The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

Posting once every two weeks is obviously no way to run a blog. I've been tied up lately fact-checking a bunch of long feature pieces for New York and writing a new draft of a (hopefully) upcoming piece on the planet Mars (details to come).

I've also picked up Ted Gioia's new book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. Gioia is a music critic who edits Jazz.com and has written survey books on the history of jazz and the Delta blues. This new book is more ambitious and, so far, seems more suspect. Gioia argues that "cool" is a historical phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century that has ended with our society's new turn toward sincerity. So far, I've found a few parts of his argument appealing (if not entirely persuasive)—"over the course of the fifties and sixties, a whole generation started acting like jazz musicians"—and many parts of his argument baffling: Gioia portrays anti-consumerism as anti-cool and offers up the ultimately aughts cliché, "9/11 is seen as setting off the new tone of warmth and directness and its associated rejection of pointed irony." The most perplexing part of Gioia's book, however, is his discussion of Barack Obama. He labels the president "postcool" and "anticool" and definitely in no way "cool." Today is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which, as you may recall, was the day on which Mr."Postcool"/"anticool" won the presidency. To remember that day and to offer a rebuttal to Gioia's characterization of Obama, I'll turn it over to Fred Armisen.

Comments

[il maestro]

I haven't watched any new SNL episodes for nigh on 10 years, but I have to say, it's sunk to new lows of unfunniness than I ever could have imagined.

I'm reading DFW's "A supposedly funny thing that I'll never do again" now, and I must highly recommend the second essay in the collection for a brilliant analysis of our society's postmodern, ironic, "cool" stance.

[il maestro]

P.S. I thought Ted Gioia's book about Jazz was truly wretched.

[Eric Benson]

I'm imagining you're referring to Wallace's television and U.S. fiction essay, which is a classic. I think Gioia would point out that w/r/t "cool" the changes he's talking about happened in this decade and Wallace's take on this aspect of society no longer applies. I have to read more of Gioia's book before I start weighing in too much on his perspective on "cool" v. Wallace's, and I think it's definitely important to read Wallace's essay as a historical document (which seems nearly impossible not to do given his characterization of shows like St. Elsewhere as the dominant cultural medium).

Actually, thinking back on that essay, I think you could trace a clear development from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist as the ironic, "cool" book that symbolized the early 90s (raise your hands if the first time you heard about that book was reading the Wallace essay, good, that's about everybody) to the spate of fake memoirs in the early aughts signifying a new hunger for "authenticity."

There's a lot of really fertile ground in the cultural shifts of the last 20 years, but I'm not sure Gioia's book will be up to the task. I'll see once I've finished it.

(On a related aside, Ben Metcalf, the Literary Editor of Harper's, once proposed a cover to the magazine that would depict two airplanes flying into "irony," to mock all of these bloated 9/11 assertions that it "killed irony" or ushered in a new age of "authenticity." The cover, surprisingly, was never published.)

[Eric Benson]

This is my first encounter with Gioias work. Was it poorly written? Historically lopsided? Certainly as a prose-smith and a conveyor of clear ideas, hes not earning high marks so far.