose discovers the trad music party going on in steerage on the Titanic and thinks ‘hey this is a lot cooler than the party upstairs.’ It’s the plot of the song ‘Common People’.

Elites have always envied the masses for their ability to embody culture, and counterculture in particular. And the masses will always have superior culture. The reason I can say this is simple math. There are more of them, and more culture there.

Elites are desperate to participate in mass culture. And their desperation betrays them. It renders their practices perverse and grotesque in extreme examples like Elon and Zuck, but more often just boring and dull. Uncool. Two classic examples come to mind: abstract expressionism and disco. As soon as they came to be seen as backdrops for bourgeois lifestyles, they faded from relevance, stripped of their original energy and purpose—at least until countercultural members of the masses wish to reclaim them.

The song ‘Common People,’ considered one of the great Brit pop songs of all time, tells the age old story well. She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge/ she studied sculpture at St Martin’s college,… and so, naturally, it follows she wanted to know common people. This is framed as a natural extension of her obvious interest, as an elite, in culture. She infiltrates common culture via the singer. She adopts all the right practices. But she will of course “never get it right.” She ends up the butt of a joke. The singer ends by chanting to the audience he wants to be like common people like YOU (when he performs this line, he points at us, the masses listening in the audience).

Here’s another more topical example for you. Funny enough this one also comes from that place we like to think of as this more rigidly stratified, mirror image of our own society that is England—America if CLASS was still a thing, can you imagine? (haha, as if any other society could be more stratified than ours).

‘Brat’ is the 2024 album by Charli XCX. The first time I listened to the album, three different songs made me cry. (Don’t worry about me, please, I’m just an emotional person). In her strong accent the American brain immediately classifies as working class, she projects such vulnerability about losing a friend in a tragic accident (‘So I Cry’), alienation between would-be friends (‘Girl So Confusing’), and wanting a baby (‘I Think About It All the Time’) in between ‘hyper-pop’ beats and a lot about cocaine and clubbing. I thought it was daring, at times beautiful, at times grating, and, for a massive pop star, impressively transgressive and counter-cultural.

One day last summer, Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala is Brat” and the Democrats went from blue to lime green. When Barack Obama pushed out his annual playlist last summer, I laughed so hard that he had selected the one song most explicitly about drugs to share with his followers (365 Party Girl). That fall, the Democrats lost the “most significant election of our lifetime” and I can safely say I will never listen to that album again. There’s your Sherlock Holmes answer to the grand mystery of why *I* for one adopted a particular cultural practice then suddenly abandoned that practice.

Some are saying the reason Democrats failed so hard is because, having successfully captured a class of people known as “cultural elites,” they came to cater excessively to their wishes and needs, in the process abandoning the working class, who allegedly don’t share elite cultural values. I don’t know if that’s true. But I will say if their major accomplishment has been in capturing a group known as ‘the cultural elite’ they have failed even harder than we thought. There is no such class called the cultural elite. Cultural elite is an oxymoron.