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" Lou Reed died yesterday of complications from liver failure. According to his physician, he died surrounded by his family, and was doing Tai Chi &amp;quot;within an hour&amp;quot; of his death, trying to power his way through to a little more life. A perfectly fitting ending: Lou Reed even died cool.  Of all the great singers and songwriters of his generation, Lou Reed was the only one who managed to stay cool all the time. David Bowie had his Iron Duke phase; Dylan made a Christmas album; the Rolling Stones had Altamont. But even Lou Reed&amp;#039;s great disasters, like Metal Machine Music, were explosive and fascinating and of their moment. When he failed, he failed going out. He failed the right way. And his successes, which were legion, were so so cool: &amp;quot;Heroin,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sweet Jane,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Walk on the Wild Side,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Coney Island,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Perfect Day.&amp;quot; He did joy cooly. He did despair cooly. He did drugs cooly. He did sex cooly. He married Laurie Anderson, which is about as cool as you can make marriage. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Lou Reed&amp;#039;s life is that he managed to remain cool during a period when cool collapsed all around him. Reed emerged with Andy Warhol and the Warholian idea of cool \u2014 in which it became an imprimatur applied to objects to give them value \u2014 has dominated ever since. A recent article in Slate wondered if cool had a future. The idea has been coopted so much, by now, that only the most suckerish call anything cool. Cool is a way to sell you more soda \u2014 we all know that. Jonathan Franzen&amp;#039;s piece in The Guardian on what&amp;#039;s wrong with the modern world endured a lot of mockery, but its hard to doubt his assertion that the cool kids have become, primarily, examples of &amp;quot;vapidity and cowardice.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s always how I&amp;#039;ve found them. Cool food is food that isn&amp;#039;t nourishing. Cool people are mostly the ones who haven&amp;#039;t developed past high school, don&amp;#039;t want to develop past high school, but also don&amp;#039;t want to stop hating high school. Cool is an expression of juvenile contempt. Cool is a way of saying &amp;quot;I know more than you,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I am more aware than you.&amp;quot; I despise it. Brian Eno said that taste is the enemy of art, but what he really meant is that cool is the enemy of art. Cool is the enemy of making real judgments and feeling real feelings.  But Lou Reed was the one absolute and unimpeachable exception to the decline of cool. Because it wasn&amp;#039;t possible to doubt that Lou Reed was cool and that he was a great artist, too. And he was cool for decades. He was cool all the way through. He wrote Berlin in the seventies. He wrote New York in the nineties. He wrote a damn cool review of Kanye West&amp;#039;s album last month. Why did his cool survive while others failed? I think it was because his cool was not contemptuous. His cool was not a closing of the heart. His cool was an attempt to make the world new, to capture the urgency of the situation we are faced with, and to live more fully. He was both unafraid to embrace the past (he made albums with classic five-piece bands) or to thrust himself into the future (his last major project was with Metallica).  Famously the Velvet Underground&amp;#039;s first album sold thirty thousand copies but every person who bought the album formed a band. Not one of those thirty thousand managed to be as cool as their idol. That&amp;#039;s the real definition of cool \u2014 imitated by everyone, totally inimitable. That was Lou Reed. REMEMBERING LOU REED: \u2022 The man, in his own words: &amp;quot;You know the expression &amp;#039;God protects fools and drunks&amp;#039;? I qualify for both.&amp;quot; \u2022 Tom Junod on the Lou Reed he loved. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a25484/rip-lou-reed-marche/>