Cool

I read this essay by Rick Moody called "Against Cool" about the evolution of the word and concept of "cool," that I thought provided some interesting food for thought about a concept that I simply cannot imagine existing without. Moody starts off explaining his own relationship to coolness:

Whatever cool is or was ... I, your narrator, do not consider myself cool and never have been cool. As a teenager, when questions about cool are at their most rigorous, when a lack of cool implies the possibility of lifelong psychotherapy, I wore Levi's corduroys in the rainbow shades -- yellow cords, red cords, powder-blue cords; I wore flannel slacks.... My hair poofed in ways that best recall Michael Landon during the Little House on the Prairie years. I liked to mix plaids. I preferred, where music was concerned, Cat Stevens, Yes, Jethro Tull, and other bands even more embarrassing to enumerate, when all around me was Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones. I came from the suburbs. I read science fiction.... I cried easily; loved New England autumns. In an area of inquiry where credibility is everything, where credentials are essential, where any deviation from this orthodoxy of the unstated and recondite is actionable, I was and am an interloper. I am, in fact, uncool.






He notes that there is no Platonic category of coolness, that "what is cool is often in dispute, quickly outmoded, neglected soon thereafter." Whatever is established as cool, "becomes precipitously irrelevant in the inexorable march of time." He also notes that, despite cool's slipperiness, we know it when we see it.  And that:

In an absence of clearly delineated American ethics, in a period of cultural relativism, in a political environment in which both American parties have amplified their rhetoric to such a degree that the other side is beneath contempt, in which religion seems no longer able to rationally or effectively deploy its messages except through moral intimidation or force, in which families are no longer the ethical bulwarks they felt themselves to be in the past, in such a millennial instant cool has become the system of ethics for the young in America. Cool, it seems, is the one thing that kids believe in. Cool is what they talk about, cool is what motivates them, cool is what they occasionally live and die for.

According to Moody, Miles Davis is partly responsible for contemporary usage of the word "cool." In the late 1940s, Davis formed an ensemble called The Miles Davis Nonet that was conceived as a reaction to bebop. In contrast to bebop, which, according to Davis, was "this hip, real fast thing," the nonet emphasized sweetness and melody over bebop's fiery tone. The nonet's sound was considered slow, strange, evocative, and supple. In other words, cool. An A&R man at Davis' record company dubbed the results of the Miles Davis Nonet's efforts Birth of the Cool. This new cool jazz was designed to soften jazz, an African-American genre, for a white audience, rendering it looser and more melodious.

Moody traces how cool evolved in the 1940s, through loose experimentation and improvisation, to mean "good and modern" and how the beat writers further evolved the concept to refer to an ineffable "It" factor that some possess and others covet. Moody says about the Beats' development of this concept:


Cool crests, perhaps not yet in the explicitly modern usage of the word, but rather as a way of carrying oneself, a way of marking an attitude that extends beyond language and the capacity of language to denote, that pre-emepts the civilizing and hypocritical layers of straight culture, that focuses instead on a deportment, an ephemeral and unstated aspect, a perfume of the infinite, a wisp of the spiritual, in which improvisation and spontaneity enable numinous predisposition, access to the ether. IT's not a product or an extract or a medication. IT is cool and cool is an approach characterized by feeling, by passions, and you find it in the riotous voice of Kerouac's narratives, as well as in the riffing of Ginsberg's poems in the later fifties....

What Moody argues has happened since the '60s is that, first, due to rock&roll, cool became hackneyed. There was The Coasters',"Three Cool Cats," The Beatles' "Hey Jude" ("Don't you know that it's the fool who plays it cool/By making his world a little colder"), "Cool Jerk," the Stooges "Real Cool Time," composed in 1970,  the Hollies; "long cool woman in a red dress," Kool and the Gang, Rickie Lee Jones' "Coolsville," John  Gale's "Indistinct Notion of Cool," Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A. ("I'm a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.), etc., etc. The '60s and '70s also spawned a number of cool idioms: Keep it cool, cool it, cool out, cool hand, cool cat, cool as a virgin, cool beans, coolcock, in the cooler, cool off, cool one.  Moody says that due to the cultural forces of rock&roll and also advertising (Kool cigarettes, Kool-Aid) that sought to sell merchandise to the cool demographic and make it a commodity in itself, cool ceased to mean much of anything in particular.

Another development, says Moody, was the integration of cool into drug culture: Is he cool (does he smoke)? Was it cool (was the location free of cops)? "The energy around cool," says Moody, "had shifted away from jazz, away from Black Americans, away from writers. Cool, instead, had become something that was possessed by drug users and free-love espousers and rock-and-roll musicians."

By the end of the essay, Moody says cool started out as a way to describe Miles Davis' emotionally dexterous and evocative jazz music but over time came to mean, in the '80s, "dead inside. Chilled-out cool, to use nineties locution. Flat, lifeless, dim, empty, dead cool."

Moody asked a cool guy he went to high school with in the '70s about his thoughts on the topic and this former cool guy had this to say:

Whatever we thought was cool was miles from anything Kerouac had in mind..... By the time we got to cool it had lost all of its earnestness and it had an almost complete lack of self-awareness.


And the unfortunate thing about cool in our era was that it wasn't very nice. Being cool was about distance. Sparring, in that verbal kind of way, conferred cool. If possible, frighten all fuckers away from ever thinking about judging you.


I didn't perceive  until I had been away from school for years that trying to be cool was about selling out in the worst way. We were trying desperately to be distant, to have a critical detachment that would allow us to sit in judgment. And as anti-establishment as we styled ourselves, that wish to be the one doing the judging was strictly generic arrogance.


As you may see from the foregoing, my career as a Cool Guy is somewhat painful for me to contemplate.

This is the aspect of his essay that resonates with me. Growing up in the '80s, I certainly was raised on a concept of cool that seemed to be about denying emotions and vulnerability, being detached and dead inside. As an excessively emotional person, I've always hated that, this emphasis on detachment that contemporary notions of hipsterness (as seen in blogs like Unhappy Hipsters) seem to rely on. I love this David Foster Wallace quote, from Infinite Jest:


“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

So, yeah, I agree that this emphasis on transcending sentiment and denying vulnerability and humanity isn't very cool at all, and in fact is quite lame. If Moody is right that there was a point in time where being cool was about adding something, giving more, it seems that it has come to mean coming off as though you have taken away, that you have absence, distance, empty space (like the annoying Zooey Deschanel character in 500 Days of Summer). Nor caring, not emoting. That you lack the complexity, excitement, and raw terror of human life. And I think that's stupid.

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