Deep Cuts: Kate Fagan’s “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” is the epitome of American postpunk.
Adela Teubner · July 20 2017
When you search ‘Kate Fagan’ on Google, the entirety of the first several pages are full of results pertaining to an ESPN sportswriter - and when you add ‘music’ to this, these refer to a Sydney-based folk singer/poet. In fact, in order to find any information whatsoever pertaining to the creator of the above record, I had to weave my way through a veritable maze of links and search suggestions related to the above song - and even then, all I could still find were a several short-ish reviews of the EP on which the above song is housed, a bio written by her record company on her Bandcamp page, and a four-sentence long entry on punkdatabase.com. When you can, despite the fact that we are living in the Age of the Internet, barely find any information on an artist and the four solo songs they released - now that, my readers, is a true deep cut!
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” is the titular song of an EP Fagan released in 1980. It kind of sums up everything about East Coast American postpunk in the late 1970s - where its British equivalent (which I also hold a deep appreciation for, albeit in an entirely different way), save for your Siouxsies and your Ian Curtises, steered closer toward poppier subject matter and melodic elements than its predecessor, the East Coast Americans swerved in an even weirder, ‘DIY’, and more experimental direction than what went before! (Then there’s everything that went down on the West Coast... Let’s save that for another day...) Fagan’s EP is distinctly homemade and defiantly quirky in a way that much of the CBGB scene was not.
On her Bandcamp bio, Fagan says that she composed the song intuitively after buying a bass guitar that she didn’t know how to play properly. This is fairly obvious when one considers its musical elements - there’s literally one drum pattern throughout the entire song, the presence of chords is largely replaced by a repetitive bass riff - but it is this that makes the song so good. I’m reminded of a quote from 20th Century Women, one of my favourite movies of late, where one character explains the abrasiveness of postpunk to another, who wonders why they can’t just sound “pretty”: “It’s like they’ve got this feeling, and they don’t have any skill, and they don’t want skill, because it’s really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that’s raw. Isn’t it great?” Fagan’s lack of technical skill results in her ability and freedom to create ideas that most of those trained in the diatribes of traditional musicality would be incapable of - she isn’t constrained by what they have been taught is “correct.” The ideas she comes up with are too delightfully bizarre and simple (less really is more!) to be conventional, this spawning all sorts of originality and interestingness... While this philosophy was behind much of punk also, it was only within this particular dialect of postpunk - almost entirely created by assorted visual artists, or people just generally looking for a way in which to express their deepest emotions, with very little both prior musical experience and input from larger labels and companies external to the scene - that it found its truest form. Let us also consider the fact that Fagan paid for a pressing of the EP entirely out of her own pocket, and that its cover could easily have been shot and printed on low budget by an artistically-inclined friend. If “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool”, in all of its DIY, unconventional glory, isn’t among the best representations of this ethos, then I don’t know what is! (May I also mention just how well its musical elements works - repetition equals instant catchiness, after all, and that drum beat is just so danceable... It’s such a well-executed song!)
Fagan’s Bandcamp bio also explains the genesis of “Too Cool”’s lyrics. She explains that she wrote the song following a move from New York to Chicago in the late 70s, after becoming fed up with the growing elitism and exclusiveness of the former’s alternative scene in relation to the increase in of what she terms “the whole Studio 54/red rope thing”. She further remembers that she fell in love with the Chicago scene, it being more inclusive and in line with the ideas that originally defined its NY counterpart - but she soon began to see some of the “divisive hipster culture” (as she calls it) that ruined the NY scene begin to seep in, the song being her reaction against this. I know it’s become such a cliche to suggest that “*insert older piece of art here* is still relevant,” but “Too Cool” really is - incessant gentrification, and a definition of “cool” so constantly changeable and frequently absorbed into the mainstream lexicon that it’s impossible to keep up, things that still threaten to destroy the current incarnations of the scenes Fagan involved herself in, immediately sprung to mind as I read her explanation of the song. “Too Cool” is a reminder that the easiest way to be “cool” is not to try to keep ahead of the endless stream of trends, not to look down upon those from over the top of your sunglasses - but to simply be yourself. (Cliches seem to be among this post’s motifs!) This, again, perfectly evokes everything that was behind postpunk - the idea that you could do whatever you wanted to do, that you would be accepted no matter how impenetrable you appeared to mainstream society.
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” remains relevant in another way, as well - as the perfect example of how the Internet has furthered the idea of the “cult classic”. Even with the Google maze that one has to navigate in order to find it, the song has been the subject of a niche, virtual renaissance, via the special kind of musical word-of-mouth that now finds itself based in the music blogosphere and Youtube’s “suggested videos” sidebar - the modern-day version of that effortlessly cool downtown record shop that a lucky few knew was the best place to look for the most impressive new records. While I’m well aware of the Internet’s downsides, its power to be able to introduce you to myriads of long-lost obscurities from literally any other place or time in a way that no other medium could is, well, powerful! It fascinates me just how many of my favourite songs are, as with the one featured in this post, little-discovered deep cuts from years before I was born and countries on the other side of the world that I stumbled across via Youtube’s “autoplay” feature, that are practically now nonexistent in tangible life due to their lack of recognition. Other than the fact that it is an amazingly-crafted song, perhaps it is this newfound phenomenon of old obscurities being unearthed and effectively becoming “new” again that keeps “Too Cool” sounding so fresh, so relevant, so addictively listenable... I, for one, eagerly await what other wonderfully little-known tracks I’ll stumble across in the years to come - we live in exciting times!
