They certainly rearranged mine. “Particle Man’ rewired me, and specifically rewired my sense of what cool was, or could be, or should be. Who gets to be cool? Who decides? What did my fellow teenagers think was cool from 1990 onward? Is coolness solely the province of angst, and rage, and furious moping, and confrontation, and crunchy guitars, and rampant badassness? Or does one achieve True Coolness by subverting that angst and rage and punishing volume and by instead embracing exuberance, and surrealism, and the sort of shrewd and defiant silliness often dismissed as quirky?
