Interview with Ted Gioia, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

Ted Gioia is an author and musician, responsible for several scholarly, yet avidly readable chronicles on the history of blues, jazz and work songs. His most famous book, The History of Jazz, is an epic sprawling survey of this century’s most dynamic genre. His new work, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, is a cultural study of the social attitudes of the 20th century, how ‘cool’ became the prevailing style, and how advertisers use it to their advantage.

Gioia will be at BookPeople on Thursday, January 14th at 7 PM, to read and sign copies of the new book.

When did cool become more than the attitude of a few mid-century hipsters and start to become a cultural mindset? At the close of the 1950s, Life magazine estimated that there were fewer than 1,000 hipsters in San Francisco, around 2,000 in Los Angeles, and a comparable numbers in a few pockets of activity elsewhere in the country. But a decade later, the behavior styles of these bohemians and beatniks had become commonplace in the broader culture. And by the time you get into the 1970s, almost everyone under the age of thirty in the United States had been changed, in some degree, by the cool revolution. By any measure, this shift was one of the great transformations of the American psyche in modern times.

Doesn’t cool derive most of it’s power from being anti-establishment, or counter-cultural? How does “cool” as an attitude work when it’s the cultural standard? That’s part of the problem with cool. It started out as a way of expressing the individual in contrast to the established powers. But when the establishment begins controlling the cool—as gradually happened during the second half of the 20th century—a backlash will inevitably take place. A key theme of my book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, is to outline and predict the shape of that backlash. But the overall picture is quite clear. Back in the 1950s, if you had asked random people what they associated with the word “cool,” they would have invariably named a person—James Dean, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac. But today, it you ask that same question, people will often mention a product, an iPhone or iPod or a pair of stylish running shoes. Cool was once a personal vibe, but now it has become a selling point on merchandise. This blatant commoditization is one of the leading causes of what I call the “death of the cool.”

Your assertion that shaping one’s persona and life like a”great work of art” is mostly a modern phenomenon definitely caught my attention. Do you feel that this expectation has led to some disgruntled people who prior to the advent of cool, would have enjoyed simply working, living and being without the expectation of doing it with “style”? Cool can mess up your life. No question about it. I describe many ways that this happens in my book. Perhaps the key problem is that the moment you decide to be cool, you are forced to constantly look to others for feedback and approval. Cool is in the eye of the beholder. You may think you have the most righteous hairdo or the coolest running shoes, but they aren’t really cool unless others validate them as such. Because of this, there is a certain neurotic quality to the cool lifestyle. Instead of being driven by deeply held internal values, it constantly must change to keep up with the crowd.

Douglas Rushkoff produced a great special for PBS, The Merchants of Cool, about how ‘Madison Avenue’ has turned the hunt for and marketing of cool into a vacuous cycle. In your book you seem to have a similar opinion, that commerce has kind of sucked the life out of our cultural landscape. Even if ‘cool’ is on the wane, will it ever be possible to keep culture and commerce separate again? Over time, the broader culture resists this kind of manipulation. This can be measured in many ways. The average Chief Marketing Officer in a US corporation now only lasts 27 months on the job—this is the most tenuous job in the executive office. Companies are constantly firing the marketing guy. And why? Because the techniques of manipulating the cool don’t work the way they once did. The research on this is clear. In a recent survey, one-third of respondents said they would accept a lower standard of living in order to get rid of marketing and advertising. How often do people admit to pollsters that they want to lower their standard of living? Almost never. But people are so fed up with the hype and manipulation, that they want it all to go away—even at a cost to themselves.

Outside of the amazing works of art and music ‘cool’ has created, do you think cool as a cultural de facto has had a positive or negative impact on our society? Although I write about the death of cool in my book, I have an abiding nostalgia for the glory days of cool. I was originally attracted to this subject because, like many people, I found the concept of cool appealing. It was a magical way of transforming the ho-hum life into something special and glamorous. Yet, on the other hand, I recognize that the cult of coolness is mostly exhausted as a way of shaping our lives and our culture.

Describe your idea of the “New Sincerity” movement, and what it could mean for the future of pop culture? As cool falls by the wayside, different personality styles and cultural styles are replacing it in American life. I write about the “new sincerity,” which is typical of these approaches. In truth, there are many post-cool or anti-cool lifestyles emerging, and I describe a dozen or so of them in my book. But the key elements are earnestness, simplicity, and a focus on the down-to-earth and the natural, rather than the glitzy and glamorous. You can see this transformation everywhere—in movies, media, music, business, even politics and religion.