The Death Of The Cool

Commonplace Newsletter #29

Jazz by Henri Matisse. Jazz is the coolest music, blue is the coolest colour. These are facts.

Cool is dead. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it’s a fact.

We live in a post-cool world now, whether we like it or not, where earnestness, sincerity and the endless quest for a sense of personal authenticity are the order of the day. In certain quarters, irony attempts to hold on but its grip is faltering and its resonance has diminished to near nothing.

Time will tell whether this change is a good thing or a bad thing, or merely just a different thing.

But it’s well worth studying the history of cool for a moment and the subsequent development of this contemporary post-cool world. I have found that once you begin to understand the cool/post-cool dichotomy and the evolution of these two concepts then the worlds of advertising, literature, music, marketing and aesthetics all begin to make a lot more sense.

Let’s get to it…

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The Birth of the Cool

If cool is inherent in people rather than objects, then what is seen as cool will change from place to place, from time to time, from generation to generation.

Pountain and Robins- Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude

One of the cornerstones of cool is that you either get it or you don’t. Talking about cool isn’t cool and trying to precisely define cool is most definitely uncool.

But I am secure enough in my own sense of cool that I’m going to do it anyway. At probably tedious length. While quoting fairly academic sources. So there.

So cool- as the generally accepted anthropological view goes- originated in West Africa. It comes out of the ancient Yoruba city-states whose religious philosophy valued cool (or composure) as one of its three main pillars, the others being command (ashe) and character (iwa).

In this context then, cool is a survival trait in an environment where disputes, skirmishes and war were a constant possibility. The best way to win a fist-fight is de-escalation, as any nightclub bouncer will tell you. Those quick to violence are also prone to taking a serious beating on a long enough time scale.

So implicit in this ancient cool (itutu) are ideas of conciliation, of the ability to defuse volatility and be graceful.

Grace in comportment is a large part of the cool aesthetic, then and now. It was said that when a Yoruba became possessed by the spirit of one of his gods, the others could easily recognise it because though his body moved gracefully, his face was frozen into an unmoving mask, the mask of cool.

By way of comparison, think of any old-school film star who was labeled as being cool. The movements along the silver screen were graceful and fluid but the facial expressions were always underplayed. Bogart lit his cigarette and sipped from his tumbler with a theatre-players practiced hand but he never flapped or acted histrionic or bawled.

By way of counterpoint, the opposite of cool is exaggerated movements and screeching and pulling faces for the camera. This is why geeks feature so strongly in comedies. Cool guys may have a strong line in wit and irony but they aren’t overtly, deliberately funny. That’s more the wheelhouse of the rubberfaced crowdpleasers who I suspect have the deeply uncool need for constant attention, if not admiration. Comedians are a needy bunch, as a general rule.

So to return to our main narrative, cool began as an ideal that helped reduce costly violence in a tribal society. It then- due to the spread of the slave trade- helped serve as a defence mechanism against the degradations of that practice. Open rebellion could of course be costly if not outright lethal under those circumstances. But an attitude of cool- where defiance can be hidden behind ironic detachment and you can distance yourself from the source of oppression without confronting it head on- could be an effective way to live in those abhorrent circumstance.

And there are similar elements at play in the European tributary of the precursors to cool- sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura, as you may well already know, is that attitude and mode of being whereby actions are made to appear effortless by the concealment of the effort that goes in to them. You practice and perfect in secret and then present to the world with an attitude of casual indifference, cultivating the impression that you are either God-gifted or competent yet not a Machiavellian threat in the hierarchy, depending on the context.

In the Renaissance court where sprezzatura originated- as in a tribal band of warrior- the tendency to brag had a way of bringing with it derision and all of the wrong kinds of attention. But playing it cool, showing self-control, tactical restraint and grace under fire would earn respect. And ironically help in courtly power-plays, should that be the game you wanted to play.

Cool is (or was) at root a coping mechanism- whether the thing to be coped with was being a vassal, a dissident, an underdog or merely a harried citizen in a competitive post-industrial world.

So that’s the whistle-stop history of the roots of cool. But as interesting and diverting as all of that is, the fact remains that cool as we know it is essentially a modern phenomenon.

And rather than being an evergreen state of being, the evidence seems to show that it is on its last legs, if not dead already. The last few flicker of movement may be merely post-mortem twitches.

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Cool Goes Mainstream

Now, before we I go any further I am going to quote one more source so that we are all definitely on the same page as to what cool actually consists of.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, in tracing an origin of cool from African and Caribbean mythic archetypes of the Trickster gives us a list of trickster adjectives which serve as an excellent summary of what cool consists of :

‘Individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture.’

