Planner Reads

This is from a Brian Eno article that appeared in Propsect Magazine (thanks Colin Nagy)

“We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas."

It provides a lot of food for thought for those who are in the business of trying to make things cool. Although Eno is referring to music and art initially in this piece, he expands it to include cultural ideas.

So what about brands?

Follow Eno’s line of argument and all brands can be cool to someone. There’s no such thing as an uncool brand, everything is now accessible and acceptable because there are no real arbiters of taste and style.

If you take Eno’s thinking and ...