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

Amazing music for sure, and Uprising was particularly strong, but the more I read about Bob the less cool he seems to me.

 

When one of the coolest guys on the planet wants to hang with you, you're cool!

 

Coolness by your definition is what young people at any given time of history like.

I don't think that's what cool is, or a useful definition.

 

It's just that some of these people were heavy users, so if they'd survived, they might have wound up being useless junkies eventually. With one obvious exception, not many people recover from being a junkie and return to creativity.
Amy had kicked junk and drank herself to death, I would hope she would have been able to come back to some part of her creativity, she was so damn young.

 

Elvis got old and stopped being cool in the early 70's. By the time of his death, he was often ridiculed for his behavior and appearance. His music wasn't too highly regarded (or even popular) at the end either.

 

"What if nothing in the world was cool?" - Steven Van Zandt

 

Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison

 

Well, Strummer was FIFTY, over a decade older than the OP's cut-off age of 40. That might explain his exclusion from the poll.

 

I actually didn't say anything like that, and I wouldn't agree with that, at least not as an exhaustive definition.

At any rate, nothing I said suggested that simple popularity, whether with younger listeners or not, is what coolness is. And if I were implying that, I would have given a list of currently cool stuff a la Adele, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, Drake, Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, etc.

We do need to be referring to some sort of consensus (otherwise what would we be saying differently than "Hey, I still think that Johnny Mathis is cool" etc.), but I wouldn't say that simple popularity is what it is, or that we have to be talking about a particular demographic. In fact, I specifically made a comment about this earlier that made it clear that it wouldn't just be about one demographic.

 

...depends on what you mean by, 'stayed cool'.......

 

Yeah, by the time of his death, the general impression was that Elvis fans were the sorts of people whom you'd only see emerge from the woodwork at state fairs, say--those sorts of folks where you'd say, "Where are these people the rest of the year? I never see anyone who looks/dresses/has-personal-hygiene etc. like this anywhere but here."

 

I don't know, Bob Marley has essentially been reduced to a caricature in death. I can't imagine his fate would have been better had he lived.

 

Who'd have stayed cool? No one. The baggage of life gets to everyone eventually and these people's lives were lived out in the open. Their reputations would invariably get tarnished as time went on.

OK, maybe two or three of these people would have stayed true to themselves and would've been cool all their lives, but most I think would been found to have had feet of clay, eventually.

 

Jimi.

 

If you base everything on how things were portrayed on TV, sure. Yes, he gained weight and TV comedians ripped him for that, but if that's what you're going to choose to base all perceptions on, I think you're missing a few pieces of the puzzle. I saw him in concert in '76 and it was absolute madness.

 

Eddie Cochran

 

Lol, Jerry Garcia? He ruined his health and looked 80 years old by the time he died at 53. That's hardly "aging well".

 

disagree, there a lot of artists who recovered from heavy drug use to remain artistic

 

I didn't mean in that way.

 

The only one from the list I can’t imagine being uncool is Jim Morrison, because IMO coolness was his main asset. The rest are either not so cool from the beginning, or are capable to hold artistic credibility and to create interesting music outside of the "coolness" frame.

 

I'm a huge Pistols fan but he was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Totally sucked. All image, no talent.

 

But if he expected to live to 100, then it was. Not quite for you or anybody to say.

 

There's a quote where Pete Townshend says he could never see Hendrix selling out.

 

Duane Allman

 

John Lennon for sure!