No Seriously, Listen To This

Dear Avid Reader,

I'm cool. I have no idea if you are cool. Maybe. Who knows?

But I am. Count on it. Son.

The Heart Is A Stone And This Is A Stone That We Throw
See, only a cool person would have said, "Son" after the last sentence. If you saw it coming ahead of time, you're cool. If you didn't, maybe you are, but the outlook does not look good (burned 8-ball style).

Part of being cool is the music. I like cool music. You could call me a hipster, or an indie rocker, but I'd deny it. Cool people deny things. Cuz.

With Our Legs On The Edge And Our Feet On The Horizon

I got this friend on mine that listens to the same music as me. He is cool. We'll call him Junior Mint (even though his name is Brent). We listen and judge and compare notes. He goes to more concerts than me, and I have probably heard more albums. We bring different flavors to the mix and we bring each others game up. It's awesome.

Now Junior Mint has a wife, Isabella (whose real name is April). Isabella is into the music scene that me and Junior Mint are into. She's genuinely interested. Why do I bring this up? Why am I changing the names up? Because my wife, Robyn is cooler than us.

Legs Parallel, We Stood So Long We Fell

Robyn is genuinely disinterested in cool music. I've tried. I've gotten her to listen to songs that she might like even if I don't. Occasionally it works. But only occasionally.

See, Robyn is suspicious of anything that she thinks she's supposed to do. I, other the other hand, am interested in having opinions and listening habits that the generally accepted cool brand issues to me. Bro.

And the thing is that she is impervious. Even if she likes it, if she sniffs even the slightest bit of requirement from the artist or media, she's off it. This is amazing and frustrating and amazing.

This Push and Pull Is The Force Of A Wave Of Time

I listen to indie music because I think of it as a reaction to what mainstream culture produces. Currently, that means a lot of awful hip-hop. But the indie music scene is probably the most codified culture out there. It's an otherness, but a very specific otherness. I am aware of this and I still listen. I actually like the music. Kid.

But Robyn rejects that and embraces whatever happens to cross her path that she happens to like also . Like Train's "Hey, Soul Sister". I'm out there, machete in hand, hacking through the jungle of music to find new and interesting things. She isn't interested in working for it. She's can't be bothered. She's aloof. She's cool.

It Can't Be Gone, We're Still Right Here

This "working for it", the thing that my brand of music holds as essential to music fandom, she rejects completely. She then embraces the mainstream music scene not out of ignorance of the other worlds of music, but in protest of them. Is she aware of this protest? I have no idea. It's irrelevant to the fact that she is doing it.

So all of this means that Robyn is cooler than me. Of course she hasn't listened to the Sleigh Bells demo, she doesn't know why My Bloody Valentine is important, and she has no opinion on who is the bigger creative genius in Animal Collective, but she wins. Because she doesn't care. And that's cool. Daddy-O.

The Next Post Promises To Be Better,

James