The Naff

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What is the relationship between coolness and naffness in pop history.

A version of it wd describe pop history as essentially a story of a thread of coolness constantly besieged by naffness. This seems deeply unsatisfactory to me.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Welcome back Tom! The interweb has missed you :-)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't like the converse either!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

oh pah i have IMPORTANT WRITING to finish this morning! instead i have already written and scrubbed three answers to this key question

the dynamic of "cool" seems to be "it's good until a critical mass of applause is reached, then it becomes bad" -- ie "cool" has the same apparent qualities as NEW and DIFFERENT but less absolute; so that a non-tiny group of people can imbibe over time before the goodness goes

so can a better map be drawn up by pushing the claim out to an extreme?: "a thread of DIFFERENCE constantly besieged by SAMENESS" (i don't mean this is correct -- it isn't -- i mean, what's obviously absurd about this statement is also absurd in the cool-naff version, even though it's a less strong claim

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Pop was naff from 1989-1997, until the girl/boy bands suddenly became bigger than everything else again.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

ALSO, also, isn't the cool/naff binary just totally rockism in disguise? given that "cool" was invented by jazz [hem hem] and jazz is the most rockist of all the musics.

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

Gosh. I think you could spend a long time debating what "coolness" is and never get anywhere near a satisfactory definition. To me, pop history seems more about the naffness as a constant, with "cool" a roaming tag being applied to different bands/artists during different eras (both historical and personal).

And welcome back!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Does cool = down with the kidz on the bus?

Cool at the moment therefore is Ne-Yo!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the word for "naff" in jazz-lingo = CORNY!

but "cool" as originally used -- it was explored on that VICTORIA COREN prog -- meant sumfin a bit like "botherd", and didn't reference artists so much as those left unruffled by the rush of life

(in john miller chernoff's tremendous book on african drumming., he describes being in a club at a bar listening to african pop, and his toe is twitching to the music, and someone sees this and shouts with glee that this is the COOLEST DANCE EVER SEEN -- ie in west africa at the time, controlled elegant minimalism is a value

(re this anecdote: i can't remember if the word is actually "cool" though, or an african word meaning "cool")

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

quest for cool = fear of / defence against naff? But this is transparently 'naff', so cool = not caring about being 'cool'. But this is not true either. The Simpsons explored this problem: (paraphrased) Marge 'by not caring about being cool or not I become cool' Bart and Lisa 'no it doesn't work like that'.

Dunno, mate.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I have been using the word 'naff' a lot recently, I observed to Adrian at lunch yesterday. For example I have described cow parade as 'naff': in fact I mostly use it to describe feigned artistic sophistication (often populist in intent) which fails on aesthetic grounds. Describing something as naff establishes a distance and a hierarchy between my taste and other people's taste, and instances my critical judgement.

AND ANYWAY 'naff' might not be the opposite of 'cool', or the relationship between the two might not be symmetrical.

Arbiters

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

The notion of implied arbiters seems crucial for 'cool' but not 'naff'. If I pronounce something naff I am saying 'I am an arbiter', but to claim that something is cool is a bit naff in itself.