Savvy?

Let’s press on then.

Cool as we know it today comes from Jazz- a world of predominantly black urban underdogs using irony, grace, unflappability and all of those other cool moves to survive in a world of poverty, drugs, obscurity and Jim Crow. Echoes of slavery and the situation mentioned above.

To this day the apotheosis and epitome of cool are characters from the Jazz era, foremost among them Miles Davis. You could also cite Lester Young, Bix Beiderbecke, Thelonious Monk and so on, but though hugely influential to cools development, those names have sadly faded outside of jazzhead circles.

Those figures though, over time, had a huge influence on the mainstream via the Beat Generation (literature as a form of jazz) and the Method school (acting as a form of jazz) which gave us icons of cool such as James Dean, Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen.

And the Beats and Method-inspired New Hollywood gave birth to the ’60’s hippie movement which lead to the mainstream acceptance and commercialization of the cool way of life.

Ad Men began to grasp the idea of cool. They saw there was money to be made in using that attitude to sell products. Youth culture was a growing market and a products utility and durability became less important than its image.

The era of branding had begun. The era of the monitoring of cool like any other stock on the exchange. But woven with this change was the inevitable decline of cool.

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Cool Becomes Uncool

The beginning of the end of cool was signalled when it became commoditized.

Ted Goioa, The Birth {and Death} of The Cool

People tend to become good at doing things when the financial incentive is strong enough. And by the 1980’s and into the ’90’s there was a fortune to be made from cool.

And with human greed being what it is, this was then time when the goose that lays the golden egg was finally killed off.

Cool became something that a product had, not that a person embodied. Cool became something that you bought, not an attitude you projected.

And so, as was to be expected, the hippest of the hipsters grew tired of it. They searched for a retreat from stylisation, from irony, from surface, and so grunge music blossomed via making a virtue of heart-on-sleeve sincerity, earnestness, authenticity and utilitarian, anti-fashion clothing.

And in the years that followed, slowly but surely, seemingly everything began to bear traces of the influence of this seachange. Everything became similarly organic and unprocessed and sincere and earnest. Products were advertised virally by an ordinary random person rather than by Michael Jordan.

Authenticity was now the name of the game. As the old quip goes ‘Sincerity: if you can fake that you’ve got it made.’

Culture, in short, had now become post-cool.

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Living in a Post-Cool World

The new generation will be truth-seekers instead of cool-seekers.

Ted Goioa, The Birth {and Death} of The Cool

And so this is the world we find ourselves in today. Sincerity is the name of the game.

(Now to clarify: the sincerity doesn’t have to be authentic, and the authenticity doesn’t have to be sincere. In most cases they aren’t. But the signalling of these things, the projection of them is what matters. This is the seachange from the mid to late 20’s century)

Think about it. As an exercise, just imagine someone lighting a cigarette with a Zippo, imagine someone who pays no lip service to being health-conscious, imagine someone who keeps a low profile and an ironic knowing distance from the world and has zero interest in sharing their life via social media.

It seems anachronistic doesn’t it, if not faintly ridiculous.

But this is where we are. And I, as someone whose formative years were spent imbibing the ghosts of the dying culture of cool, am fairly ambivalent about it all, truth be told.

Authenticity is all well and good, and irony can degenerate into a reflexive shield and a crutch that justifies never trying. But. The pervading online tone of snark (or toxic sincerity as I like to call it) I could truly live without. Let alone the deeply uncool (if nothing else) ideological point scoring and pseudo-intellectualism and general smart-arsery.

Plus, while we’re at it, the bizarre and largely unnoticed real life cultural shift whereby once-cool counterculture types have somehow morphed from being anti-corporate activists to the (unwitting?) champions, apologists and footsoldiers of these same forces.

(This unremarked upon fact is one of the few things that comes closest to inducing me to manically bounce around the room like Daffy Duck when Bugs Bunny’s antics finally tip him over the edge.)

Let alone the fact that seemingly any thought for aesthetics, stylisation and design seems to have largely gone out of the window, a leitmotif that regular readers will recognise running through these newsletters like letters through Brighton Rock.

(The exception to this is Apple of course. I have my qualms about sterile Minimalism, but I suppose the care behind it implies at least a modicum of concern about aesthetics. Indeed, ask anyone what they think of Apple products and I bet you the first word out of their mouth is cool.)

But the biggest post cool factor of all is this- the ascendancy of fanboy culture and all of its nerdy implications. This is one that I will always rue as I look at the state of contemporary cinema and pop culture.

Though a part of me would very much like me to, I won’t moan to you about it here today.

Because that would be uncool.

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