The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style.
If African-American slang is the cradle of the new kind of cool, then jazz culture was its nursemaid. Popular American music was already quite friendly to the vernacular, but swing-style jazz went so far as to turn language into a self-conscious plaything. Starting in 1938, Cab Calloway began publishing his “Hepster’s Dictionary,” a pamphlet explaining that “jive talk is now an everyday part of the English language. Its usage is now accepted in the movies, on the stage, and in the song products of Tin Pan Alley.”
Subverting the usual method of explaining unusual words in more familiar language, the “Hepster’s Dictionary” was the un-Webster’s. To be unhep was to be “not wise to the jive, said of an icky, a Jeff, a square.” A square was an “unhep person (see icky; Jeff).” And an icky was “one who is not hip, a stupid person.” A Jeff was “a pest, a bore, an icky.”
The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. Norman Mailer, a close reader of Anatole Broyard, was clearly influenced by Broyard’s essays on the subject, but made the connection to black culture even more explicit in “The White Negro.”
Mailer’s essay is a manifesto of sorts, against conformity, against large organizations, modern society, squares, and anyone else helping to uphold the big lie of American life. He spoke for those who, having lived through World War II, now understood that all could die at any second. Humanity had proven itself a great collective murderer, and the modern state was its greatest weapon. White people, Mailer tried to show, were thus forced into the condition of black people who had lived “on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”
The Negro knew “in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war.” So, he lives for the present, as does the hipster who, according to Mailer, has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro.”
Among those who criticized Mailer, James Baldwin, who did not appreciate the way Mailer eroticized black people, considered the essay “downright impenetrable.” Given the controversy it created.
It is generally believed that it is not until the sixties that cool goes viral, as we would say. But before it does, Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) takes up its meaning in his 1963 history of blues and jazz, Blues People. For Jones, the obvious context for a discussion of cool is the recent history of cool jazz and the longer history of African-American inequality. More or less a beatnik at the time, Jones was already a provocateur, although his take on cool could be described as conventional by today’s standards.
It also reminds us of another function of slang, one elucidated recently by Michael Adams in his book Slang: The People’s Poetry. Slang is creative, aesthetically interesting, and rich in meta-commentary, some of which becomes hard to discern just a few years later, less so perhaps in the case of a word like cool, which is still readily used and readily understood, but at times can be a little hard to nail down.
Sources: neh.gov, press.uchicago.edu
Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style.
If African-American slang is the cradle of the new kind of cool, then jazz culture was its nursemaid. Popular American music was already quite friendly to the vernacular, but swing-style jazz went so far as to turn language into a self-conscious plaything. Starting in 1938, Cab Calloway began publishing his “Hepster’s Dictionary,” a pamphlet explaining that “jive talk is now an everyday part of the English language. Its usage is now accepted in the movies, on the stage, and in the song products of Tin Pan Alley.”
Subverting the usual method of explaining unusual words in more familiar language, the “Hepster’s Dictionary” was the un-Webster’s. To be unhep was to be “not wise to the jive, said of an icky, a Jeff, a square.” A square was an “unhep person (see icky; Jeff).” And an icky was “one who is not hip, a stupid person.” A Jeff was “a pest, a bore, an icky.”
The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. Norman Mailer, a close reader of Anatole Broyard, was clearly influenced by Broyard’s essays on the subject, but made the connection to black culture even more explicit in “The White Negro.”
Mailer’s essay is a manifesto of sorts, against conformity, against large organizations, modern society, squares, and anyone else helping to uphold the big lie of American life. He spoke for those who, having lived through World War II, now understood that all could die at any second. Humanity had proven itself a great collective murderer, and the modern state was its greatest weapon. White people, Mailer tried to show, were thus forced into the condition of black people who had lived “on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”
The Negro knew “in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war.” So, he lives for the present, as does the hipster who, according to Mailer, has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro.”
Among those who criticized Mailer, James Baldwin, who did not appreciate the way Mailer eroticized black people, considered the essay “downright impenetrable.” Given the controversy it created.
It is generally believed that it is not until the sixties that cool goes viral, as we would say. But before it does, Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) takes up its meaning in his 1963 history of blues and jazz, Blues People. For Jones, the obvious context for a discussion of cool is the recent history of cool jazz and the longer history of African-American inequality. More or less a beatnik at the time, Jones was already a provocateur, although his take on cool could be described as conventional by today’s standards.
It also reminds us of another function of slang, one elucidated recently by Michael Adams in his book Slang: The People’s Poetry. Slang is creative, aesthetically interesting, and rich in meta-commentary, some of which becomes hard to discern just a few years later, less so perhaps in the case of a word like cool, which is still readily used and readily understood, but at times can be a little hard to nail down.
Sources: neh.gov, press.uchicago.edu
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