I always wondered when I’d stop being cool. Qualifier necessary at this point: not that I ever claimed to be cool. I needed to add that, to stop my children from laughing so hard they were in danger of swallowing their tongue or accidentally farting out a strand of their lower intestine. Rectal prolapse. Definitely not cool.
So, yes, it’s official, I am no longer cool. I know this because the 2016 Grammy’s featured almost nobody I knew. Until today, I thought a ‘manika’ was something a gladiator might have worn to bludgeon Christians to death, but now I discover it’s a French word for the feeling a parent gets when their daughters publicly humiliate them. Likewise, I thought ‘Dencia’ was a brand of incontinence pad popular with older women in the 1970’s, but apparently it now describes what happens to a Lhasa Apso if you leave it out in the rain. “Tove Lo!” used to be what you blurt when somebody much more attractive than you unexpectedly asks you out for coffee, but nowadays it refers to that mutually embarrassing moment when somebody points out you have something yuck hanging from your nose. Z-Lala makes no sense unless you speak the Khoisan click-language, in which case it means “beware the meerkat, for he is a cunning adversary”, but it also happens to be a safeword commonly used in the BDSM community. So I’m told. Not that I know anything about that. The Weeknd should have got a Grammy for ‘Most Auto-Corrected Stage Name Ever’ but instead was handed a rather attractive woman who was wearing her blouse back-to-front. I imagine for twenty minutes or so he was The Long Weeknd, if you know what I mean.
Anyhoo, further evidence that I have totally lost my mojo lies in the short list of names I did recognise at the Grammy’s. Justin Bieber, shave that disgusting blonde worm off your face before it attacks your little brother Potsdam or Flotsam or whatever the little punch-worthy brat’s name is! I couldn’t belieber it. And Lady Gaga, dude, enough already. Good to see Adele so proud of her body that she’s lost at least fifteen kilos since her last Grammy appearance, and cadaverous James Bay seemed to be lurking for no better reason than to be on standby-by in case somebody choked on an olive and had to be transported to the morgue. I didn’t know Skrillex was still in high school, but then again, I also didn’t know that Caley Cuoco was a singer, but apparently so is Selena Gomez, so there goes my credibility! Sheesh. But at least we now know for sure that Taylor Swift is colour-blind. That said (given Taylor’s fondness for litigation) I still think her album ‘1998’ is the greatest. Even cooler than ABBA ‘Arrival’ and that is saying something, right? Am I right? Of course I’m right. I’d love to see Taylor do a cover of Super Trooper. That would be awesome. And cool.
But then The Hollywood Vampires were mentioned and I got nervous. Something about these guys reminds me of three guys I used to see on television about forty years ago, only these guys are much uglier. I thought for a second somebody was going to bite the head off a chicken or attack somebody with a huge pair of bloodstained scissors, so I abandoned the Grammy’s and any pretence of coolness. I’ll just keep listening to what I like, and forget about the whole “I’m cool because I saw Tame Impala in concert at Sao Paulo” thing–the whole, “I was so close to the stage I upskirted Alicia Bognanno” thing. Not washing for a month because you got spattered by Hayley William’s sweat at the Paramore concert does not coolness make. Just take a shower, that’s disgusting. So to all the uncool dads, uncool husbands, uncool sons out there, I salute you. Wear your Coldplay t-shirt with pride.