Andrew Dubber     

Cool? It’s absolutely icebox – Photo by gari.baldi

As a piece of marketing discourse, the word ‘cool’ has come to mean different things over the years. Today, if you look for websites by searching on the word ‘cool’, then what you’ll typically find is more accurately described as humour. Visual gags, videos of people falling down, and viral gags you can send to your friends.

Whereas, by ‘cool’ I’m referring to its original colloquial usage – particularly by beatniks and New York intellectuals. It’s an urbane aesthetic, an attitude and an approach to life that is at once detached and engaged. It’s smart, politically active, exploratory, self-composed, improvisational, unhurried, interested in expanded horizons, and emphasises an appreciation of both quality and authenticity – as indefinable as those things may be.

Of course, the problem with cool, is that it leads people to try and endlessly sort ‘cool’ from ‘not cool’ or get involved in whether one thing is ‘cooler’ than another. We could argue all day and night about what’s cool and isn’t or just how cool something might be, but there are some things that are (I would assert) just objectively and categorically cool.

And it’s those things that I’m interested in here.

So what’s a Box of Cool?
My idea is for a subscription-based, home-delivered regular package – let’s say monthly, for the sake of argument – full of things that are undeniably ‘cool’.

Typical contents might include an issue of a high quality print magazine that you may not have come across before (Bearded Magazine springs to mind here); a 180g vinyl reissue of an underappreciated recording like Leroy Vinnegar’s Glass of Water; a DVD of a film you probably haven’t seen, but should – like Alan Arkin’s Little Murders; an undeniably cool book like Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums; a single, commissioned long-form essay by a contemporary cultural commentator; perhaps a miniature taster bottle of a single malt scotch… I don’t know. Stuff like that, I guess.

However, the trick to it being actually cool – rather than merely marketing cool is to have a different guest editor every month. Someone smart, interesting and culturally curious, who epitomises some element of cool – and not in a GQ suit-wearing, cigar-smoking sort of way – but in an ‘in-touch with the zeitgeist – but aware of far more interesting stuff’ sort of way.

Following a few simple guidelines, the guest editor could curate what goes in the box this month. I can think of a few names I’d pick, but that’s not my role here. I’m just putting the idea out there.

People buy things that are cool
One of my motivations for suggesting an idea like this is in reaction to the record industry’s constant griping about losing money due to downloading. There was an article just this morning about EMI’s rising debt, which wondered aloud whether Katy Perry could save the company.

And I think that misunderstands consumer culture in an age of both digital and physical products. Music recordings themselves – particularly mass-produced pop music recordings – are pretty much medium-agnostic, which is to say that a download of Katy Perry is easily as good as a CD of Katy Perry for my purposes.

But tangible things, when they’re really desirable things, can’t be substituted online.

I can read an article on the web, and that’s easily as good (better, actually) than a print newspaper. But not nearly as good as a gorgeous, well-designed, high-quality print magazine.

I’ll buy a CD (and I’m in one of the few remaining demographics that will), but only if you’ll pay attention to the whole product. Make it a desirable object to own. Make it cool. There’s a reason that box sets are on the rise while mass-market CDs in crappy plastic jewel cases are on the decline – and it’s not because of theft.

It’s because the digital age favours good product design and desirable objects. Popular is not as good as cool anymore.

What price cool?
You’d probably be looking at something like £30-40 a month, but the contents would be so desirable, so well-packaged and with such a real attention to detail, you’d find that people would be so overwhelmed by the quality that the price would be a small one to pay for something so, well… cool.

Every instalment should be different. The project should be an international one. Every element should be fascinating. Every item should be a talking point. It’d be niche, perhaps – but a significant niche.

And, of course, the companion website has the opportunity to open up more about each of the ideas, cultural artefacts and experiences contained within the box.

You should start this. I’d buy it. It’d be cool.

Tagged: Cool