Why Cool is Un-cool: Part 1

Author’s preface:

This began as a rant about why I could never get friends to come to gigs in Cape Town, but has turned into more of a sociology paper.  I was finally prompted to write it when a friend of mine, Brett Allen-White, asked why there were no girls at shows apart from the girlfriends of band members, and it started a massive discussion of gender politics in the local underground music scene.

This article will most likely be the first in a series, as I develop my thoughts around this complex topic.

A Note  on Terminology:

I will refer to ‘The Scene’ very often (with a capital ‘S’). It might seem trite to those who know me, but for those reading this out of interest: by this I mean the small collection of bands, most of which do not have record labels, who play regularly in venues like The Assembly, the Purple Turtle, Mercury Live and Zula Bar in Cape Town, and the people who support them. In my opinion, this scene can be described as ‘underground’, as it is not popular, but still has large covert appeal (by covert I mean as opposed to the overt appeal of swanky nightclubs and popular beaches). This can of course be generalized to most underground or niche music scenes.

The Cape Town music scene is not well-known by most people.  In fact, most people who consider themselves fans of local music have probably never encountered the ‘Scene’ I am speaking of. It exists in small bars, and venues dedicated to live music on a small scale. The types of places you wouldn’t venture unless you were going there for a reason – like to see a band.  The bands that play are amateurs, by and large, and the members usually have day jobs to support their love of music.  The purpose of this article is to investigate why this scene is ‘un-cool’, given the natural behaviour of the ‘cool’ phenomenon.

Live at the Purple Turtle

Allow me to explain. Popular theory around ‘coolness’ is that it emanates from the lower rungs of popular society – the underground.  The theory is that a small group of people who are looked up to by another group of slightly less-cool people will innovate a new trend, a new fashion, or a new style of music.  This will be picked up by their followers, but initially shunned by the majority of young cool-seekers.

However, after a short period of time the more progressive amongst the ‘majority’ (and by this I mean the mainstream – the people who define style by what is depicted in the mainstream media, and that which can be easily found in local hotspots and the vicinity of celebrities) will start to pick up the trend.  It will eventually reach critical mass, and soon everyone is wearing skinny jeans and spiked belts, even though they are far removed from the bands and fans that first started doing this.

Obviously, once everyone is wearing skinny jeans and spiked belts, they stop being cool – that is the nature of fashion. So my question is that if these trends originate in this Scene, why isn’t the Scene itself more popular?

A common complaint about the Scene goes something like this: “The bands suck. The sound at the venues is terrible.  They’re always hot and smoky. The chicks are short, fat and have too many piercings, and the guys all wear eyeliner.”  So why on earth would anyone go to these gigs?

Here’s where the irony comes in.  The people who are attracted to this kind of social event are, for the most part, those who do not fit in or do not feel comfortable in places that are conventionally popular – at least when they reach social maturity and start to go out to clubs and bars. These are the un-cool kids. The places where their friends’ bands are playing can be scary at first, but very quickly the Otherness of the places begins to make these lost souls feel at home.  They identify with it, and begin to feel pride and take confidence from the fact that they, out of all of their peers, understand it.  Liking something that nobody else likes can be difficult, but for certain personality types it is extremely satisfying.

The question to be answered here is, why don’t all the cool kids flock to these gigs?  If anything, to see what’s going to be cool tomorrow?  The answer lies in incentives.

Incentives, if you’ve read Freakonomics, are basically what motivates most human interactions that involve the exchange of a commodity.  Our commodity in this case is coolness itself. For those who are ‘members’ of the Scene, there are plenty incentives to go to gigs.  All your friends are there, you get to see bands you like, and you come out of it feeling like you belong to something bigger.  Those are just a few of the things that people who put time into the Scene get out of it.

On the other hand, for an outsider, there is very little incentive to try to penetrate this little world.  As mentioned above, the bands are not ‘good’ enough to attract people purely by virtue of their name or their music.  The venues have little to recommend themselves as hotspots, and the overall quality of the production is not of a consistently high standard.

But that’s not all. The coolness of the Scene depends entirely on the constant activity and input of its members.  They create the trends, the music and the fashion that define that little corner of subculture. Why bother going to a place you don’t know, listening to bands you don’t know, with a bunch of people who probably scare you, when you can get all of that stuff second hand, for “cheaper”, simply by letting it permeate upwards through the social strata?

The ‘good’ parts of the scene – those that the mainstream decides are cool – filter upwards, and become far more easily accessible to everyone else.  There is no incentive to seek out a social arena that offers little rewards to the casual visitor. Especially if that casual visitor’s motivation is to increase their own exposure to coolness, or to find some of their own.

Why is this? When did we become so hostile to newcomers? Surely it seems counter-productive to make the events we’re trying so hard to promote into an environment that’s hard for newcomers to access? We all say that we want people to come to our shows, but in reality we have built the Scene from the early days into an exclusive club, because that’s what being underground is all about.

So what do we do? Do we make it more user-friendly and soft around the edges, so people can come?  Do we need more money, better bands and bigger venues? On the one hand, this would help.  Improving the general quality of shows would attract more people – it’s my guess that most people aged eighteen to their late twenties don’t ever go to see bands except for more than once or twice a year.  In fact, the next time you go to The Assembly to watch some bands, take a look around you: you’ll see copies of One Small Seed on the tables (don’t get me started), a big bar with expensive drinks and pretty bar girls, and decent sound.  This could be the future.

If we had more people coming, we’d have more money in the scene, and that would lead to better venues, better sound, and more support for more bands, some of which would be good.  But we don’t necessarily want this. Not really. If we make it easy for the people who go to parties sponsored by major radio stations and events companies to come to our shows, we’re not the elite anymore.

The Scene is something that we feel we own. If everyone is coming to shows, we’re not special. And as I mentioned right at the start, if everyone is doing it, it ceases to be cool.  So while the Scene is traditionally un-cool, it needs to stay this way in order for it to be a source of tomorrow’s conventional cool.

This was Part One of a series of articles I intend to write on this interesting section of the counter-culture.  It will hopefully develop through discussion with those involved, and those who are not.  The next topic I intend to tackle is the aforementioned Brett’s question about why the scene is male-dominated, with girls traditionally being transitory girlfriends of band members or fans who lose interest when their punk phase passes.  I plan to write another on the phenomenon of a place like The Assembly in Cape Town, and it’s effect on the Scene. But in due course.

I hope this started some of you thinking.  Leave a comment if you’d like to contribute to the discussion.