Who Would've Stayed Cool Had They Not Died Before Their Time

Alex Chilton would've stayed cool to those that were cool enough to know how cool he was when he was around.

 

Hence why I said "the vast majority" and didn't leave it unqualified.

 

Yes, definitely he's had a comeback on the "coolness" front, but that's a different question, isn't it?

Any one of the people in the list, if they'd remained alive, could have went through a very uncool period and then had a comeback wherein they regain something like the cultural cachet they once had.

 

Miles Davis.

...and going by how Nile Rodgers has remained impressively cool decades since his original success, you'd have to say Bernard Edwards, his partner in the classic Chic line-up.

 

Probably because Elvis didn't have anywhere near the same "cool" stature for well over 10 years when he died, so we already know the answer there.

 

Im gonna go out on a limb and say James Honeyman-Scott. His guitar sound and rhythm were a part of my earlier youth listening to the first two Pretenders albums and on MTV. I liken him to Johnny Marr. Very talented and unmistakable sound. I imagine he would have left Chrissie eventually to be his own artist and in-demand player on other's albums.

 

Miles Davis was 65 when he died. I mean, there's dying before your time and there's dying before your time...

 

Still arguably "before his time", his "three score years and ten".

 

Zappa's sensibilities were very much at odds with the current political climate, which has already pushed him to the fringes (more than he was) as a legacy artist. If he were still around, he'd probably wind up really raked over the coals by those folks.

The more I think about this question in general the more I think there isn't any candidate for a popular musical artist who remains perpetually cool. If nothing else, simply the fact that there's a new generation arising who aren't about to think that their parents are "it" when it comes to coolness will wind up disqualifying any candidate. Older folks like 'em, so they basically become "dad rock" (or some equivalent to it), which means that it loses its coolness.

 

Yes, but who thinks of Miles Davis as someone's whose life was cruelly cut short - he did pretty well to reach 65!

 

Reading the thread title, my immediate reaction was Lennon and Jim Morrison. Then I read the OP's criteria.

After consideration though, I didn't pick Morrison as I think he would've lost his cool factor without serious lifestyle changes.

Went with Hendrix, Buckley and Marley. Thought about Curt Kobain because of the music he made, but I don't know enough about him to say whether or not he was cool.

 

Out of that list, it could only be Ian Curtis

 

Also he gave the impression of being much older than that by the 1970s.

 

I thought that he would be a unanimous choice of the forum, so I left him off. Brian Jones is in the trinity of coolness for sure.

 

Which reminds me of the true answer to this question: JOHN COLTRANE.

 

He was there in my Word document as I was piecing the poll together. I don't know what happened! Sorry.

 

Can't vote: I don't know what to make of the "only 3" logic": it's not about picking your 3 favorites but "who do you think would....?".
You should be able to pick either 1 only, or 8 or more.

 

Agree with your last paragraph for 60/70s (hippies) artists for sure. Hard to see any of them making new music relevant to younger generations.

 

Well, and with people like Cobain, is rock in general at all cool now? I don't think so. The last gasp for rock being cool was probably during the height of popularity of bands like the White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, the Strokes, etc., but we're already well past that. Bands like Radiohead have remained cool by moving away from rock. Their most rock album is considered the uncool one now.

Of course, one thing we're not addressing is "cool to whom"? We could talk about this from the perspective of far more niche audiences, but then we're not going to be listing folks who were ever anywhere near as popular as Kurt Cobain.

 

It probably hasn’t helped Marley’s rep that he became the go to reggae guy for frat bros and prep school lacrosse teams.

 

As I said in the original post, I (perhaps arbitrarily) cut the age off at 40. I knew by doing so that many would want to see Lennon and Elvis on the poll. After all, they did absolutely die before their time, unlike some of the other mentions here of artists who made to 50 and 60. There are a lot of good names here that I left off that meet the criteria of the poll: I can't believe I excluded off Biggy and 2Pac!

 

Yeah, jazz audiences are a lot less fickle, a lot more loyal, and they respect the tradition/history of the genre a lot more than pop audiences. What can be frustrating there, though, is that due to those qualities, there's more grumbling about later developments, and that also makes it more difficult for the genre to survive aside where it doesn't more or less become a museum piece, dedicated to endlessly emulating/recreating the past.

 

Brian Jones

 

Jeff Buckley is my only pick. He seemed doggedly focused on music that mattered to him, his fans' wishes be damned (I remember being frustrated because I wanted another Grace and he was concentrating on Sufi devotional music). He didn't work in the rock industry per se so could have avoided the usual pitfalls. I suspect he would have quit the industry and left a small but tremendous catalog. It didn't hurt that he looked cool, too.

As for Hendrix, I've often thought about this one. Tremendously creative, but could he have kept up the pace? And if not, would that plus his drug use have led him to take on work that was beneath him? Disco and synthesizers were on the horizon, and anyone would have begged to work with him.

 

Nick Drake
Jimi Hendrix
Janis Joplin

I felt compelled to vote for Janis
since she's the only female artist
listed, and she happened to be a
friend of the late Jimmy Carl Black,
who was one of the coolest
human beings to ever live.

Nick was just the epitome of cool,
and Jimi, for all of his known faults,
was in his last weeks a spirit who sought knowledge of true inner peace and I believe he'd have known it, had he lived and gotten away from the dark criminal element orbiting his métier, quit psychedelics, and pursued his interest in jazz-rock. Jimi might still be alive had he not pricked up his ears to the deadly agitprop of the radical left movement.