New Year's Day – when many of us wake up to a day already slightly past its prime. The sun, high up in the sky by the time we rise, looks with a sense of deep irony on our resolutions and good intentions which still smell of last night's delights.
Half-woken, I sipped my decaff to the sounds and sights of the Rose Parade - a phenomenon I was not aware of until then, and which almost brought a tear to my eyes. From our living room sofa, stretched before our flat screen and covered with a warm blanket - Christmas gift from mother-in-law - I was transported to California. I reflected deeply on the metaphysical, philosophical, and botanical wisdom of parades, but mostly on the thousands of young people who enthusiastically took part in this one. My thoughts were: what could possibly have enticed these teenagers to dress up in costumes which were hardly cool or sexy, and march, various musical instruments and other suitable objects in hand? This was so not u-tube, facebook, or twitter-worthy, so not Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana!
Up to this point, I had a very clear image of an American teenager in mind (don’t we all?) – a vision split between two very distinct heads of a hydra. One: low-cut jean-wearing, exploring a slight bit of a toned, tanned midriff, exhibiting an ‘I just got out of bed but cannot help looking gorgeous’ outlook on life. The other: also wearing low-cut jeans but for different reasons altogether, hamburger and fry-munching individual with shiny, streaky hair and a facial expression calling for help. One could even add another, much less significant in size ‘head’: large glasses, bad haircut, a large doze of social awkwardness, a PhD-level knowledge of major computer games, a slightly grey ‘computer tan’ complexion, in other words – a nerd. These three, on the surface so different, types have one crucial thing in common. It is being cool, aspiring to be cool, doing nothing that could even remotely be accused of not being cool.
Watching the Rose Parade, I realized that somewhere between Glee, Superbad and my memories of Beverly Hills 90210, I missed something. Who were these young people I was watching, in their hundreds, playing in marching bands or otherwise parading down the sunny California street? Why were they there?
The history of the event is long, perhaps as long as the Parade itself (it takes hours for all the participants to parade down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard). Sometime in the 1890s very distinguished citizens of Pasadena decided that they ought to show off their own little paradise, their 'Mediterranean of the West,' to the folks from the East Coast. So they invited them over for fun and games, and a parade showcasing the region's beautiful flowers. Of course, the flowers were meant to make the New Yorkers arriving from snow-covered metropolis sick with jealousy. It was January after all. And the success was overwhelming.
Since then, the Parade is organized once a year and now it is a major media event - would it be too much to say that it equals some of the key college football games? Probably yes, but it is big nevertheless. People all around the country are having their first, and second, coffee of the New Year to it.
I think it is difficult for Europeans to understand the enormity, the pomposity, the variety, the monumental impressiveness of this parade. Perhaps one might compare it to the Queen's Jubilee, or the Bastille Day Parade. For me - a Pole who grew up in the socialist system - all the May Day parades come to mind, albeit for obvious reasons the mood in Pasadena is less, ... well, artificially joyful.
But the Rose Parade is so much more than this, and in fact it is so much more than roses.
First of all, there are the floats. They call for a longer story, which you will not find here: they are gardens, homes, toys, and often all these together in supernatural sizes, built out of flowers and some popular foods like corn, on wheels. They are built by volunteers or simply float-building companies using countless hours of hard work. They are built by charities, towns, hospitals, big and small businesses. They compete in a beauty contest under a whole number of interesting categories.
But even more impressive than the floats are the marching bands, if only because of the young people I am reflecting about. They march and strike various poses in perfect harmony, in the rhythm of the tunes they play, and pretty well too.
The bands come from various corners of the States, and are mostly school or college bands. Many consist of more than 100 musicians, some have a good few hundred members. All of them young, dressed in old-fashioned costumes which remind me of, well, uniforms. Here goes the North Carolina University Marching Sound Machine (a band with an over 70 years’ history), all dressed in red and white, straight up, proud and smiling; then there is the Southwest DeKalb High School Marching Panther Band (from Decatur, in Georgia), dressed in blue and yellow, and just as impressive; or the Spirit of St. Louis Marching Band – at least a hundred of them dressed in black and dark green. And there were so many more…
Old-fashioned uniforms? And they volunteer to play part in this Parade? I’ve been hit by a disconcerting thought that my comfortable set of stereotypes has just fallen like a house of cards. This called for an answer, a solution, and hopefully a new comfortable set of stereotypes. All things and people ought to fit snugly into categories if one is to retain one’s sanity, right? Where and how do I catalogue them, though? These were hundreds of teenagers for whom ‘cool’ was irrelevant. Or perhaps I should revisit ‘cool’. Did they redefine ‘cool’?
Searching for the meaning of ‘cool’ is a somewhat vain exercise – with a far from certain ‘do I qualify?’ somewhere at the back of our minds. Although, to quote Homer Simpson, “if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool” (from episode: ‘Homerpalooza’).
Each historical point in time has its own ‘cool’. Academics who analyse the concept even drew a time-map of what was cool, and where, since about 1500s (they call it the ‘Cool Timeline’). According to Dick Pountain and David Robins who drew this Timeline, what is cool right now in the Americas and Europe are Dance/Techno and Hip Hop. Rather than merely styles of music, these two are cultural, philosophic youth movements. They allow those who wish to express themselves to do so through the attitudes, ideas, clothes and haircuts. The things they say and sing are cool, so are things they smoke, drink, and tweet about.
The bands marching in the Rose Parade might have been playing Dance or Hip-Hop music. Some actually did just that, but there was something crucial missing. There is another important thing about being ‘cool’. What is ‘cool’ at a particular time is slightly out of the ordinary, beyond the generally accepted, somewhat distant and out of reach, non-conformist. But the young people I saw in the Rose Parade were certainly quite ordinary, and I could almost imagine the establishment, sitting comfortably in their dark leather armchairs, nodding and singing to the tunes they played. These were thousands of young people who were not well dressed. Many of them were also not very attractive. There was nothing disconcerting, gripping, intriguing about them. Instead of the casual and slightly dissatisfied attitude typical for cool teenagers, they were happy to be where they were. They were not cool and they did not care.
Interestingly, the longer I live here in America, the more I see the presence of these bands in community and cultural life. Take college football games as an example. Don’t understand the fuss? Just check a few U-Tube videos of such games. And remember when you observe stadiums capable of containing one hundred thousand people (and full to the brim) – these are games played by two amateur school-kid teams! Even Stephen Fry, who is not known for being overly emotional, was reduced to tears when witnessing one such game. Important games very often start with, among other attractions, a band or two. This is another side of American pop culture – something Europeans certainly do not appreciate.
So – back to the bands and the uncool teenagers. Perhaps the uncool is the new cool? As in all my other experiences and reflections since I became an adopted American – the more I see, the less I seem to know.