When you search ‘Kate Fagan’ on Google, the entirety of the first several pages are full of results pertaining to an ESPN sportswriter - and when you add ‘music’ to this, these refer to a Sydney-based folk singer/poet. In fact, in order to find any information whatsoever pertaining to the creator of the above record, I had to weave my way through a veritable maze of links and search suggestions related to the above song - and even then, all I could still find were a several short-ish reviews of the EP on which the above song is housed, a bio written by her record company on her Bandcamp page, and a four-sentence long entry on punkdatabase.com. When you can, despite the fact that we are living in the Age of the Internet, barely find any information on an artist and the four solo songs they released - now that, my readers, is a true deep cut!
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” is the titular song of an EP Fagan released in 1980. It kind of sums up everything about East Coast American postpunk in the late 1970s - where its British equivalent (which I also hold a deep appreciation for, albeit in an entirely different way), save for your Siouxsies and your Ian Curtises, steered closer toward poppier subject matter and melodic elements than its predecessor, the East Coast Americans swerved in an even weirder, ‘DIY’, and more experimental direction than what went before! (Then there’s everything that went down on the West Coast... Let’s save that for another day...) Fagan’s EP is distinctly homemade and defiantly quirky in a way that much of the CBGB scene was not.
On her Bandcamp bio, Fagan says that she composed the song intuitively after buying a bass guitar that she didn’t know how to play properly. This is fairly obvious when one considers its musical elements - there’s literally one drum pattern throughout the entire song, the presence of chords is largely replaced by a repetitive bass riff - but it is this that makes the song so good. I’m reminded of a quote from 20th Century Women, one of my favourite movies of late, where one character explains the abrasiveness of postpunk to another, who wonders why they can’t just sound “pretty”: “It’s like they’ve got this feeling, and they don’t have any skill, and they don’t want skill, because it’s really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that’s raw. Isn’t it great?” Fagan’s lack of technical skill results in her ability and freedom to create ideas that most of those trained in the diatribes of traditional musicality would be incapable of - she isn’t constrained by what they have been taught is “correct.” The ideas she comes up with are too delightfully bizarre and simple (less really is more!) to be conventional, this spawning all sorts of originality and interestingness... While this philosophy was behind much of punk also, it was only within this particular dialect of postpunk - almost entirely created by assorted visual artists, or people just generally looking for a way in which to express their deepest emotions, with very little both prior musical experience and input from larger labels and companies external to the scene - that it found its truest form. Let us also consider the fact that Fagan paid for a pressing of the EP entirely out of her own pocket, and that its cover could easily have been shot and printed on low budget by an artistically-inclined friend. If “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool”, in all of its DIY, unconventional glory, isn’t among the best representations of this ethos, then I don’t know what is! (May I also mention just how well its musical elements works - repetition equals instant catchiness, after all, and that drum beat is just so danceable... It’s such a well-executed song!)
Fagan’s Bandcamp bio also explains the genesis of “Too Cool”’s lyrics. She explains that she wrote the song following a move from New York to Chicago in the late 70s, after becoming fed up with the growing elitism and exclusiveness of the former’s alternative scene in relation to the increase in of what she terms “the whole Studio 54/red rope thing”. She further remembers that she fell in love with the Chicago scene, it being more inclusive and in line with the ideas that originally defined its NY counterpart - but she soon began to see some of the “divisive hipster culture” (as she calls it) that ruined the NY scene begin to seep in, the song being her reaction against this. I know it’s become such a cliche to suggest that “*insert older piece of art here* is still relevant,” but “Too Cool” really is - incessant gentrification, and a definition of “cool” so constantly changeable and frequently absorbed into the mainstream lexicon that it’s impossible to keep up, things that still threaten to destroy the current incarnations of the scenes Fagan involved herself in, immediately sprung to mind as I read her explanation of the song. “Too Cool” is a reminder that the easiest way to be “cool” is not to try to keep ahead of the endless stream of trends, not to look down upon those from over the top of your sunglasses - but to simply be yourself. (Cliches seem to be among this post’s motifs!) This, again, perfectly evokes everything that was behind postpunk - the idea that you could do whatever you wanted to do, that you would be accepted no matter how impenetrable you appeared to mainstream society.
“I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” remains relevant in another way, as well - as the perfect example of how the Internet has furthered the idea of the “cult classic”. Even with the Google maze that one has to navigate in order to find it, the song has been the subject of a niche, virtual renaissance, via the special kind of musical word-of-mouth that now finds itself based in the music blogosphere and Youtube’s “suggested videos” sidebar - the modern-day version of that effortlessly cool downtown record shop that a lucky few knew was the best place to look for the most impressive new records. While I’m well aware of the Internet’s downsides, its power to be able to introduce you to myriads of long-lost obscurities from literally any other place or time in a way that no other medium could is, well, powerful! It fascinates me just how many of my favourite songs are, as with the one featured in this post, little-discovered deep cuts from years before I was born and countries on the other side of the world that I stumbled across via Youtube’s “autoplay” feature, that are practically now nonexistent in tangible life due to their lack of recognition. Other than the fact that it is an amazingly-crafted song, perhaps it is this newfound phenomenon of old obscurities being unearthed and effectively becoming “new” again that keeps “Too Cool” sounding so fresh, so relevant, so addictively listenable... I, for one, eagerly await what other wonderfully little-known tracks I’ll stumble across in the years to come - we live in exciting times!
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