The Secret History of the Word Cool

En inglés se usa con frecuencia la palabra ‘cool’ para definir aquello que encontramos de nuestro gusto. Pero ¿qué significa exactamente y de dónde viene este concepto? El historiador Joel Dinerstein nos remite a las etapas de la evolución de este término.

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Sarah Davison

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Charlie Parker and Miles Davis at Three Deuce, New York (1947)

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In its traditional sense, the word ‘cool’ in English means ‘slightly cold and refreshing’. But it is used in other ways too. A ‘cool’ person can be a nice person, someone you can trust. ‘Cool’ can be an approval, signifying the same as ‘great!’ And ‘cool’ can also be a wider descriptive term that refers to a certain style that someone has, combining a set of accessories with a way of being. This look is much-desired, but very difficult to capture.

SWING ERA JAZZ

According to the American historian Joel Dinerstein, ‘cool’ is what we call individual artists, musicians, comedians or actors who mix cultural resistance with cutting-edge aesthetic pleasure to raise awareness and command respect. While anyone can potentially be cool today, he dates the term back to 1940s African-American swing era culture. 

COOL JAZZ

Then it referred to a type of jazz music. But it also indicated a personal yet familiar style that appears on the album covers and photographs, in the concerts and interviews of some of jazz music’s most iconic figures: Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins among them.

BLACK IDENTITY

At its origins, ‘cool’ was not meant to signify that you were in vogue, and it was certainly not the commercialised image that it is today. On the contrary, it celebrated difference. It allowed those who could not protest politically to remain defiant. It was about resistance. It was about protecting black identity and individuality in a hostile white environment.

CULTURAL REBELS

Joel Dinerstein has spent twenty-five years exploring the origins and evolution of cool. In his book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America he traces its roots back to the African-American jazz music culture of the 1940s. In fact, he told Speak Up, the whole cultural concept came down to just one introspective African-American individual.

Joel Dinerstein (American accent): The whole modern usage of the term ‘cool’ comes from Lester Young. Lester Young is a jazz legend and he figured out that in an era of big bands he needed to stand out. So the first thing he did was he held his saxophone at a 45-degree angle, like a flute. Lester Young is the first person to use the phrase “I’m cool,” and what he meant by it was not I’m great … it meant, “I am relaxed, in my own style in this environment.” Which was not a simple matter for a black man in America in the 1940s. 

SOCIALLY ANXIOUS

Recreated on the iconic jazz album covers of the 1950s, from Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool to Sonny Rollins’ Newk’s Time, Lester Young came up with almost all the defining characteristics of being cool, and he did so, Dinerstein said, for a specific purpose.

Joel Dinerstein: He was very quiet, he hated conflict. He always walked in a very relaxed manner. That was a way of saying: I am going to live at my own pace. Not only does [did] he have the jazz in-group jargon but he also had his own personal slang. His manager once said that it took him three months to figure out what the hell Lester was saying. He decided, “I need to be protected from racism in my everyday life.” So he came up with wearing sunglasses at night and indoors because nobody is going to talk to a guy who is wearing sunglasses indoors.

INVENTION OF THE “HIPSTER”

Lester’s set of stylistic gestures were a way of maintaining an individuality that the majority of white society didn’t think that African-Americans even had, said Dinerstein. But a decade later many white people wanted in on it. With urbanization, a new African-American city slang emerged that white kids were desperate to learn. 

Joel Dinerstein: The language creation in this period is  fast and furious. And a lot of these words become the slang that people mistakenly think is 60s slang. Almost all of that comes from jazz. The slang that jazz musicians used had been an obsession of swing era youth culture and then Beat Culture for thirty years.

TOO COOL FOR WHITE CASH

By the mid-1960s, cool had evolved. The civil rights movement provided the opportunity for an angry African-American man to be in public. This, said Dinerstein, set the scene for the epitome of 1960s cool, the boxer Muhammad Ali. 

Joel Dinerstein: He played a psychological game both on his opponents and on white America. He changed [his name] from Cassius Clay to Mohammed Ali and angered the entire dominant white society. Rather than fight in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali went to jail for three years as a conscientious objector in the prime of his career as the world heavyweight champion. He gave up ten million dollars in earnings for his conscience. It is one of the coolest acts I have ever heard of. 

CROSSING OVER 

White cool has its own story to tell. Thanks to one iconic photo, the idea for which was borrowed from French existentialist Albert Camus, James Dean became the new teenage cool.

Joel Dinerstein: James Dean had a copy of an Albert Camus book... on the back cover is a very iconic photo. And so he gets a photo taken of himself in which he wears an overcoat with the collar up in the rain in New York, and it becomes one of the most iconic photos. James Dean made adolescent angst glamorous. He made it tragic and defiant.  

ME ME ME

It did not matter that Dean in real life was an emotional mess, said Dinerstein. Immortalised by his early death, the actor coined a cool look that was easily sold. 

Joel Dinerstein: What he left us with is what I would call the fetishisation of the self, “Why I’m important. How do I look cool?” And that is easily commodified. You can sell people that they can look rebellious. So this leads to advertising and corporations constantly anticipating how you might rebel and then selling it to you. 

LESTER’S GESTURES

By the 1980s, cool was sold out. Now, being a successful musician that made a lot of money enhanced your cool rather than otherwise. But perhaps, says Dinerstein, cool has made a comeback, thanks to former President Barack Obama.

Joel Dinerstein: In every sense of being low-key and charismatic and having things under control and being relaxed – being a little too relaxed, for some of us, when he should have been angry! – Obama takes all of his pull from a historical aesthetic of cool.   

JIVE DICTIONARY

Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary (1938) is an introduction to the slang of musicians working in New York’s Harlem. This glossary of Harlem jive is thought to be the first dictionary written by an African-American. Cab Calloway was a bandleader and jazz legend and his small book is credited with helping introduce African-American slang to white America. The language it helped preserve still lives on in American English, in terms like “boogie-woogie”, “come again?” and “hep” (now hip).

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