The Death of Cool/The Poverty of the Take/The Verfremdungseffekt of Tucker Carlson
Three Essays on 'Provocation' (more or less)
(Notes on) The Death of Cool (2025)
There’s a small genre of essay that deals with the idea that cool or coolness as a cultural category went extinct at some point in recent decades. Music and general culture critic Ted Gioia published a book to this effect in 2009, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool,1 and brought up the theme again earlier this year on his substack. The post is pay-walled so I couldn’t read the essay in its entirety, but it seems to contextualise the decline of coolness within analysis of certain meta-cultural moods; a homology is alluded to between coolness as an emotional disposition, and the perhaps less definable cultural category of coolness, which, as per Gioia’s 2009 book, seems most associated with western music from the second half of the 20th Century.
The disappearance of coolness seemed to coincide with the disappearance of the phenomena and idiom of “selling out.” Christian Lorentzen wrote on this a couple of years ago, but there’s only one paragraph before the paywall (I even tried to claim a “free post,” but this resulted in an alienating QR-hieroglyph).2 The Lorentzen essay links to writing by Dan Brooks from the same year about how “selling out” became historically defunct. He implies that as the selling of music moved from a less, to an increasingly more exact science via digital distribution, the industrial practice of “discovering” “underground” music for the sake of mass-commercialization faded in favour of the more ruthless market fundamentalism and Minority Report-esque pre-emption that’s defined '“popular music” for a long time now, and which Richard Grusin has claimed as a generalised condition of contemporary media. In both the Brooks and Lorentzen texts, Nirvana symbolise the lost ontological possibility of “selling out,” with Nirvana particularly useful and difficult as an example precisely because the question of whether they did or did not (sell out), whether suicide annulled the paper work;3 these remain open theological questions, or would have, had music remained a religion.
This raises the question of how “selling out” and its death relates to the same questions with respect to “coolness.” A thesis shot-from-the-hip: coolness functioned like the Heideggerian being-towards-death, the horizon of death replaced with, or symbolised by, the horizon of selling-out. Just as a “being” is only alive in as far as it can and will die, bands were only cool in relation to the possibility of selling-out, of losing their authenticity, by choice, as tragedy. Coolness no longer exists because that horizon has been abolished: the mainstream is generated by AI, not “discovered” from the “underground.” This means that everything other than the five things produced by the mainstream are “underground”, but for the “underground” there is no being-towards-selling-out. Punk bands used to come from the underground and then commercialize. All recently punk-branded mainstream music is from its onset a part of a BlackRock revitalization of MKUltra psychological torture programs to subliminally convince people that it’s fine if McDonalds increases its use of Styrofoam as an ingredient by 37%. The closest thing to selling out in recent years was the appearance of Death Grips in a photo with Beyonce. The “underground” is everything and everyone other than Beyonce Swift x Lil Gucci Pedophile, but even music itself is being displaced by the Culture Industry dimension of Skynet in favour of vertical videos of teenagers running over snails with motorbikes. Music is too intellectual. It soon might be a thing of the past not just to sell “out,” but for music to be “sold” at all.
The Poverty of the Take (2005)
I’ve written “takes.” This is to say that when we’re are commissioned to write for pay—regardless of whether this writing is framed as an article, essay, or piece of criticism—what can often be expected, explicitly or not, is a “take.” What is a take? On the surface it tends to mean something like argument or opinion. While takes involve argument and opinion, I’d like to argue here that the take is not simply a synonym for these terms, but is rather an historically specific form of communication.4
On an immediate level, this specificity is tied to the high-speed internet culture of the 2010s onwards.5 But to reduce the take to the context of the internet would be to suppress its deeper lineage to what is by now centuries of cultural industrialisation. Without invoking any kind of Frankfurt School 101 proselytization, I feel comfortable writing that the culture industry in which takes are written, made, or given, is one with a gravitational pull towards simplicity and ever increasingly, the short-shallow form.6 For those of us who thought the essay was that thing Michel de Montaigne did, the economy of take can be somewhat deflating.
