Let Me Just Say This About That

by Chef Troy

Mrs. Chef and I are going to have another baby around the end of this year. The pregnancy has triggered a flood of memories from last time, when she was pregnant with Chef Jr. (Granted, not all of them were happy memories; frankly, I’d just as soon forget all about the Swirling Hormone Gumbo™ Mrs. Chef was marinating in and my resulting life of fear that I’d do or say the wrong thing and set her off.)

One particular memory that’s been on my mind is of sitting at the hospital talking to a family member who said something like, “So you’re a parent now. You realize that means you’re never going to be cool again.” They prattled on about minivans, spit-up cloths, diaper bags and PTA memberships, but I barely heard any of it, so horrified was I at the prospect of being forced to relinquish my “cool guy” membership card.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that parenthood isn’t the death of the cool. It’s unquestionably the swan song of whatever hip qualities you may possess, but hip and cool are not the same thing at all.

Hip is ephemeral; Cool is fundamental.

Who can remember what bands were hip, say, three years ago? But look how long Tony Bennett has been cool. Hip is a wave front moving through popular culture, sweeping trends along and leaving a tangled mass of parachute pants and dethroned kings of pop bobbing bewilderedly in its wake. Sometimes the wave will gather up the flotsam of former hipness and deposit it anew on the beach for people to discover, but such recycled trends inevitably begin to stink even faster than they did the first time.

Like a skilled surfer, someone who’s really good at being hip can stay with that wave front by constantly reinventing themselves. Madonna is an example of this: she’s been hip longer than many would have thought possible, but she’s not really cool. Cool doesn’t surf the wave; cool ignores the wave in favor of its own pace.

Hip cannot exist without “unhip”; Cool stands on its own.

Hip is based on a sense of being one of a group of “insiders.” It defines itself in terms of who and what it excludes - after all, what’s the point of being inside the velvet ropes or being waved through the doors of the trendiest night club if there aren’t people outside those ropes? If there aren’t people wishing they were you, why would you want to be you? Cool, on the other hand, answers only to itself. Cool is an absolute; it doesn’t depend on contrasting itself with anything, it just is.

A related point: As much as hip thrives on exclusion, it also has a desperate need to be included by the rest of the hip universe. Hip screams “Me too!” Cool, on the other hand, just murmurs, “Me.”

Cool is confident; Hip is frantic.

Cool follows an inner compass; Hip is always looking over its shoulder.

Cool is all-encompassing; Hip is just a place to keep your wallet.

Be cool.