I can sometimes be a bit complacent about buying pop albums: a combination of the fact that they’re always gonna be in stock and they take a while to fall below about $20 Australian, but also because (as I’ve mentioned before) relationships with pop artists are often more successful when structured around singles releases rather than the sustained wallop of an album. I haven’t really applied that logic to Gwen Stefani, because, unlike with say Chingy or Blue, I didn’t feel the necessity of a “getting to know you” period - I started to jump on board with No Doubt circa “Simple Kind of Life” and the conversion was complete with Rock Steady. Why stall on picking up Gwen’s debut album? This time it was just laziness.
Still, I have enjoyed consuming her solo work in single-sized portions, and rather curiously, I’ve enjoyed each successive release more than the one that preceded it. This seems to go against the consensus, which appears to be “Hollaback Girl” > “What Ya Waitin’ For” > “Cool” > “Rich Girl”, and I acknowledge that on a conceptual level the consensus position holds some merit. The underlying formula appears to be a privileging of Gwen’s delightfully dippy “only Gwen would do this” moments over the merely dippy, which makes sense obviously. “Take a chance you stupid ho” and “This shit is bananas” are, for better or worse, arresting; by contrast, borrowing liberally from Fiddler on the Roof is precisely the sort of basic inane-hook-stealing manoeuvre we’ve come to expect from pop music at large.
Except that I find that I actually enjoy the relative genericism of “Rich Girl” quite a lot; partly it’s just because it’s got Eve looking and sounding hottt in the video clip, but also because I like to imagine a pop world where the inherent ridiculousness of even Gwen’s more restrained moments becomes the standard for pop music – with “Rich Girl” it’s possible to fetishise the song as well as the singer, to invest in it as something more than another example of Gwen’s severely deranged pop nous. “Cool”, however, represents the best of all possible worlds – simultaneously a “Who but Gwen?” moment, and also a “this is what everyone should be doing” moment.
The first striking thing about “Cool” is the lesson it teaches us about 80s pop music: the question I immediately wanted to answer upon hearing it was, why does this make me think eighties so much more intensely than Fischerspooner or Ladytron or whatever? There are maybe a couple of answers to this, one being that the 80s was not nearly so devoted to roboticism for its own sake as we might like to think – indeed the most quintessentially 80s sounds are those computerised or synthethised attempts at mimicking an organic sound – the Fairlight remains the most efficient signifier of the decade, I suspect. In a similar manner, the simple guitar riff that runs through “Cool” is so much more joyfully plastic than any actual synth sound could ever hope to be (including those hyperactive synths that the song actually uses to complement the guitar), reminding me of those marvellously aerated late 80s ballads soundtracking the serious moments of Dirty Dancing etc. – actually apart from the fact that the tune is based on Yaz’s “Only You”, surely the closest reference point for “Cool” is “Hungry Eyes”??
In other words, if you were to think of eighties revivalism in terms of “Emerge” versus “Call On Me”, then Cool would be on the side of the latter. But Call On Me and all the related stabs at 80s-sampling house operate at only two levels of intensity, high and higher, and necessarily move between these two states in a strictly regimented fashion (there’s another story that could be written about Todd Edwards as the secret father of this stuff, but I’m gonna think about it some more before issuing a court order for DNA tests). And it occurred to me that, if there’s an underlying unity between “Emerge” and “Call On Me”, it’s that both records in their own way believe in the larger-than-life unambiguousness of emotional responses (electroclash often does this even when it seems to be avoiding overt emotionalism, simply by placing the emotion it lacks on a pedestal, by gesturing to the majesty of emotion that is somewhere offstage; if you play “Emerge” and “Call On Me” off against one another you end up with something like The Knife’s “Heart Beats”).
By contrast, Cool is unhurried; (bitter)sweet and even moving but neither ecstatic nor tragic. Perhaps the word I’m looking for is gentle. Most of all, it sounds to me like the Thin White Duke Mix of The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” with its stomach-churning anthemism delicately retracted, withdrawn into a state of trembling composure. And it’s similar to that other favourite of mine in several other ways too, most notably in how it appears to tell me a certain story about love in spite of itself.