The take is commonly known beside several modifying adjectives: the hot take, and the fresh take, for instance. As a term, the hot take helpfully makes apparent for us the fact that takes, like food, are only ephemerally useful to us; they grow cold. All takes are fundamentally hot takes, but sometimes its worth reiterating, as a branding exercise, that the take in question is losing its warmth by the minute. If you thought that writing was supposed to touch on the universal, even when dealing with particulars, you were wrong: writing is supposed to go off like milk. The fresh dimension of the fresh take is, with some minor confusion, not a food metaphor, but more an atmospheric reference; to shift metaphor, a deformed bastard child of cool. For a take to be fresh, it normally means that the person applying the term has never come across the idea in question before. This tends to be because the person doesn’t read anything despite private education and is thus unaware of how fresh things were back in the 18th Century, the Middle Ages, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, or wherever else people once thought about perennial ideas. Still, few of us want all essays to read like Derrida riffing on Apartheid. To write clear and accessible messages, clear arguments, in economical word counts, is good—just so long as this doesn’t come at the expensive of more difficult literature to be written, and read, elsewhere—which it certainly doesn’t have to.7 But this raises the fact that the take is not reducible to a technical definition based on brevity: the take is inseparable from, yet not entirely reduceable to, a purely technological (internet-inflected) understanding of contemporary writing. The take is not simply short-form, clearly argued, accessible writing. It is not interchangeable with journalism.8 The take could fundamentally be understood as a statement made below a certain threshold of profundity. At its worst, the take is a bizarre kind of conceptual minimalism and extreme rigidity which aims to say nothing, at all costs, beyond what can be summarised by a heading and subheading, or what can be abridged in a sentence. This applies for all genres of take, including the take in the mode of interpretation; a take on Shakespeare (Macbeth set in Argentina), a take on the serial killer trope (the serial killer had a difficult childhood). Instead of critiquing, reading, we’re expected to take. The take can be even more reductive than AI-generated text, as it never hallucinates. The take comes from the same positivist idiot culture as the “elevator pitch” and the variously misattributed (to inspirational corny idiots like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman) and bizarrely misogynistic quote, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” (Just as Morrisey sung that Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers, the intelligence of grandmothers is not universal).
The take is also a matter of tone. There are two major tones of the take that I’m aware of: serious, and (supposedly) comedic, something like a Sock and Buskin Tragedy and Comedy. The serious take channels Ben Shapiro. It is serious and not (intentionally) funny. It stares at the camera. It cares about what’s written in the comments. The comedy side of the take is not funny. Its humour is a cross between SNL and middleclass English gameshow “banter.” The take has evolved out of what we might refer to as a “culture of provocation” (perhaps a subset of that other famed culture of…). The culture of provocation is often spoken of in terms of macro culture war tendencies towards polarisation. But even beyond the most obvious and banal provocations, the take always has in its chemistry, the key compound of provocation.
