The Birth (and Death) of the Cool
By Ted Gioia Speck, 256 pp., $
Reading Ted Gioia's dust-jacket credits ("Best-selling author of The History of Jazz and Delta Blues"), readers may think this book is about jazz or pop culture. It is--and Gioia has written an intellectually precise, lively, and imaginative account of "the cool" and its role in American life. But even Gioia may not realize that he has offered up a tangential illumination of the whole phenomenon of modernity:
Starting in the fifties and gaining momentum over the next two decades, average people wanted to lead their lives as though they were works of art, songs or movies or novels. At the same time, people now judged songs or movies or novels as lifestyle accessories, not as aesthetic products. In some strange way, this became the epitome of the cool--to externalize your life as though it were one more entertainment product.
This rehearses the argument of the whole book, including the "death of the cool," which he attributes to the eventual sickening commercialization of the concept. From now on, he argues, we are in for earnestness, authenticity, and an absence of irony.
Where did "the cool" come from? Gioia's answer is no surprise: from African Americans. Cool was first defined in print in 1947, in a book titled piquantly Jive and Slang of Students in Negro Colleges. It meant "neatly dressed," and a "cool papa" was a "nonchalant fellow."
Unsurprisingly, Gioia, the author of five books on the subject,
leans heavily on jazz in explaining cool. Almost 40 pages are devoted to discussing the roles of Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, and Miles Davis in the construction of cool, and much of this is gloriously written criticism. A few representatively brilliant asides: Gioia looks at Method acting as a sort of stage jazz, and riffs on the fact that Bugs Bunny, Fred Flintstone, and the Pink Panther had jazz themes despite the fact that jazz record sales were minuscule.
The strength of this study is that Gioia's theorizing rests on specific examples drawn from his magisterial knowledge of jazz. That is also its weakness. Gioia may underestimate the degree to which film fed the aestheticization of everyday life, and starting long before the 1950s. Gioia would also have deepened his analysis by looking at 19th-century intellectual history. The ability to "externalize" one's view of one's life arose in the late 19th century. There is Nietzsche, who wrote about looking at art from the perspective of life in The Birth of Tragedy, and the aesthetes, decadents, and dandies of the fin de siecle.
Gioia might also have written more about when bohemia arose, and why, and why it seems increasingly fragile, though not so fragile as "the cool." He pays so much attention to jazz that he slights the role of bohemia, including the WASP bohemia of early 20th-century Greenwich Village, in forming "the cool."
Then there is the role of Jews, also soft-pedaled here. Gioia includes "blacks, gays, jazz musicians, street toughs, bohemians, and countercultural figures of all types" as role models for cool--but not Jews. This, too, would be investigated best by going back to the 19th century, where Jews first appeared as "cool" figures in novels (Daniel Deronda, Proust), politics (Benjamin Disraeli), and society. The aura of the demonic and outcast that clung to them would also be part of the aesthetic of cool.
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