Wilco on Coolness

Over at NPR I was listening to the Wilco concert from last month's Sasquatch music festival in Washing State, and thoroughly enjoyed this seemingly impromptu soliloquy-of-sorts from band front-man Jeff Tweedy during one of their songs:

"The people that are clapping are the people that we like.

And the people that aren't clapping are the people that are more like me.

Because I wouldn't be clapping. I would be thinking that I was too cool to clap.

And I would be wrong! I would be so wrong.

Don't be like me. Be like the people that we like.

That sounds terrible. It sounds like I don't like myself.

I do! Just not the part of me that doesn't like to clap.

So let's clap. Let's clap together. Let's clap together people. Let's clap together."

Reminds me of a realization I had after high school (thus too late to be of much good), which was that the coolest people are the ones who think least about how cool they might be. I wonder how many good things we refrain from for fear that it might seem cheesy. I say own it. If it is good then clear away the cheese rather than leaving it to the fate of the cheese-balls. Self-consciousness and obsessive self-projection are the modern gods we cast off in freedom.