Darth Vader was just a weed in cool black

In Space Gray no-one could hear him scream

Photo © 2024 Majo Villalón | https://unsplash.com/fr/@majovillalon

My laptop is silver, the keyboard is black and the trackpad white. I bought them separately several years apart, when each of these bland colour schemes were deemed “cool” at the time of purchase.

Buy a Windows laptop today and it’ll almost certainly be grey/silver or black. And the silver option is essentially a MacBook cosplay. The colour that really matters is black. It is a statement.

Take Johnny Cash.

JC was a serious singer and serial sinner whose worst offence, I think we can all agree, was to belong to the country and western genre. It took a long time for him to atone for this catastrophic error in musical judgement, choosing late in his life to record cover versions of Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus and Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt. So cool.

When this was done in reverse, a pop singer recording a cover of a C&W song, it fails. Take Whitney Houston’s foghorn cover of Dolly Parton’s funeral-favourite I will always love you for example. Like the brief but memorably awful fashion for encasing laptops and mobile phones in Rose Gold, no matter how many copies you sell, no matter how loudly you honk out the melody, it is definitely not cool.

Imagine you turned up at the wrong Hollywood party a couple of decades ago and found yourself surrounded by C&W stars, some of whom were even famous for singing both kinds. Would you have chosen to hang out with Kenny Rogers in the hot tub or with Johnny Cash by the dustbins?

What made Cash cool? Could it be, perhaps, because he dressed in black? Does black = cool? And could this phenomenon explain why every other electronic product over the last 15 years has been designed to look like a stealth fighter?