26 Jan 2008, Posted by Josh Allan Dykstra in Life, No Comments. Tagged branding, culture, entertainment, fun, gen Y

Just Can’t Wait To Be Cool

Tonight Allison, I, and Housemate Kris watched a brilliant movie from the good ‘ol days (read: 1998) that you may have heard of entitled Can’t Hardly Wait.

In case you live under a rock or were born after 1990, this was one of many late-nineties movies where the nerdy, yet heartfelt, love-struck white dude gets to finally make out with the super hot girl in the last scene. Another one of my favorites would come out a year later: She’s All That, where they switch it around and the girl is the dork, but other than that it’s pretty much the same movie. And I still love it.

There’s a classic scene in the middle of Can’t Hardly Wait when William (another, more different nerd) performs Paradise City. Behold:

The brilliance of this scene is, of course, that William goes from outcast to extreme super-lovin’ stud in the time-span of a Guns ‘N’ Roses song. Housemate Kris says he calls this the Beck Principle — if you do anything long enough and with enough gusto (e.g. dance like a fool to a song by a hair band, and/or, be Beck), eventually it, and you, will become “cool.” In this method, “coolness” has more to do with simple longevity and stamina than it does with actually being cool.

This actually works pretty well for me, because I’ve never known what the hell “cool” was anyway (and if you had a picture of me from ’98, you’d know that’s true). So I suppose I’ll just keep doing what I do.

So thank you Beck. And William. Rock on my friends — rock on. And Ethan Embry, you kiss that girl.

//