How this perfect pop song from Gwen Stefani’s debut solo album evokes emotions in me I once didn’t think I was capable of ever feeling
Songs have the power to make us recall the memories and emotions that have long since passed, are still fresh, or that we’re in the middle of experiencing. However, what is a song if it makes you feel emotions you have yet to experience and doubt you ever will feel?
For me, “Cool” from Gwen Stefani’s 2004 debut solo album “Love Angel Music Baby” answers that question: such a song as that is a challenge.
The song is a relationship song, a love song, but not just any song about heartbreak. It’s specific, it’s sharp. Its lyrics describe two people who were once together, no longer are, and have moved on to other relationships, which is all okay because they’re “cool” with it.
Immediately within the first seconds of the song with the most lush synths, I am always hit with a sonic whiplash.
“And after all the obstacles / It’s good to see you now with someone else / And it’s such a miracle that you and me are still good friends / After all that we’ve been through / I know we’re cool,” sings Stefani, as if it was both a lullaby and a prayer.
In the music video (or as I see see it: a cinematic masterpiece) we see Gwen Stefani play a woman as she hosts a visit from an ex and his new beau at her opulent Italian mansion. She anxiously waits playing with her fingers for them to arrive, not knowing how she’ll feel once she sees them together.
The mansion doors open, pleasantries are exchanged. Then it begins. The three sit down to chat, only for the former couple to lock eyes, cuing the synth intro and throwing us into their past.
A brunette Gwen and her former mans run through a small town in Italy, ride a vespa, dine “Lady and The Tramp” style, and just be with each other in the way only true loves are. It’s the straight “Call Me By Your Name.”
Stefani wears tube tops with quilt patterned skirts with her brown locks down. Her ex and his new lady hold hands, making Stefani recall the time when that was her hand he held. She allows her to try on her own wedding ring to see what it will be like to wear one someday. The video continues to cut to and from their present meeting with their memories of the past, with each cut posing the same question: “What if?”
Then there’s the bed.
We watch Blonde Gwen channel the spirit of Marilyn Monroe as she sprawls around a bed in a luscious bob as she dawns a red lip, a deep navy blue crop top with a mock neck, white sailor shorts, and with a pair of leopard print heels. Heels. On a bed.
The music video should have won awards for its editing, its acting, its costume design, its makeup, its set design, its directing, its body language, its timing, and every other category! FOR ITS LONGING! ITS YEARNING!
It’s a music video that fulfills the responsibility every music video has: to elevate the storytelling of a song. It enhances the listening of the song from going beyond just “listening” to it, but instead, to experiencing it, living it.
The song never fails to transport me to an alternate dimension where the ones that got away and I still aren’t together, but where we have the respect to treat and view what we used to have as the memory it will always be, rather than omit each other from our lives as we do in reality.
“Cool” not only allows me to envision a future where I genuinely want someone I had feelings for from my past to have happiness with someone other than me and in life in general, but it also allows me to hope that I can someday become such a selfless person.
This song makes me want to become the person I know I’m not yet. With each listen, the song challenges me to practice my selflessness, to keep envisioning the person I know I want to become, but that sometimes I worry I can never become.
To someday be able to forgive their refusal of my offering of unconditional love. To someday accept that it was truly them and not me. To someday be at peace with the amount of love we felt and the amount of love we lost.
Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” doesn’t ask us to go get back the ones that got away. Instead, it asks us to move forward with our lives, until we are unafraid to open the door when the past comes knocking.
Contentless 