Always. Tom Verlaine. 1981. Warner Bros.

 Cool. It’s a dead word that, by the time I came to use it in the polyester-clad 1970s of my youth, had acquired a catch-all definition like Warhol’s “great,” meaning the tacit approval of whatever the word was being used to describe. Elsewhere, in New York, the commercial image of cool—as practiced by its now legendary downtown punk scene—could be traced all the way back to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and their association with kill-your-sons rerouting of mental circuitry drug use.This was cool experienced as extreme alienation and emotional detachment from mainstream life. Tom Verlaine, during his career as co-founder and member of Television, and later as solo artist, projected this dangerously sincere and cool image of New York punk. But that image was complicated by Verlaine’s boyish good looks, so the persona that translated instead was more the aloof boy-genius with an electric guitar holding his own in a downtown milieu of junkies and seasoned thugs. An adept at documenting the idiosyncrasies of that late seventies milieu, Verlaine was careful to always present himself clean of moral and immoral detritus; like Philip Marlowe, he’s cool to the temptations of compromised behavior, though they abound. On Always, from his 1981 solo record, Dreamtime, you hear Verlaine practice his peculiar tough guy artistry of cool. It’s in the exaggeratedly defiant confrontation of his vocals, and in his lead guitar, which suggests the arc of silver light following the path of a blade in a knife fight. Even the stop-start syncopations of the song’s rhythm imply a hyper-alert, paranoid progression through cityscapes of predation. Though Always plays like an accomplished examination of Verlaine’s grasp of the mechanics of cool, his narrator is an emotionally naked version of us all in periods of personal crisis. On Marquee Moon, Verlaine asks the man down by the tracks “how he don’t go mad,” to which he is replied, “Look here, Junior. Don’t you be so happy. And for heaven’s sake don’t you be so sad.” That suggested mode of balance is worthy of the very definition of cool.