THE ORIGINS OF COOL

Part 2: A series on the hyper-commodification of hip and individualization of culture

Ah, the choice of scope - the age of the chicken, the maturity of the egg - wherever one draws the line, they’ll come out of the woodwork to shout? Well, shout all you want, but a line has to be drawn.

Here it is important that I remind you of the approximations of cool that I created in part 1 of this series.  A summation which sheds a shadow of what the idea of «cool» we’re operating with contains: 

«What is «cool» has become far removed from the birth of the «cool» (cool being the timeless, figurative apparitions of hip-phenomenons): being it the jazz-heads of the 40s, beats of the 50s, hippie/counterculture of the 60s or the «groove» of the 70s.»

With a nod to the ethereally opulent Belle Epoque (Paris, 1871-1914), shameless hedonism of the Weimar Republic (Berlin, 1918-1933 ) and the razzmatazz of Dixieland (New Orleans, Chicago, New York, 1900 — …) - I draw my infamous line - at the eponymous «Birth of the Cool» (1957, by Miles Davis). Important to note: that although released in 1957, this compilation album compiles eleven tracks recorded by Davis’ nonet over three sessions during 1949 and 1950. 

So having set down that marker, we recognize that both «The Birth of the Cool» (album) and the actual Birth of Cool (concept), is brought to the fore in the immediate postwar time. A sort of aesthetic Hour Zero (Stunde Null) of contemporary vogue. Further, will be focusing on NYC for this piece.

*Remembering strongly that if ‘cool was birthed in the postwar, then the Harlem Renaissance was its immaculate conception*

We start with the precursor to the Beat generation, the greater crowd from which the Beats would emerge. Essentially, fueled by the fumes of the nascent empire - the beginning of the American supremacy which would make them the defining empire of the century - American youth, downtrodden by war and destruction had two overarching choices: conform or counteract.

These two choices, both center to modernism as a cultural movement, yet with two different aesthetic outlines. You had your archetypes - your Don Drapers on one hand and your Dean Moriarty in the other. Got your white picket fence, apple pie and neatly-collared shirts on one half, and on the other you had smoke-filled rooms, hallucinatory qualities and a search for the gutter-god. One side was characterized by the idea of the pristine White America, the other imbued with the spirit of the free from the descendants of the chained - Black America.

Notwithstanding - we will be talking about the second, yet also focusing on the influx from many who could, in other circumstances, have landed in the first category. For in many ways in the northern metropols, this post-war time was the continuing of the cultural de-segregation which in many ways the inter-war Harlem Renaissance had started.

So back to them. The American Youth. They’d been battered in the second war to end all wars - the war over all wars - which in degree of destruction outgrew the Great War (WW1) due to technological advancement. An advancement that also brought home the use of radio and the mass transmission of music directly to the personal consumer. The radio, now a semi-handheld device, receiving signals which through one experienced the world. The world of sound. The world of spirited sound at times: that one unique form of expression which in its very center lies a dual concept: the form, music and its bodily manifestation, the dance.

Bird

«Where’s the tape».

«Where’s the tapes, man», that was the idiom, the saying not shouted - the saying whispered between small cells of freaks, American freaks. Tapes where the spirits calling them were Dizzy, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Prez, Coltrane, Lady Day and the meanest of them all, Bird .

For even though this in many ways was the age of the trumpet, it was Charlie Bird Parker, the saxophonist who was the king of bop - the main architect of the shift in the rhythm of the American soul, wherein lied the earlier dichotomous, now cacophonous spirit - an American spirit which wasn’t at ease anymore - it was a’moanin and a’ groanin - yes, baby that spirit was a’singing.

The music chased something - strutted or lay behind - sauntering - always in total awareness…

…of how cool 

it might ‘seem’ to ‘get’ «there»,

but never quite getting there, 

but in the ‘getting’ itself,

you sort’ve ‘got’ «there»?

*Someone good in math could properly sort this out with x’s and y’s… «I’ll never need to learn it». Well, I think I just needed it there, fucking algebra. Does literary algebra count?

Fitzgerald and Monroe. Titans who crossed over picket fences and gutters - becoming symbols of all of America.

Well, what I am alluding anyways, by way of poetry, is the prime spark of that low-down American cool - a near-industrial pursuit which in its ambiguity started the modern sensibility of breaking down so-called ‘barriers’ - through the purity of its being.

We’re talking about the style-tired, the bravado-effeminate, the lust-sexless and the sex-without-lust: the drink without measure, the toke never-ending - the search sublime without god and a god sublime in his unholiness. The love without meaning or direction and the mapped out road to ecstacy without the fawns of romance. 

The birth of the cool…

TBC

Free Palestine

‘gassed out