The Birth (and Death) of the Cool by Ted Gioia

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool Reviews

• 
  Marvin

  Cool is one of those things that fit the "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" category but I must admit Jazz critic and writer Ted Gioia does a fine attempt at defining it. Here is my feeble definition. Cool is an attitude, a facade that hides the base emotions but communicates a an individualistic ambivalence over status and society. Cool is one of those things that you can attempt to have but is defined by others judgments making it a bit contradictory. Yet we all know it when we see it and we know what is not cool. Frank Sinatra was cool. Micheal Bolton isn't. Laugh-in was cool. American Idol isn't. James Dean was cool. Jim Carry isn't. I think my cool definition is similar to Gioia but he says it better and takes a lot more words to say it. But what else the author does is to identify its birth and how Cool is no longer an issue in our "post-cool" society. Gioia starts at the beginning with the jazz musicians. Cool is above all a jazz concept and he spends a good bit of time with the three lead perpetrators of Cool: Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis. He describes the role of Cool in the arts and media and show how the advertising establishment hijacked cool and led to its demise. He shows how Cool is a late 20th century device not having any real comparison in American culture before that time. And he also define the Post-cool area, a time when sincerity and honesty becomes important for its own sake and people are not defined by brands. I'm not totally convinced by this part of the book but Gioia makes some nice points. I also enjoy the revelation that my generation was not introduced to coolness by Davis or Kerouac but was already indoctrinated into cool by the antics of Bugs Bunny, Top Cat, and Rocky & Bullwinkle. A decade of watching Bugs Bunny will definitely prepare you for the writings of Jack Kerouac. I did find his chapter on comedy a bit perplexing. He spends a lot of time on David Letterman as a arbiter of cool comedy but barely mentions Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl or Richard Pryor. Personally I think cool comedy started with Jack Benny but that is just my opinion. Any book on such a broad topic is going to encourage agreements and disagreements. But that's cool.
• 
  John

  This is a pretty good book about transformations in culture from the 40s to the late 2000s and how cool lost its lustre through commercialization. It's really interesting to read how cool was essentially derived from African-American behaviour in the face of corporate America and how the meeting of black and white musicians created the underground of cool, but how this all became tiresome once the fashion industry took hold of it and banalized it. Tracing the downfall of cool and the rise of earnestness and sincerity that has now become aggression and bluntness in the online world is one of the strongest sections of the book. Recommended.
• 
  GLF (Beaware of eye strain!)

  "Cool No More" could have been a better title for this book which has little to do with the Miles Davis sessions known as "The Birth Of The Cool".
  
  Rather than being a book on music (particularly Jazz) this book is more about the birth, gradual acceptance, adoption and finally rejection of "Cool" in Western society. It explores how "Cool" has been exploited by those wanting to sell products, rather than remaining a way of life or a personal philosophy.
  
  While there is some mention of Jazz artists in the book, this not the "light read" I had expected to be. But it is rewarding in it's depth and breadth coverage of the topic of "Cool".
• 
  Mark O'mara

  A very interesting social history about a “cool” subject from one of the great music writers. The tedious and highly overrated Greil Marcus could learn something about how to write from Ted Gioia.
• 
  Diann Blakely

  While I've written of Gioia's DELTA BLUES here, I've not read this one but plan to do so on the basis of what I assume is an excerpt in A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, which I discussed in absurdly brief length last summer on OPTION (see the review posted here) and another contributor, Ann Marlowe, whose review of HOW TO STOP TIME: HEROIN FROM A TO Z (also available for reading on NBCC/Goodreads). If, in what has become known as "the Harvard Book," Marlowe explores the phenomenon of Linda Lovelace with the terse stealth of Chandler's hero, in "Cool Gone Cold," published in THE WEEKLY STANDARD (11/29/09), "Ted Gioia... has written an extended essay on a phenomenon that draws on his own field of expertise. And he has hit upon the one essential point: He writes that the cool 'eventually boiled down to how one was perceived by others. Coolness, even more than beauty, is inevitably in the eye of the beholder.' This is a remarkable insight into all of modernity, not just the cool."
  
