Ted Gioia on Why Cool is Dead

The Birth and Death of the Cool

[@avantgardenovelist]

Wow, what a great interviewer. Every bit worthy of the great author she's interviewing. Bravo!!!

[@deadbeatdynamo]

Cool is not dead, it just smells funny.

[@HollywoodRecordingStudio]

Wow - love the questions and responses. Learned a lot from this

[@tenbroeck1958]

Ted Gioia is a brilliant guy.

[@javiceres]

Indeed

[@charlesjacques750]

‘I don’t know if I can define it.. but I know it when I see (or hear) it.’

[@dylankelly7081]

'What is hip? Tell me tell me... What's hip today , Might become passe...'

[@jonunderscore]

As long as Ted is around, cool lives.

[@atendriyadasa6746]

Cool is a musical or any experience that brings hOMe a PEAK FEELING, the "chills" or goose bumps.

[@finisterfoul]

Great observations

[@djzouke]

I believe that it was James Hillman or Thomas Moore who said that the word connotes lack of feeling and a disconnection from matters of the heart. I can see that.

[@jeffblanks529]

A good thing would be to oompare "cool" with the related concept of "hip", which is more socially-driven than "cool". The sort of "anti-cool" that Ted Gioia talks about has, in a way, been a thing since Elvis Costello came along, to the extent that anti-cool is its own kind of cool. In fact, anti-cool has pretty much been the prevalent kind of cool over the last 45 years. OTOH, that sort of "anti-cool" is also precisely "ironic"--"I'm so cool I can be square", so to speak. It is, in a way, a profoundly conservative re-conception of "square" as the ultimate "cool", an idea so *hip* from the get-go that otherwise-progressive and liberal-minded people have flocked to it for over four decades--a counterculture for reactionary times.. Cool is social, sure, but it's also personal. As for "eccentricity" (also a relative concept, as it depends on an established "center"), you could say that it's especially needed in a society such as ours, where mass production fosters conformism. I've found that people often value the eccentric today, precisely in what seem to be our more conformist times, as opposed to the '60s and the times in their wake. "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible", said Frank Zappa, and any such deviation is liable to be tagged as "eccentricity". Lady Gaga might be popular precisely because she's at least trying show people what a liberated life looks like. I get the desire for a "New Earnestness". I have it myself--"terminal irony" has had us all running in circles for decades. But it won't necessarily mean The Death Of Cool. It may mean the death of "hip", though.

[@smileybubbles9894]

Miles Davis died September 28th 1991 The death of the cool🎺

[@Guallera]

her hat is so Cool

[@maximusindicusoblivious180]

Forget the cool hat. She's maga hot.

[@studio107bgallery4]

Cool will always be Cool, and groovy will always be groovy…..

[@johndoyle5706]

I always thought that the modern idiom 'cool' was essentially a detached/non conformist person. This person may also 'dress' in a cool way that starts new trends. The only real things that chimed for me were it emanating from Jazz and that it changes from generation and group. More likely fir me is that it's a state of mind. I thought some of his assertions were wide of the mark, but maybe I've misunderstood.

[@orshovaly682]

I think you did understand… it’s Ted that doesn’t understand unfortunately

[@urbandecay3436]

I'm not cool, I'm just slick. 😎

[@hussstuart]

Good content but very poor sound quality

[@jeffjfindley4802]

Cool hat!

[@birdworldist]

Hug

[@ronlight7013]

I think Gioia is correct only to a limited degree, and like others here feel he goes gravely off-course. His understanding of history, for example, is surprisingly off kilter. Cool as a construct can be seen today with origins in the slave era. Cool wasn’t a fashion, and it wasn’t just an aloof attitude. It’s not a true component of “hip.” What does it mean when someone tells you, “be cool”? Especially if you’re “holding.” Being “cool” inferred the element of subterfuge to avoid detection or interference by slaveholders. Later on, it took on a more generalized meaning of social restraint, unattachment, or nonchalance. Richard Pryor built a great bit around this, because everyone got the joke about ACTING cool when you’re actually burning up inside. :-) Pryor ran away from an ass kicking, but he ran “cool.”

[@JPVillalobos27]

Do you have a reference for where the term cool was used by slaves?

[@ronlight7013]

@@JPVillalobos27 I've read a fair bit of pop music and popular culture history, so In all honesty I don't specifically recall. It's not so much the word as the construct of "cool" that emanates from slave days and remains salient throughout the modern jazz era.

[@deirdre108]

I don't get his criticism of Boyle--she's got killer chops. So was this "death of cool" prefigured by the "hip to be square" ethos of the '80's?

[@redlumb953]

This just seems mixed-up and the definition he seems to have in his head leads to bizarre judgements. Clinton talking about his boxers was cool but Obama's disdain for such questions wasn't? Would Miles Davis have talked about his boxers?

[@koalabandit9166]

I think that if Obama had expressed disdain in the sense of being too stylish or superior to be talking about his boxers, that could possibly have been "cool". His attitude was that he takes his job too seriously to respond to that sort of question, which is most definitely uncool. It's probably not easy to define the word precisely, but I don't think Gioia's views are bizarre. It seems to me that's how I use the word as well.

[@maximusindicusoblivious180]

Yes he would. Miles was a boxer :).

[@andrewiwm9980]

The world is too poor to be cool, post wwII there was a glut of money being thrown at everyone and it ended up in a baby boom but now that’s all gone and people are just being honest enough to recognise it… there’s nothing wrong with that tbh

[@walkercatenaccio]

This seems wrong to me. Louis Armstrong was cool - as well as hot. Duke Ellington in the 1930's, Charlie Parker in the 1940's weren't just cool insofar as they were excellent, or even stylish, but because they appeared to smile and float over both musical challenges and personal troubles.

[@tarp11z]

I don't find Lady Gaga cool.

[@igorbuttos9044]

the girl is pretty

[@darryljones7100]

I am a fan of Mr GioIa's book on the history of jazz but I disagree with almost every aspect of his definition of cool. I have not yet read his most recent book but in my estimation, anyone who thinks cool is dead doesn't have any idea what cool really is. Cool is a response to oppression. A way of acting as if you are unaffected by the knife's edge of being seen or treated as less than. A man who comes to the assistance of someone being bullied and takes a beat down for his trouble but picks himself up, calmly retrieves his fedora, brushes it off and places it back on his head slightly cocked to the side before calmly walking away is expressing the essence of cool. A southerner who is up north and is treated rudely by a store clerk who takes the southerner's accent to mean he is uneducated. When the southerner still treats that same clerk with respect and politeness, he is expressing cool. If the clerk has any sense of decency he must reflect on the encounter and think to himself, who was the uneducated brute in this scenario? It certainly wasn't the southerner. For those who know what cool really is, we would say of such an encounter, the southerner killed that clerk, with cool. That Mr Gioia has the wisdom to mention Miles Davis in his definition of cool is only partly laudable because Miles wasn't cool because of how he dressed or acted. He was cool because of how he made all the years of hard work he did to capture genius, look so effortless.

[@lizkneebone7989]

I agee with you....

[@ref6122]

I love hearing him talk but his hand movements are so distracting I have to block out the video and only only listen to the audio.

[@stevendavis1940]

Gioia doesn't understand cool.