The prisoner of cool

 

 

I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

 

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants, Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

 

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. It has long been stuffed down my throat good and proper.  I’m no longer the Morlock I once was, but I know I am made, essentially, of mud, and am not going to rise much higher. The Eloi will forever be out of my grasp.

 

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

 

What struck me in the Bush era wass how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool. Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

 

It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

 

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

 

|”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

 

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

 

2.

The January 1, 1951 of Commentary carried an article by Anatole Broyard entitled KEEP COOL, MAN: The Negro Rejection of Jazz. In the corner of the article, there was a little bio of Broyard:  “Anatole Broyard, anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world, here lays open the deeper meaning of the injuction to “be cool, man” now current in Harlem music-making.” The ambiguity of being the anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world trailed Broyard around throughout his life.  He was a pale skinned man, apparently, and though he did not call himself white, there was a rumor that he ‘passed’ as white. Race, that chopping block in American culture! Broyard was, it is said, the figure that Phillip Roth referenced with his character Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Roth himself denied it, in a strange “letter” to Wikipedia, where this rumor was referred to as fact.

 

Whether Broyard presented himself as black – whatever that means – or had some responsibility to do so is wrapped up in the white supremacist subtext of the American dream: one that it is difficult to drain out of that dream without popping it entirely. However it is certain that he wrote a lot about black culture for magazines like Commentary, who accepted him as a “guide” – setting up one of those informant-explorer relationships that always come to a bad end, unless you have the genius to understand how to make the joke and slip the yoke, like Ralph Ellison.

 

Broyard’s essay is notable for appearing about the time that the notion of “cool” was slipping into the vocabulary of a certain white subculture, after circulating in a black sub-culture. For Broyard, the concept marks a certain loss of innocence. Broyard’s essay supposes, again and again, an equation between negro and primitive – meaning, positively, an innocent autonomy, and meaning, negatively, a certain essentialist imprisonment in which “civilization” is seen as the corruption of this innocence. The boundary at which innocence trucks with corruption is music – particularly jazz.

 

“In this period, Negro popular culture began to incorporate into its body proper certain elements of white society, drawn for the most part from the less favored ethnic and economic groups… Their incorporation as spectator, participant and devotee served to further split the consciousness of Negro popular culture. The Negro became increasingly aware of his role as creator and performer. He himself however  was still the subject matter of his performance. His music – in lyrics and feeling – remained autobiographical and continued to express his reactions to his situation.”

 

The fifties was the heyday of the Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship – you can call it the Partisan Review effect, or at least I will call it that, ho ho. It turns up all over as the master trope to understand American society, and particularly, for obvious reasons, America’s system of apartheid. This is the context in which music and civil rights and oppressions background the formation of an existential attitude. That attitude takes the term “cool” as its own master-trope. Jazz, in Broyard’s view, is terminally anchored to “hotness”, which in turn has become, after the moment of spectatorship by a curious white sub-class – one that is marked as deviant by its very interest in black culture – a property lost, an innocence that could no longer be sustained. In the moment of that gaze, hotness turns to jive.

 

There is a lot of futurity in Broyard’s essay, themes that continue – through Mailer’s The White Negro – into the sixties and into the Black Power movement itself. My view is that the imprisoning idea of “cool” comes out of this image of an innocence that is corrupted in the moment of its consumption, which is less history than a nostalgic substitute for history. Here's Broyard pursuing his thesis: “Bebop, which began in the mid-40s, was the expression of the Negro’s search for new material in this period. It was the improvised interpretation of experience of the Negro musician as immigrant in white society. Because he was a foreigner, it was a kind of gibberish.”

 

The idea that he was a “foreigner” is a product less of the real economic and social situation of apartheid – for this foreigner was, actually, a laborer and consumer in the system, and had made the system work from the very beginning not as an immigrant but as a kidnapped hostage – than  of the magic of the image of the master-slave relationship, which seemed to explain so much about racism while relying on highly abstracted essential types that could not explain the reality of a person like, say, Anatole Broyard.

 

3.

So much for cool’s background. The problem with the history of concepts is the same problem that the cowboy faces on the plain – how to move the doggies forward. In other words, how did cool transform from an existential attitude into an imprisoning trivialization of affect? Which is, you might say, sharp eyed reader, a transformation of Broyard’s myth – the fall from innocence leading us to the corruption of the present. The story surely has to do with the attractiveness of “cool” in a postwar consumer society, in which “like” and “dislike”, those responses to the handcrafted, are elevated quantitatively to responses to the mass produced. The time to like, that is, the education of the sensibility that creates a patterned liking and disliking that signifies something about character, becomes something hard to resource. Where is one going to get this time, and how is one going to afford that education? Out of this dilemma, I think, comes the solution imposed by the ”cool”. Imported from the “stranger”, the black entertainer/artist, it goes out there as a short-cut to the sentimental education that is overwhelmed by consumer culture. Which Broyard lays out in racial terms that are pretty marvelously put. I’ll finish with this paragraph about “cool music”, or jazz beyond the swing era, and its tragic flaw:

 

“The circular quality of cool music is unmistakable. The orchestrations and the solos turn back on themselves as a result of the “cool” musician’s lack of interest in the autobiographical continuities which served as program, mood or configurations of jazz, jump or wing. The circle is the most self-contained form in nature, and thus, in cool music, nothing obtrudes, the effect is zero. The supporters of this music might argue that all music- i.e. “classical” “serious, nonfolk music – is tautological or equal only to itself, but their own habit of interpreting cool music and describing the musicians’ attitudes in psychological terms would contradict this. In other words, this zero is attitudinal, not an aesthetic effect. It is the cool man’s answer to the difficult algebraic problems of the marginal man’s place in society.”

 

The algebraic problems! The problem, I guess, of the variable that represents a number which itself varies according to the formula that gives the variable its value. Now that is something for the marginal man to ponder. Un-coolly.