  A subject upon which Marlowe is something of an expert. A decade earlier, I read what I still remember as one of the most chilling, so to speak, passages in HOW TO STOP TIME: attempting to slip from a wannabe lover with a pot belly who was drinking beer, she asks about "a beautiful man leaning against a wall, smoking.... 'Who is that? Who does he hang out with?' 'Oh, you mean Stuart. He hangs out by himself. Everybody he used to hang out with is dead.' And Stuart acquired an extra layer of glamour for me with David's words. To be so hip that all your friends were dead: that was the deepest layer of cool.
  
  "After I'd stopped doing dope, it occurred to me, shattering a mythology I'd embraced for decades, that cool is the way of describing from certain exterior viewpoints what registers as loneliness from the inside. Thus the celebrated cool of black people and jazz musicians and junkies. And when you are alienated enough from your feelings to be able to identify with the exterior viewpoint, you decide you're cool.
  
  "Cool and dope inform each other; they share an underlying banality of blank affect. That is, after you've done enough heroin to feel withdrawal symptoms, you've also done enough to exhaust the drug's repertoire of new sensations. Once getting high is no longer the greatest thing in the world, once, in fact, it's a routine you undertake to feel good again, you might as well quit. But this is just when your use has become cool, when you're cool about the drug, when you are becoming cool.
  
  "Despite my skepticism, I use the word as a compliment as often as everyone else I know."
  
  
• 
  Americanogig

  This book was a lot more Jazz-centric than originally expected. There were definitely cogent points made about the changes in values through the last couple of generations with special emphasis on what is desirable. The author poses that we are entering/are currently in a Post-cool society where people are not defined by what is popular. The biggest issue I had with this book is that although Gioia covers the etymology of cool and its nascent states through today's ambivalance about the same, I felt major events were glossed over. I suppose that it is such an encompassing subject, you could probably have ten such books and still feel the same way. I suggest that if you are interested in reading this sociological commentary, you do so post haste, as it relies heavily on current events (and it is quite current).
• 
  Meagan

  Ted Gioia does an excellent job giving shape and definition to something quite amorphous: cool. I appreciate how accurate his eye is for noticing trends and how accurate his research is for putting together elements that seem unrelated but actually give a helpful picture of the ethos and Zeitgeist of a time period.
  
  Gioia's attention to jazz and other elements of popular culture (including literature, movies, other genres of music, celebrity, and advertisement) give a startling picture of the rise and fall of "the cool" as a concept that drives American culture. This book is highly informative and readable, and I appreciate how curious Gioia is in his work. I highly recommend this work to those who are interested in the historical or sociological aspects of American culture and to those who want to learn more about the impact of jazz on culture.
• 
  Jeff

  There have been a lot of books written in the last few years about the birth of cool but none, until now, have addressed the death of cool or post-cool society. This well-written book explains contemporary post-cool culture in very cogent terms. It picks up where Thomas Frank's book The Conquest of Cool leaves off, looking beyond the co-opting of cool in the 60s and 70s to explain how contemporary culture evolved to where it is today. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in late 20th Century popular culture.
• 
  DeadWeight

  Good book, though Gioia has a peculiarly selective and Romantic definition of what a "commodity" is or could pertain to, as well as a bafflingly whole-hearted belief in the myth of authenticity for an academic. Furthermore, I think that much of his thesis (at least as far as it concerns consumer attitudes) has since been proven wrong by the rise and fall of normcore; the "New Meme" trappings of the cyberwave; and Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool the following year, which highlighted many nuances about advertising in the 20th century that Gioia missed or misunderstood.
• 
  April Raine

  Although, I disagree with Gioia's thesis I appreciate the connections he draws between elements of pop culture and it's manifestations in society. He makes numerous intelligent and thought provoking arguments. The problem with the book starts with his claim that cool has died, with the aging of his generation, which he seems to feel had the monopoly on hip. For someone so well-versed in the history of cool, he is incredibly ignorant to one of its most important aspects--constant reinvention.
• 
  Victor Caamaño

  Interesting book, but I was expecting a discussion of Cool Jazz (Mulligan, Davis, Baker). Saving this book for another time. I like Gioia's writing style.