LOS ANGELES, CA- I first stumbled across Daniel Crook almost by accident.
I had gone to Zebulon to see another band and arrived early enough to catch the tail end of Crook’s set. I didn’t know Daniel. I didn’t know the songs. I just remember being struck by how vulnerable the whole thing felt.
That curiosity eventually took me to The Echo, where I watched Crook command a November residency in 2019, and later to the Silverlake Lounge, where much of the cinematic instrumentation I had associated with his music was stripped away. What remained was something I had probably been responding to from the beginning: an almost uncomfortable earnestness.
A Northern California native who established himself in Los Angeles as a musician, Daniel’s creative life extends beyond music into painting, performance and visual art, often engaging with questions of identity, masculinity, sexuality and the body. Vulnerability has long been embedded in his work.
Recently, Daniel posted a video that caught my attention for many of the same reasons his music originally did. It was impassioned, occasionally confrontational and deeply earnest. His argument is that social media has evolved from a tool through which artists present their work into a lens through which they create it, producing a culture increasingly frightened of sincerity.
He calls it the “panopticon of cool.”
With his permission, I transcribed his remarks and lightly edited them for readability while preserving the substance, language and character of what he said.
His proposition is remarkably simple: Be uncool again.
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In the United States, we’re currently living in what I think is the panopticon of cool.
Sometime during 2020, when we were all retreating to our homes, scared of death and illness and potential futures that we weren’t sure existed anymore, something happened. What I consider to be the most powerful modern weapon was really honed and crafted.
Social media, and the influence that it has over us in our day-to-day lives here in America, changed.
We went from being a society that was very emotional and concerned with the way that systems worked and operated, hopefully to our benefit even though we knew better, to being a public that was afraid of one another in a new way.
Everyone became a narc. We were encouraged to tell on ourselves, to tell on each other. And sometime during that period of quarantine, there was this way of living as an artist that became introduced, which was to create work with the phone.
This had already started. The phone had become our bread and butter as artists and musicians. Even before quarantine, we had started thinking through the lens of the phone and the scope and scale of Instagram.
In 2020, we saw this massive shift where the phone was the only way that people could experience our work, and we adapted.
At some point in that adaptation, we lost a great deal of ourselves, but also of our work.
Thinking through that lens, and thinking through this small scale of approval, changed the way that the arts were experienced in totality, not just outside of the white box, but off the stage as well.
And at some point in 2020, 2021, 2022, you started to see this shift. People had gone through so much. There was this collective trauma. There was a lot of death. There was a lot of fear.
You started to see this preservation of self happening in the arts, where to become too emotional wasn’t necessarily discouraged, but a certain depth of emotion was impossible for us to fully convey because we were still in the thick of this collective trauma, this global trauma.
Things started to have to be topical all the time.
Hashtags had to be topical. Black screens or black boxes on our profiles. Everything was topical. Our activism had to become topical. Every conversation started to have to become topical to what we had seen on the screen, because the screen was our entire life.
But then that just became normal.
As that became more and more normal, you started to see that every conversation you had in public was topical. It was all something that was a parroted statement or a hot-button topic.
I feel like we’ve seen this reflected more and more in the arts, especially in the art that is being made and popularized now.
Within music, it became punk to say less, or say little, or say nothing at all outside of whatever rhymes and works and does well for the algorithm.
Aesthetics also started to become this homogenized, simplified version of this punk ethos, where a lack of skill was punk. There didn’t have to be deeper meaning. That was punk.
But this is not punk.
This is part of what I think is the weapon: to strip the arts as a whole for parts and make it cool.
It’s become so normal now for this cool aesthetic and this cool emptiness to prevail in the public theater, and to become successful, that it’s almost laughable when you are too earnest.
This fear of cringe has just permeated American culture and the American art systems. I don’t think it was by accident. I think it was by design.
I think that to be an earnest artist now is more important than it’s ever been. To make something that’s deeply raw and emotional, regardless of your fear of how it’s perceived or the lack of likes, is even more valuable and even more powerful.
But because we exist in this panopticon, we don’t have that same encouragement that we used to have in the arts to make something deeper, to make something feel more real and visceral, to strip us wide open.
All these terms and these ways of communicating were also weaponized against us.
Saying something like this, there’s a slew of terms that can be hurled against you. It makes you out to be a villain for even conveying that, like, hey, I think that the arts have been stripped for parts and that this lack of depth and this obsession with empty coolness is not your idea.
It was an idea imparted onto you, and you’re doing the devil’s work for them.
I’m at risk of being slandered or being called something, even if I talk about skill or I slander this neo-punk ideology that is being touted as anti-academic, but it is not. There are conversations of class that can happen as a defense of this.
But a lot of the perpetrators of this empty, cool work are fucking upper-middle-class people and nepo babies who are being given these platforms and who are able to pay for the influence that they have on the arts, which I think invalidates their arguments against what I’m saying.
But I feel that the overall message of why I’m even making this video right now is:
Be uncool again.
Be uncool.
Make something that is so unbelievably vulnerable and raw and honest that it’s embarrassing in this particular climate.
Just please.
Outside of America, there’s still so much earnest work being made. And it’s really hard, when you’re so programmed here, to believe that, to see it or to be exposed to it, even when you travel.
Your eyes are fixed. They’re focused to seek out what you think is cool here and to use it on your social media, to share it and to platform yourself with it.
You forget that this is new. This is young. And this is by design.
To hollow us out.
To make it harder for us to express ourselves.
To make it more difficult to have the language to express what’s actually happening inside us and what’s happening around us.
So I guess this is kind of me begging on my hands and knees to the outside world, and to the artists that will see this, and the artists that know me, and the artists that I’m surrounded by, or maybe don’t yet know.
The world has been weaponized.
The world of the arts here has been weaponized against us. And the more that we participate in an attempt to get in the door, and to go to the right party, and to wear the right clothing, and to be so deeply afraid of our debts, this is on purpose.
Fight it.
Be as earnest and embarrassing as you can possibly be.
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The Panopticon of Cool: Crook on Why Artists Need to Be Uncool Again
