What is Cool? Reading List
Nice and eclectic to provoke your thoughts.
Dear all,
We are meeting for Thinking Through Cool on March 8th at Colbo Next Door. Please reserve your spot here if you haven’t done so. Below find the reading materials to help us approach the question of cool from various angles.
Looking forward to our discussion.
All the best,
Ece
I. Cool Across the Globe
Marketing professors asked nearly 6,000 people across 12 countries from Brazil, to Korea and Nigeria, what makes a person cool, and respondents around the world agreed on six core traits.
Do you agree with those traits?
You can find more details about the study here.
II. Black Origins
1. The Birth of The Cool: The Genius of Miles Davis
What does the emergence of cool jazz, as a departure from hot-tempered bebop, reveal about the meaning of “cool,” especially Miles Davis’s “So What”, which stands as cool jazz’s clearest musical expression?
2. What is Cool? : Understanding Black Manhood in America by Marlene Kim Connor (1995)
Connor traces the origins of cool back to captivity and enslavement. She argues that cool emerged as a survival mechanism under slavery where any visible display of emotion, anger, fear, joy, or love, would be met with violence. Emotional restraint became a form of self-protection and resistance. By appearing emotionally impenetrable to oppressors, enslaved people preserved a sense of dignity and control.
After emancipation, cool developed into a code of Black masculinity. Black men had to construct an achievable and respectable form of manhood while being systematically denied the social and economic markers available to white men such as stable employment, breadwinning wages, property ownership, social respectability. Cool composure became a way to claim dignity, authority, and self-possession despite these constraints.
According to Connor, jazz later provided the cultural expression of this attitude, and the men who performed it became its embodiment. She argues that Miles Davis personified this rebellious stance. His cool reflected a growing pride in a distinct Black style and presence within American society. Davis would arrive late to performances, play with his back turned to the audience, and refuse to smile or banter with white listeners, refuse to seek their approval.
** I can’t make the book available publicly. If you want a copy of the chapter reach out to me.
3 . Keep Cool, Man:The Negro Rejection of Jazz by Anatole Broyard (1951)
Broyard’s opinion piece is Connor’s opposite, defining cool as Black people’s self-denial. Broyard argues that early jazz’s exuberant “get hot” mentality symbolized a celebration of freedom among Blacks after emancipation. On the other hand, “cool” styles reflect a distancing from jazz’s original communal roots and from Black struggle, as the jazz player, particularly Miles Davis, emerges as a performer for the white audience. According to Broyard, cool jazz represents an aspiration toward Anglo-Saxon restraint, but it also leads to a kind of emotional anesthesia among Blacks.
Maybe Broyard was right, maybe he was projecting? You can read about his interesting life here.
*This text was written in 1957 and reflects the terminology of its time, some of which is outdated and offensive today.
III. Italian Origins: Is cool marker of higher social class?
1. Sprezzatura
In discussions of cool, the Italian concept of sprezzatura often comes up. Coined by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528), a prescriptive courtesy book dealing with issues of etiquette, self-presentation, and morals at royal courts, sprezzatura described a studied nonchalance, the ability to make difficult things look effortless. This raises a question: is cool, like sprezzatura, fundamentally a marker of social class?
2. Bourdieu’s Theory of Taste : Good Taste as a Marker of Class Distinction
Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste is not a personal, innate preference, but a social construct determined by class, education, and upbringing. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he posits that "good taste" is a marker of higher socioeconomic class, acting as a form of cultural capital that reinforces social hierarchies and class distinctions. What appears as natural aesthetic preference is actually learned behavior that signals and reproduces one’s position in the social order.