Do you stop being yourself when you want to be seen?
One person walks into the room and suddenly you have forgotten what to do with your hands. Your voice sounds slightly wrong. Something completely ordinary comes out of your mouth and, while you are still saying it, another part of your brain is already wondering why you chose those particular words. Later, you replay the interaction and discover several moments of humiliation that the other person probably never noticed. Attraction has an extraordinary ability to turn a functioning adult into both performer and critic, acting out the scene while simultaneously reviewing it. When we last encountered Baby Brave, “Spiralling” took us somewhere considerably darker, into the question of what happens when a painful experience becomes part of your internal architecture and you try to turn it into something you can control. “You’re So Cool” catches the mind doing something different, and much earlier. Nobody has rejected you. Nothing terrible has happened. You simply like someone and, inexplicably, being yourself has become the most difficult role available.
You may even tell yourself that this person is “out of your league”, as though attraction had somehow acquired divisions, rankings and promotion zones. The strange thing is that we understand exactly what the phrase means. Someone can appear so much cooler, more self-assured or somehow more at ease in the world that, by comparison, you begin to feel distinctly ordinary. The imbalance may exist almost entirely in your own head, but that does not make it feel any less real. The person you fancy becomes a small mythology while you become unusually conscious of everything that might expose you as less interesting than you hoped. Digital life has given this old insecurity an enormous amount of new material to work with. Other people now arrive accompanied by photographs, followers, friends, clothes, places, references and apparently spontaneous evidence of a life already happening perfectly well without you. You can know that much of this has been selected and arranged and still feel intimidated by it. Coolness survives because it appears effortless. The person who possesses it never seems to be managing an impression. Meanwhile, you have started wondering whether everyone can see you trying not to try.
Baby Brave make that discrepancy funny, and their video pushes the idea somewhere stranger. The band were green-screened into scenes from 50 films, including “Napoleon Dynamite”, “Trainspotting”, “The Shining”, “Amélie” and “House of Flying Daggers”. On one level, it is simply an absurd visual joke. But think about how much of your understanding of romance, confidence, rebellion and desirability was learned by watching other people perform versions of them. Before you ever went on a date, you had already watched hundreds of dates. You knew how longing was supposed to look, how somebody mysterious entered a room, how somebody heartbroken stared through a window, how the outsider eventually revealed that they were more interesting than everybody else. Popular culture gives us an enormous wardrobe of possible selves and we spend years trying them on. Social media has made that process almost literal. Choose the photograph. Delete another. Rewrite the sentence. Decide which interests belong in public and which version of your personality works in that particular room. Putting Baby Brave inside dozens of unrelated films accidentally produces a perfect image for all of this. None of us naturally belongs in every scene we enter. Most of the time we are learning the part while the camera is already rolling.
This is also why being told to “just be yourself” rarely solves anything. Which self? The one talking comfortably to an old friend? The one meeting somebody for the first time? The one at work? The one trying desperately to look unbothered while waiting for a message? You probably know people who make you louder and people who make you quieter. Around some people you become funnier, more defensive, more competitive, more childish or suddenly incapable of finishing a sentence. Attraction makes these adjustments particularly visible because the stakes feel higher. Baby Brave describe “You’re So Cool” as a love song for socially awkward people trying to navigate interactions while pretending that being a normal human is entirely manageable. The joke works because you do not have to consider yourself socially awkward to recognise the sensation. Almost everybody has met someone around whom their normal personality briefly stopped loading. The song’s response is not to construct a better version of yourself for the occasion. It is to admit the panic, the swooning and the awkwardness before somebody else can expose them. Once that happens, the imagined hierarchy starts looking slightly ridiculous.
Perhaps that is where “You’re So Cool” and “Spiralling” meet after all. Both are interested in the distance between what happens inside your head and what another person can actually see, but from opposite ends of an experience. One deals with the thoughts left behind when something has gone wrong. The other catches you before anything has happened, already manufacturing possibilities, hierarchies and embarrassment from almost nothing. With “Sugar To The Tongue” arriving on 9 October, our second encounter with Baby Brave makes that tension difficult to ignore. Awkwardness can be more revealing than confidence precisely because it exposes the machinery. The pause before your answer. The joke that does not quite land. The unnecessary explanation. The sudden awareness that you have been talking for far too long. Those moments cannot be polished because they happen before you have decided how you want to be perceived. You simply have to remain in the room. And perhaps that is the particularly cruel joke of fancying someone: you want them to like you for who you are, then immediately begin interfering with the evidence. So you take a breath, attempt to behave normally and start auditioning for a place you have already been invited into.