Provocation is a form, or mode, of criticism. It’s a critique in which the persona of the critic is typically manifest, performatively. The take is a form of provocation expressed in written or spoken language. Takes are often organised by crude good versus bad value (or rather, often, moral) judgements. This is not to say that our critique of the take should result in refusal to judge things as good or bad. But, for aesthetic criticism, even the most wholeheartedly positive or negative judgements of value will not conform to the parameters of the take, if such criticism itself can be valued as art. The headline, sentence-long, depthless judgement expressed by the take, is intended to provoke; its expression is composed for the sake of provocation. The poverty of the take is not in fact that it’s intellectually vapid, but rather that this vapidity is in fact weaponised for the sake of provocation: takes are often intentionally depthless, at least on the level of subconscious intention, in order to provoke the intended negative audience. Complexity is insufficiently provocative to the dopamine fiend. Art can/should provoke, but unfortunately, to get to such a state that a formal manouvre in a novel, poem, painting or building might provoke one on an aesthetic level is to live in a state of relative experiential and (now likely self-driven) educational luxury.9
For the chimpanzee brain, the take is a lot more provocative than art. One thing that seems to make the chimps throw shit more than normal is the contrarian take. If the typical formula for a hot and/or fresh take is that X person/artwork/phenomena is good/bad, the contrarian formula is that X person/artwork/phenomena is good/bad but this is because of Y counterintuitive reasoning. Some contrarian takes for the next ten years: a) Why the Left should vote for J.D. Vance b) Why the Right should vote for AOC c) Why a Nuclear War with China will save lives. This is obviously not to say that contrarianism or heterodoxy are inherently bad. But when encouraged by formulas, anything potentially authentic can turn into a conveyer-belt product just as quickly as the homogenous normie takes that such takes supposedly counter.10
To write in the 21st Century should not be to work in the take sweatshop, to produce an ostensibly “literary” equivalent of social media demagoguery. AI is entirely capable of delivering this labour. Criticism, whether focused on literature, art, film, or architecture, as well as social and political criticism, when written as an art-form in-itself, does not conform to the contours of the take, even when writing on the internet, in the short-form. We don’t need to sacrifice clarity, nor complexity. We live in a world of takes, but like Oscar Schindler,11 we need to do what we can to survive, and try to keep literature alive in the process, and to produce criticism-as-literature.
The Verfremdungseffekt of Tucker Carlson (or 'Tucker Carlson's Dialectical Cabin Theatre') (2024)
Australian art critic Robert Hughes’ eight-part documentary series and accompanying book, The Shock of the New, hints with the word “shock” at the relevance of provocation to the industrial-to-post-industrial century of art framed from 1880 until the series release and book’s publication in 1980. The era in which we live is not one where anyone’s likely to be provoked by suggestion that a urinal might be a sculptural art object, or that a black or white square might make for a profound painting. Other forms of artistic provocation have been defunded: Todd Solondz can’t get films funded these days, nor could David Lynch even before becoming dead; a contemporary Pasolini would have even less luck. This culture—in which there’s next-to-no likelihood of being provoked by the form of a painting, sculpture, film, novel, poem, or piece of architecture—is one in which provocation tends to be of an obvious polemical nature.12 Polemical provocation has become a dominant supposed artform for a culture in which everything is didactic or is interpreted didactically, where culture itself tends towards a form of cultural criticism, however poor.
Any real political programme will inevitably prove provocative to some, but the artist-provocateur provokes for the sake of provocation. Politics is not its game, nor its end, though political polemics, at this stage of culture, prove most provocative, so long as they disregard bread-and-butter politics, which prove insufficiently inflammatory. Kant wrote in The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 that “Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.” Perhaps this is the age, or culture, of provocation, for which internet is a natural environment.
One problem of a culture in which polemical provocation (which is to say supposedly political provocation) is its primary artform, is an assumption that all artists are politicians, that their work is the stuff of politics. The truth is that avant-gardism—or anything invoking its spirit—is not of much use or relevance to political mass movements in-themselves. This diagnosis has been made a number of times recently, and was obviously argued by Clement Greenberg in his (again recently popular) 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ via which we could think of pure provocation, or provocation for provocation’s sake, as the “medium-specific” approach of contemporary artist-provocateurs; our edgelord-avant-gardists and transgressives (transgression = provocation in the register of morality).
Like most controversial, polarising, provocative figures, Tucker Carlson has been named many things: a populist, horseshoe syncretist, fascist, Nazi, socialist, neoliberal, neocon, MAGA-communist, anti-semite, etc. This long list of labels speaks to Tucker’s possession of an often important artistic trait: political ambiguity, agnosticism or even incoherence; an increasing attention deficit to the boring unaesthetic realities of actual politics (refer for example to Tucker’s episode with Larry Sinclair, self-declared Obama boyfriend). Tucker’s career is long and varied, but he has always been a writer, an artist at heart. Cabin-era Tucker is primarily an artist provocateur, for whom artistic provocation is more important than politics.
