Geoffrey Nunberg

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Rebirth of the Cool

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- I was about eleven or twelve when I got my first LP record, from a friend of my parents who liked jazz and who had found out that I was taking saxophone lessons. It was called Konitz meets Mulligan and it featured the two saxophonists plus Chet Baker on trumpt and Joe Mondragon on bass. I haven't heard it for thirty years or more, but I can still sing for you all of the solos on "Too Marvelous for Words." It was pretty amazing, not at all like "The Bluebells of Scotland," which is what we were rehearsing in the school band. The liner notes said that what I was listening to was cool jazz. I'll say it was.

There were a lot of white kids back in the 50s who learned about cool from Gerry Mulligan, whether from his own playing or to the arrangements he did for other musicians, especially the epochal "Birth of the Cool" LP that Miles Davis recorded in 1950. That was just about the time that the superlative use of cool first surfaced in the mainstream press, though it had been around in black speech for at least 20 years before that. An article in the New Yorker in 1951 explained to readers that "cool [is] the current word for hot in musical terminology."

The midwife of cool was the hipster, the type exemplified by Chandler Brossard, Lord Buckley and Lennie Bruce, not to mention lots of wannabes who assiduously practiced snapping their their fingers on the upbeat. This was the figure that Norman Mailer described in a in a famous essay called "The White Negro," which presented the hipster as an urban adventurer, a new phenomenon in American life. "[He] moves like a cat," Mailer said, "slow walk, quick reflexes; he dresses with a flick of chic." Above all, the hipster spoke a new language that "gave expression to abstract states of feeling" which Mailer exemplified with the sentence, "That cat is really on his groove, dad."

In retrospect, of course, it's hard to believe anybody ever talked like that in earnest. That's the way slang is: outrageous on the way in, outlandish on the way out. And by all the laws of language, cool should have died a natural death around 1963 along with most of the rest of hipster lingo. It should have been replaced by gear and fab, which were themselves replaced by groovy and far out, which were replaced by rad and boss, which were replaced by dope and hot again. Who'd have figured that cool would survive the decade, much less the century?

Some people claim that cool has never been out of favor: as an architect friend of mine put it, hey, cool is eternal. Others are sure the word fell out of fashion and was then revived. That's always the way with retro: sometimes it's hard to tell who's just bought that furniture and who's had it all along. Over the last forty years or so, cool has undergone an almost constant series of revivals and redefinitions. The hippies picked up on it in the seventies and spun off a new antonym uncool. A decade later, the surfers renewed it in the expression way cool. There's the rap cool of performers like Kool Mo Dee and Coolio. And finally there's the cool of the digital age -- "click here for cool stuff," or "today's cool web site." I call this one terminal cool. It has its own special pronunciation, where it becomes a muffled grunt of approval. Coo-uhl. Coo-uhl.

I suppose this is Mailer's vindication. Every time cool is reinvented the hipster makes a flickering reappearance in American life, and maybe never so imanently as now. It's of a piece with the revival of the goatee and the Gap ads that say "Neil Cassady wore khakis." And when you think about it, the hipster is a perfect model for the 90's. Quietly disaffected, mordantly ironic, still working for Time Inc. and writing a novel on the side. In 1957 Mailer estimated that there were 100,000 hipsters in America; now you'd be hard put to find that many squares. Is everybody cool here? Solid.

JWR contributor Geoffrey Nunberg is a Consulting Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. The author of, most recently, "The Way We Talk Now," he also chairs the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Comment by clicking here.

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