COOL RULES
Dick Pountain and David Robins
(Reaktion Foci, 188pp; £12.95)
In what may well have been his sole known interesting utterance, John Travolta once denied being cool. But on the other hand, he added, he was better at acting cool than anybody else in the world.
It’s a shame that this piercing aperçu was unavailable to Dick Pountain and David Robins when they were devising and preparing Cool Rules — is the title an adjective followed by a noun, or a noun followed by a verb? — because it tells us a great deal about the recent history of this most desirable and nebulous of qualities. This slim but densely-packed volume, appropriately packaged in a nice cool blue and adorned with a photo of James Dean, is the work of two veterans of OZ and Ink, former members in good standing of the left-political wing of the ’60s underground. It sets out to explore the platonic essence of Cool, and how it remains constant as fashions shift and the more perishable notion of ‘hip’ is forced into a continual process of perpetual redefinition in order to avoid deliquescing into its polar opposite: ‘naff.’ One of the defining aspects of Cool is that it prefers to recognise itself rather than explain itself. It is therefore an act of profound cultural courage to set out out to explain and define Cool.
What it is, what it isn’t: the authors dispose in short order of two superficial definitions. One is that of calm inflappability, as in ‘keeping (or the reverse: blowing) one’s cool’ or being ‘a cool customer.’ The other is as a nonspecific indicator of approval — ‘that’s cool’ — which, depending on context or intonation, can mean anything from ‘brilliant’ or ‘fabulous’ to a shrugging yeah-sure-whatever which translates as barely-okay-but-I-can’t-be-arsed-to-make-a-big-deal-of-it.
True Cool — capitalised by the authors to indicate the underlying substance of the concept — may shift its surface characteristics (other than the eternal sunglasses-after-dark) — but its fundamental nature remains a constant. It is this deepseated ur-Cool which Pountain and Robins seek to anatomise, and anatomise it they do. Its history takes in everything from sprezzatura, the sang-froid of Renaissance Italian princes and courtiers, to the ironically exaggerated deference, barely masking stoic defiance, of those who had unwillingly become African-Americans, and such 20th century icons as Brando and Brecht, Bogart and Bacall, Dean and Dietrich, Keith Richards and Billie Holiday.
Cool is where self-possession blurs into self-obsession; where sang-froid — ‘Isn’t it nice,’ sang Lou Reed, whose cool verges on self-parody, ‘when your heart’s made out of ice’ — flirts with outright callous numbness. Cool knows when institutionalised sentimentality should be countered with dry-witted, poker-faced reserve; and also when an uptight and puritanical culture should be confronted with passionate and emotionally authentic expression. Most of all it knows — as did so many of the great jazz, soul and rock performers so venerated for their pure, uncorrupted Cool — when and how to combine the two.
In political terms, Cool represents bad news for both right and left: it ‘[embraces] both economic and social laissez-faire, sharing the far right’s mistrust of governmental spying and meddling, but not their moralism or “family values”. Cool is by preference apolitical, but if forced to take sides will usually side with the more libertarian option, which may be on the left or right in different historical contexts. There is a sense in which Cool is the inverse of Fascism, which embraces precisely the opposite combination — repressively conservative social policies with corporate economics.’ Which may explain why Tony Blair will never be cool, no matter how many Stratocasters and Gallaghers he may pose with; and why Bill Clinton, no matter how reactionary his policies or how weasely his behaviour, is.
Which brings us back to John Travolta. This side of the millennial divide, Cool is, so to speak, on ice. Cool has gone cold precisely because its superficial characteristics have been so profoundly embraced by the market that it has run face-first — or, if you prefer, shades first — into the cultural paradox of mass bohemianism. If everybody’s cool — and, these days, anybody prepared to pore over their style bibles and make a few key purchases can consider themselves cool (-ish) — then nobody’s cool. And if cool — capitalised or not — can be bought, then effectively it barely exists.
Cool may not be dead, but it’s been battery-farmed and neatly packaged: in fact, it is now available from a ‘chilled goods’ counter somewhere near you. Commodification has come closer to exterminating Cool than any ‘just say no’ campaign could ever do. Until it awakens from its Arthurian slumber, then, Pountain and Robins have provided Cool with an appropriately elegant headstone.
Independent, 2000