Brechtian, like Kafkaesque and Lynchian, is thrown around often. If the colloquial Kafkaesque simply means a kind of bureaucratic alienation, Lynchian equating a deadpan American dream-logic, then the colloquial Brechtian label often refers to anything—typically in film or television nowadays—that engages in meta-reference to itself as an artistic construction. This shorthand use of “Brechtian” tends to make it functionally, ahistorically and annoyingly, synonymous with terms like postmodern, meta, and metamodern. This use of Brechtian refers to Brecht's alienation effect (verfremdungseffekt/V-effekt); a socialist modernist avant-garde technique for destroying the illusions of bourgeois theatre and its opiate forms like melodrama and Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk. The alienation effect of what Brecht would later refer to as his dialectical theatre was theoretically supposed to antagonise, provoke, not mystify or entertain. The tendency for the term Brechtian to be trans-historicised beyond Brecht's particular historical frame might have less to do with a low-level of common literacy of early-to-mid 20th Century Marxist debates in aesthetics and more to do with the fact that the alienation effect—as with a variety of other once-avant-garde modernist techniques—were long ago incorporated however crudely into various grades of popular culture (stirring terms like “Vulgar Modernism”). This leads to a situation in which Brecht, like Kafka, is both everywhere and nowhere. This makes the label of Brechtian both tantalisingly easy and frustratingly difficult.
Nevertheless, Tucker Carlson might fit the bill.
Since leaving Fox in 2023, Carlson’s DIY media has operated from converted barn in Maine, a place of 90% forestry, its interior wood fit-out signifying a rural hunting cabin and an atmosphere of culture war traditionalism (or trad-ism) and light-ludditism. The banner image of @TuckerCarlson on YouTube is a landscape panorama in which Tucker is portrayed from the back as fishing in a stream of seemingly rapid-running water, heavily grassed, with a healthy line of trees and then mountains in the background. The cabin is an upscaled version of the Fox-era set of Tucker Carlson Today, which was roasted in The Atlantic (boring publication) in a 2021 article by Megan Garber called ‘Tucker Carlson’s Manufactured America.’ Garber describes Tucker’s cabin as a “Foxified version of Frontierland” and the article’s illustration emphasises a harsh juxtaposition between Tucker at a log news desk, backgrounded by a taxidermized moose head and windowed depiction of a mountainous American landscape idyll—the image is foregrounded by dark silhouettes of the newsroom’s technical apparatus and its anonymous operators. The cabin of Tucker’s post-Fox YouTube broadcasts could be described as a more intense commitment to this quaint-conservative aesthetic, the culminative point of his evolution from early 2000s neoliberal neoconservatism to associations of MAGA-era isolationist economic nationalism, a transformation personifying the GOP’s early 21st Century Trump-charged re-brand. Instead of sitting at a news desk he is fully immersed in an installation featuring views out the window to real life trees and running water.
Tucker’s cabin connotes both sanctuary and insurrection. Obvious reference to Ted Kaczynski’s Cabin, alluded to by Lex Friedman in his interview of Tucker (responded to by Tucker’s partial admiration of Kaczynski) reveals the short-circuit between Heideggerian forest dwelling and the potential for high-tech political violence. The cabin is reminiscent of the Brechtian scenography of Lars Von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville, a particularly dark portrait of American civilisation, and Tucker has had his own highly (likely overly) publicised problems with who Trier called the “rat king” in the past.
Tucker’s aesthetic needs to be understood in relation to Cottagecore, both of which frame bucolic life in contrast to hyper-globalised urban and suburban existence. r/cottagecore, which has close to 200,000 members at the time of writing this (and is therefore in the top 1% of Reddit ranked by size) describes itself as, "...your grandma, but like, hip. Cottagecore is an aesthetic depicting a simple, romanticised life in nature. It features themes of farm animals, earthy tones, soft illustrations, and more." The first line of this description already gives away that Cottagecore is a kind of quaint hipsterism, primarily feminine, yet also pervasively liberal-coded. Cottagecore might exist in a Venn diagram overlapping with the “Trad Wife” aesthetic phenomenon, but Cottagecore does not in-itself advocate conservative culture war positions on gender roles. The Good Trade further defines Cottagecore in relation to its life on social media:
Cottagecore is an aesthetic that celebrates simple living, particularly in the countryside. It encourages a lifestyle rooted in traditional skills — like baking bread, gardening, and sewing your own clothes. On the internet, this trend is celebrated most often on social media and blogging platforms — notably TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr, where it first gained momentum in 2017.
