This text introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a penetrating analysis of Cool's history, psychology and significance. The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. This book traces Cool's origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. The authors examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flaneurs of the 18th and 19th centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s.
Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI)
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'Packed with interesting stuff' --The Sunday Times
'The authors investigate with a fair measure of their own detachment, and the breadth of their study indicates that they really do know where it's at.' --Independent on Sunday
'A fascinating, scholarly work, pinning down a determinedly elusive subject.' --Literary Review
'The authors investigate with a fair measure of their own detachment, and the breadth of their study indicates that they really do know where it's at.' --Independent on Sunday
'A fascinating, scholarly work, pinning down a determinedly elusive subject.' --Literary Review
About the Author
Dick Pountain is a non-executive director of Dennis Publishing and a former reviews editor on Ink and Oz magazines. David Robins is the author of Tarnished Vision: Crime and Conflict in the Inner City (1992).
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
The attitude of cool can be traced back to the ancient civilizations of West Africa, from which it was brought west by the slave trade. It can also be found in the English aristocratic reserve and the Romantic irony of nineteenth-century poets. The modern version of cool was kept alive among black musicians, until it was discovered by Hollywood and hard-boiled crime writers of the 1930s and 1940s, and injected into white culture by Elvis Presley and rock and roll. Along the way, cool found its way into the Surrealists, the Beat Generation, film noir, conceptualism, rock, soul, funk, hip-hop and techno.
A general definition might be as a permanent state of private rebellion. Permanent because cool isn't a "phase" in life; private because cool means individual, not collective, defiance. Today, cool, which originally opposed subjugation and humiliation, has become a means for the media and advertisers of the world to push their way into the wallets of young consumers. Cool still flirts with living on the edge, and loves the night. Despite government health warnings, cool still loves, cigarettes, drugs and liquor. It has started to admit women, but is more in love with violence than in the past. Even though cool has emerged in different societies during different periods of history, it can be recognized as a combination of three personality traits: narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment.
This book won't reveal how to acheive cool (because the definition changes all the time), but it otherwise does an excellent job at analyzing the subject for those on the outside.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
If you believe in Platonic essences, read this book. It will give you the essence of Cool, in as intelligent, persuasive and well-informed way as you could hope. If you do not believe in Platonic essences, you should still read this book. It may persuade you that Plato knew what he was talking about.
What is cool then?
Cool is unpredictable, unconventional, non-routine, anti-bourgeois, anti-domestic, dangerous, uncomfortable, non-rational, detached, engaged, self-contradictory. It is youthful, it is thin, it is passionate but not sentimental. it is dying in many different ways.
Cool rules! But for how much longer?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
A wonderful book, well thought out, lucid and cogent, detailed without ever becoming bogged-down in overly analytical discussion of irrelevant contextualisation. The essence of Cool is most certainly found, in as much as it can be found. Read alongside No Logo, Coercion, Nobrow, and Guy Debord, and you have as near as you can get to a guide for living in modern-day capitalist consumer culture.
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This is a terrific book. If you believe in Platonic essences and you want to touch the essence of cool, then read this book. If you do not believe in Platonic essences, reading this book may change your mind.
Whether looking at music, drugs, work, consumption, politics, aesthetics or relations, Pountain and RObins identify Cool as the dominant attitude of the age. Combining obsessive aversion to authority, ironic detachment, hedonism and narcissism, Cool rules indeed. But, it no longer stands for rebellion, at least not a rebellion which threatens directly market-led consumerism. On the contrary, Cool discovers in rebellion a style, an attitude of mind which can easily be satisfied by fashion, image and advertising.
This book deserves to be ranked with Sennett's and Ritzer's recent works as one of the sharpest cultural critiques of our fin-de-siecle.
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