Merchants of Cool

It's interesting to take the point of view as these "coolhunters" as anthropologists who are looking at the teenage demographic like a wild indiginous culture previously unseen. It's so difficult to step outside of our culture, especially our generation, and look at how money driven, delusional, and frankly psychopathic we are. If you think about the things we truly value, it's mindblowing. Kids now want cell phones before their 10th birthday. Hot Topic continues to make millions. Artists like (hed) p.e. sell records and kids still beg their parents for Happy Meals.

What happened to the youth culture being concerned with sustainability and being able to feed their grandparents? What does it tell us that in our culture, we pay to basically lock elderly people away instead of ensuring their safety and good health? It tells us that our values are seriously out of whack, misconstrued, often just completely wrong and misguided.

When looking at some old photos depicted in the segment, I was struck how everything shown was definitely "not cool." Try to sell rainbor suspenders now, I guarantee you, you'll get laughed at. Rollerblades? Cool in 1994. Not to much now. "Cool" is such an unstable concept. Obviously there is evolution in what is "in vogue" or trendy at the moment, and we see that these types of products as well as channels, songs, hairstyles, etc. can be off the shelves in a day or stay in style for several decades. Not the best example but Led Zeppelin has been cool for forty years and counting.