This above quoted article—‘29 Cottagecore Fashion Brands to Get in on Those Pastoral Vibes’—further illustrates a liberal-coding of Cottagecore: BIPOC models are highly representative of the 29 Instagrams curated by the article, and more than one makes note of philanthropic support for Ukraine.
What does this overlap of the liberal kitsch of Cottagecore and of Brechtian Tuckercore suggest? That liberalism can harbor reactionary anti-modern, anti-enlightenment sympathies, and/or that both contain desires for a more liberated experience, which contemporary cosmopolitan space can no longer symbolise? Cottagecore was unsurprisingly popular during the COVID-19 Pandemic, during which time, the near-total austerity of public space may have led some to realise that even under “normal” conditions, public space has been decimated. Cottagecore may be less (an obviously fake) image of artisanal pre-capitalism, but simply one in which capitalism is less seen in general, or perhaps its an image of a foreign planet in which BIPOC models weave baskets in fields with untainted self-sufficiency.
The desire for “pastoral vibes” reflects a very basic longing for life and work without alienation. In aesthetic terms, this translates unsurprisingly into a fetish for the outdoors and for minimal architectural interventions therein, in contradistinction to the urban corporate mass-culture of the digital age. In the newsroom, this translates into the difference between, for the normie news-teller: a windowless interior of baroque digital back ornament via massive mosaic flat or curved screens, numerous logos, and news desks often branded with text, with generally sleek, reflective top finishes—and for Tucker Carlson, in an interview with Mike Rowe about Artificial Intelligence, for instance: a dog-bone shaped (and textured) ironwood desk of indeterminate old age, sitting on a rug, surrounded by wood finishes (triggering reference to Tucker’s unironic, cute love for liberal Julia Butterfly Hill) and several windows framing trees outside beyond the cabin, between which are framed photos and texts, and wooden cabinetry. A larger room in the set is organised around a wooden table seating eight chairs with antique candles on its top beneath a chandelier of antlers, fixed shelving made from the same timber as the rooms wall cladding and doors, an American flag in one corner of the room, and a framed Soviet “Ne Boltai” poster above the bookshelf. Tucker’s art is not the anti-theatrical, actually-political no-nonsense socially conservative New Dealism of Sohrab Ahmari, nor is it the typically policy-less melodramatic entertainment of Alex Jones, whose media aesthetics are entirely conventional, thwarted only Jones’ (once) impressive performativity (early cable access Alex Jones was a different story—a media installation invoking the work of late artist Mike Kelley). Tucker’s cabin is aesthetically unique compared to his colleagues and competitors beyond Jones. Candace Owens presents with an Airbnb (or “Airspace”) aesthetic. Russel Brand’s is similar to Candace’s though it’s kitschier and somewhat Nickoleodeon-esque. Ben Shapiro speaks from a humourless, stern domestic environment. Most “independent” media pundits tend to want to convey a sense of professional legitimacy. Piers Morgan’s migration to YouTube for example did not alter his newsroom aesthetic, which still gets to convey the institutional seriousness and credibility of mainstream media while simultaneously denouncing its censorious nature. British socialist George Galloway similarly constructs a “real newsroom” atmosphere on his YouTube channel but with a much smaller budget than Morgan (on whose show he has appeared). All of these pundits engage in a form of realism which Tucker’s Brechtian cabin approach rejects. It embraces visual dissonance in a way unlike any aforementioned figure, all of whom critique mainstream media in favour of an ideological alternative, in favour of a difference in content but not in form. Tucker’s cabin, more than any of these competitors, critiques the contemporary media-in-itself, and this is part of what makes his show so strange aesthetically. Tucker Carlson's show is alienating. He can be an alienating person, regardless of whether you like him or not. He has a strange voice (as did B. Brecht) and stranger laugh. He tends to either looks too serious or too happy. The standard news-teller naturalises their media setting. Tucker’s Brechtianism de-naturalises media-production. He shows that his news is theatre, but so too is the news in general.
