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

(Speck, 256 pages, $25)

Jazz critic Ted Gioia should have known better than to set himself up as an arbiter of “cool,” said Michaelangelo Matos in the Baltimore City Paper. Writing about Lester Young or Miles Davis, two figures he cites as paragons of restrained sophistication, Gioia can be sharp and insightful. But developing a grand theory about “cool” as an abstract concept requires him to venture well beyond his area of expertise. He claims that “cool” emerged as a significant force in American culture by way of jazz and the Beats, that it thrived for three-plus decades, but that the age of reality TV and tell-all blogs has spelled its end. While that may be true, those shifts can’t possibly be illuminated by a guide who considers the former American Idol contestant Bo Bice “hip.” Time and again, Gioia’s analysis of what’s cool outs him as “a full-on square.”

At least we can all agree with Gioia that cool’s heyday has come and gone, said Robert McHenry in The American. Once upon a time, cool connoted an admirable way of being in the world; the concept was “associated with such virtues as reticence, savoir-faire,” and “a bit of wit.” Cary Grant and Steve McQueen were cool; strivers like Norman Mailer were not. Unfortunately, admiration breeds imitation, and “imitation lives on exaggeration.” Clint Eastwood’s “thousand-yard stare” and James Bond’s “faux sophistication” never qualified as more than ersatz cool. But the fakes have now been with us for decades, and generations of pop consumers have grown up emulating first the fakes, then the fakes’ own imitators.

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Gioia’s “lively and imaginative” book accounts for cool’s collapse with a profound central insight, said Ann Marlowe in The Weekly Standard. When Gioia writes that “cool boiled down to how one is perceived by others,” he is striking at the very heart of modern consciousness. Stripped of the certainties of past ages, citizens of the 20th century accepted that one’s worth belonged in “the eyes of the beholder.” In order to be valued by others, they began turning their very lives into “works of art.” But a performance grows less striking the more it is copied, meaning that cool can’t last. Still, what Gioia fails to grasp is just how deeply trying to act cool lies in the American grain. What’s more, “this is a good thing”: Poseurs may lack deep convictions, but they’re preferable to glory hounds and true believers. Hep cats don’t “commit suicide bombings.”