I love that as a story it goes precisely nowhere, circling back on itself and making the same point in different ways because intense break-ups never follow strict temporal rules. “It’s hard to remember how I felt before, now I’ve found the love of my life,” Gwen begins tenderly, musing on the distance with which she can now reflect on a past relationship…but the song accelerates almost too quickly, barely another line passing before the first part of the chorus arrives abruptly. I like to think that it’s a case of the subject matter being simply too emotional to be tamed by a judicious sense of pacing, and the climactic chorus erupts into the song like a symptom of the true depth of feeling, Gwen’s voice angling up sharply from poised alto into trebly fragility.
The lyrics belie this premature climax: “…and after all the obstacles it’s good to see you now with someone else. And it’s such a miracle that you and me are still good friends.” When I first heard this on radio I didn’t hear this as a stubborn insistence but rather a simple statement of fact: I took the song at its word, and was vaguely pleased to hear a pop song so invested in generosity and gentility. Even the title of the song seemed pleasingly novel in its cordial poise. So seeing the (excellent) clip was quite a shock, so clearly was the subtext (they still love eachother!) foregrounded with brutal precision. Gwen, her ex and his new girlfriend sit over tea, all three smiling warmly, but Gwen and her ex’s eyes keep meeting, and from their eyes we cut to flashbacks of past passions. The graciousness of Gwen’s character affected me quite strongly even in this dialogue-free video clip, but perhaps it was her delectably chosen attire and too perfect hair that did it – she comes across like the Baroness watching from the balcony as Von Trapp goes down to meet Maria in the garden.
In retrospect I’m surprised that I ever took the song at its word, as it now strikes me as blatantly self-deceiving. On the one hand my new explanation is almost disappointing – it would be nice for there to be more ballads on the radio about genuinely wishing the best for your ex’s new relationship – but I have an addiction to this brand of self-deception in pop, ranging from the obvious (“I’m Not In Love”) to the more subtle/undecidable (see also Brandy’s “Wow”, to which perhaps “Cool” is a bitterness-free sequel). The latter type is best of all, of course: if we want pop songs which can tell us about ourselves, then we need to seek out the ones that offer us a choice, because these are the ones that allow us to take sides, to be partial. My partiality is the product of a strange obsession with the romanticism of self-deception and, precisely, the refusal to admit to regret – that strange, prickly dignity which takes the guise of altruism. In this sense, the worst thing to do is read “Cool” as autobiographical, to allow for the crushing banality of thinking of “Cool” in terms of Gwen’s history with one of the guys from No Doubt, and to bestow upon the song’s apparent undecidability some restrictive empirical finality.
One already emerging standard line re “Cool” is that it’s destined to feature in the prom scene of a future Hollywood teen flick (maybe it has already?). But it makes me think more of teen soapie than teen film. For does not “Cool” mimic precisely the basic incestuous plot development of these soapies? Think of the close-knit group of couples whose stormy relationships define the first or second season but must be put aside (or reinitiated only sporadically and usually ill-fatedly) in subsequent seasons in order to keep things interesting. What is “Cool” if not the sound of these characters forced to good-naturedly share a screen for episode after to episode, placidly observing eachother’s new relationships whilst all the time secretly burning with the unfinished business of that initial (usually unfairly foreshortened) first flowering of love? Is it not simply too perfect to imagine the original central couple of a soapie in its 3rd season, attending the final year prom with their new respective partners, only to share a slow, folorn (but resonant with meaning) dance to this song, in tribute to the many, many episodes that have brought them to this moment? As fitting conclusions go it probably still wouldn’t beat Buffy and Angel dancing to The Sundays’ take on “Wild Horses”, but it might come very close.
Thank god you have comments. Allow me to mention the clip to Cool for a moment - how AMAZING is the contrast between old brunette (young, natural, free, running through springtime Europe) Gwen, and the eventual bleached, severe, lady of the Manor that she becomes!
So great that I don't even notice that Gwen's six Japanese "friends" are absent!
I second Guy on the newly-arrived comments box. 'Cool' is the one with the synthesised bells that accompany the vocals all the way through, isn't it? The bells alone put me in mind of 'Hungry Eyes'. Good stuff.
I am listening to "Head Over Heels" by Tears For Fears right now, and it strikes me that there is a certain kind of 80s affect that Gwen is channelling here. I have been thinking about this for ages and plan to post on it soon.
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