Tucker’s provocations to contemporary liberalism are obvious, but this Brechtian nature of his cabin mise en scène also makes a joke of the Rightwing rural idyll. As the list of labels thrown at him suggests, there are plenty of times Tucker has provoked conservatism. Beyond the out of-fashion Republican neocons or “RHINOs,” to whom he long ago belonged in bowtie, Tucker’s provocations against Israel are hardly the kind one would hear publicly from Donald Trump or J.D. Vance. His apparent anti-Churchillian sympathies (or provocative lack of critique of such sympathies as expressed by guests) would alienate any British conservative, and the international Right hardly maintains a unified Tuckerist position on Ukraine and Russia. Tucker seems to have no idea whether he loves or hates the “free market.” Tucker is proudly unbeholden to any variety establishment orthodoxy (will he support the crusade to turn Iran into a Starbucks?), and might do well to quote Picasso’s line that art’s a lie that tells the truth.
This culture of provocation—of the aestheticization of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics—is one in which Piers Morgan hosted debates over the casting of Disney cartoons are considered matters of politics, a condition in which all culture is treated like Le Père Duchesne; its creators plotting violent upheaval like Jacques Hébert. The truth is that with regards to Trump and Vance—or any other political formation to which he might align in future—Tucker's Brechtian Cottagecore makes his relation to theirs more like that of El Lissitzky to Lenin, Marinetti to Mussolini, or Hunter S. Thompson to Jimmy Carter. This is not to say that Carlson is without influence, but the nature of his provocation should be understood for what it is, and the nature of politics should be understood as separate to the nature of provocation in and for itself.
The Death of Cool also titled a memoir by Gavin McInnes a few years later.
leading to compulsory CIA acquisition of bone-marrow.
Would a non-suicided Cobain have eventually converted to Scientology and started making fedora ska music?
This essay might be labelled, pejoratively or not, as a take on takes, a meta-take, an anti-take, etc. As argumentation proceeds, I hopefully demonstrate that the “threshold of profundity”—that I claim separates the take from any and all forms of writing which are intellectually and aesthetically superior to the take—has been surpassed, if not by all that many vertical miles.
In 2005 internet speeds averaged 1 megabits per second, or 20 times dialup speed, compared to 10 megabits per second by the early 2010s with the rise of the iPhone.
The take has a number of perhaps equally ideal mediums: the YouTube video, the tweet, and the short article, essay, or review.
I’d be skeptical of any argument that qualitative illiteracy functions anything like a zero-sum game between a high and low culture of reading: those who’ve been conditioned to find reading anything beyond several linear sentences at once as something like having one’s eyes exposed to overly-chlorinated pool water are not going to choose to read Harry Potter over a Wallace Stevens collection: they’re going to watch Harry Potter, halfheartedly, while also watching several dozen other videos on their phone.
I.e. we can still write and distribute literature on the internet.
A couple of millennia ago, the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus played with provocation artistically: often crass, revolting content festered in direct, exquisite, ironic tension with the elegance of its language in the form of metrical composition. Expressed as a take, the poem ‘Catullus 16’ is: Furius and Aurelius are gayer than Catullus. In the absence of poetry, many contemporary takes deal similarly with who is fascister or more anti-semiter, who is more freedom of speecher or eliter, corrupter, predator, woker, etc.
The take has thrived in an apparently hyper-politicised culture, or at least, a culture in which aesthetics and politics have been made indistinguishable (thought about now for one hundred years).
I’m conscious here of the Reductio ad Hitlerum folly. Nevertheless, I’m yet to come up with a superior figure for this metaphorical service, and so I continue to enlist Oscar Schindler.
Kanye West’s music in-itself, formally, provokes no one.