"Girl, So Confusing," femme cool, and resolution over resilience

In summer 2024, the figure of the “rock star”--someone who parties hard, does equally hard drugs, flouts rules of propriety, and lives a big, very spectacularly messy life--returned to the forefront of Anglophone pop culture, this time branded lime green and distinctly femme. As The Guardian writes, “brat – inspired by Charli [XCX]’s most recent album – is more than a name, it’s a lifestyle. It is noughties excess, rave culture. It’s “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. It’s quintessentially cool.” “Brat” is both the name of Charli XCX’s 2024 album and the “cool” ethos that it evokes. In her Pitchfork review of the album, Meghan Garvey finds that when compared to other “Main Pop Girl[s]...she [Charli] had something they didn’t. She was cool.” Traditionally, “cool” is a gendered performance of knowing disidentification with the mainstream that originated in Black popular culture and was appropriated, along with blues, jazz, and rock, by white men and (ironically) the mainstream music industry. Originally, “cool” referred to a performance of Black masculinity that was “intensely, connected, aware, and able to judge the right action to take in a given circumstance” (hooks 143) -- i.e., one that “didn’t believe the hype” (hooks 147) of mainstream white supremacist culture and politics. However, when appropriated by white hipsters, “cool” is reframed into a sort of “ironic detachment” (Winnubst 2) from mainstream white culture, like the quintessential “rebel without a cause.” Philosophers like myself and Robert Gooding-Williams have called that detachment a kind of “skeptical melancholy”--it’s a very modern/Enlightenment and white self-distancing from embodied, material immediacy. Rock stars are cool because they are skeptically detached from mainstream norms of propriety regarding anything from aesthetics to personal health and presentation.

In a 1987 article on “Why Lou Reed Will Always Be Cool,” the Chicago Reader located the Velvet Underground frontman’s eternal coolness in “his unprecedented cynicism, along with his conviction that rock ‘n’ roll could be used as a medium for serious expression without giving up its trashy, offensive vitality…Lou Reed saw through that jive, and that’s Reason Number One why he’s eternally cool.” Skeptical of mainstream norms of, say, sexual propriety, Reed famously hung out with Andy Warhol’s very queer crowd and wrote a song--1969’s “Candy Says”-- from the perspective of a trans woman. Charli XCX has cited Reed as an inspiration for