I'm proud to announce the online publication of an essay commissioned by the World War II Museum for their website, "The Origins of 'Cool' in Post-WWII America." There are new aspects of my work here, including anti-racism, etymology, the cultural politics of jazz in the Cold War, and why jazz transformed from "hot music" into cool music. Postwar authors Ralph Ellison and Simone de Beauvoir help guide the ride through the usual postwar cool suspects: Miles Davis, Sinatra, Lester Young and Billie Holiday, Bogart, Ellington, The Beats, Elvis. This is the most accessible (and free!) cool essay of mine on the internet. Thanks to the good folks at the WW2 Museum for the opportunity.
My new Jazz book is out!
I am proud to announce my short narrative history of jazz is officially released into the world. I wrote it for people without any musical knowledge since jazz hides in plain sight in global culture: it is the musical revolution that led to soul, rock, funk, and hip-hop. Jazz is a story of art, race, rebellion, and freedom that I tell through its development in the African-American communities of five American cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Los Angeles. With Spotify playlists!
God Bless America’s music critic, Ann Powers (NPR), for this beautiful blurb:
“It's hard to throw your arms around a universe, but Joel Dinerstein does so with grace and great insight in this essential guide to America's art form. Designed with maximum musical interaction in mind, it guides the reader by offering multiple views on jazz history —its relationship to cities, to Black migration, and to politics; its sonic evolution in streets, clubs and concert halls; its many personalities, from legends like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis to central but less famous figures like Ben Webster and Hamid Drake. "Jazz is everywhere," Dinerstein declares. This kaleidoscopic little book proves that. A great addition to the shelf for a newcomer to the music or anyone who wants to enrich a lifetime of listening.”
And you can read it in an afternoon.
Dig in!
White Supremacy and the #ChineseVirus
A disease has spread to all human populations for the first time in human history.
President Trump’s continual attacks on China have a racial component encoded in his use of the phrase, “the Chinese Virus.” In fact, the hashtag #ChineseVirus is still used twice a minute by his Twitter followers. I wrote this piece on Medium.com to focus on how racism works for the president within a global context.
Can Joe Biden Ever Be (Made) Cool
Since young people made Bernie Sanders and #TheNotoriousRBG cool, can it happen for Joe Biden? A difficult task, surely, but someone should be working on it — after all, it’s only the free world that’s at stake.. So I published my first piece on Medium.com on the possibility of a Biden brand.
Camus, Bogart, and Being Cool
Albert Camus' The Plague remains a bestseller during the pandemic in part because Dr. Rieux, the protagonist, provides an object lesson in being cool. I refer to cool in its original meanings as they came out of post-World War II culture: to be stoic, resilient, and uncomplaining; to survive with dignity and style in the face of uncontrollable larger forces. Dr. Rieux serves people for no reward and knows he may catch the disease — and die from it — at any time. This is the situation of our medical workers right now.
Camus was often told he looked like Bogart and enjoyed the compliment. To the French, Bogart was the global avatar of existentialism in cinema. “The raison d'etre of his existence was in some sense just to survive," the French film critic Andre Bazin wrote in tribute. "Distrust and weariness, wisdom and skepticism: Bogey is a Stoic.” And to be a Stoic is the ancient philosophical analogy for being cool. In a key scene in Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo stares at an 8x10 glossy of Bogart (right) as if asking, "How can I ever be as cool as Bogart?"
The current analogy for Dr. Rieux would be Governor Cuomo. No matter his political and personal weaknesses, he has been the essence of cool in leadership: reserved but compassionate, straight ahead with no guff, comfortable in his own skin. The suit is not a great look: maybe he should wear a fedora and raincoat to every briefing.
Joni Mitchell wrote a song about this original meaning – called "Be Cool”, of course -- and how each person should aspire to this ideal balance of good and bad, of virtue and vice, of fire and ice. “Don’t whine,” she sings, “you’re nobody’s fool,” because—
If there's one rule to this game
Everybody's gonna name
It's be cool
Albert Camus in Paris, ca. 1946
The Plague was also an allegory of the Nazi occupation of Paris, figuring the Nazis as an invasive disease that must be cast out by the hard work and discipline of a superior system of ethics (like cool, for example). This allegory might also apply to our current political plague but there will be no vaccine. We can only be cool and keep our eyes open for the main chance to restore our democracy.
The Myth of the Caucasian Race
Last week, I had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, "The Pernicious Myth of a Caucasian Race." Many readers were surprised to find that “Caucasians” were simply invented by one German anthropologist in 1795 -- so I was gratified that the piece was widely-read and widely shared. And there were only two trolls on email and three on Twitter! The piece is drawn from my current project on the origins of racial ideas in America.
New Orleans Musical Culture
I gave a talk on New Orleans music and culture last week to a group of visiting CEOs from San Diego and I was surprised to find they were compelled by a common gentrification narrative. The spike in housing costs (and other expenses) since Katrina will soon displace a century's worth of musical continuity. Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, and Habitat For Humanity led the city to establish Musicians Village, which subsidizes some 70 or so musicians. Yet the engine for New Orleans’ continual rejuvenation of American music has always been the mentor-apprentice relationships in historical African-American neighborhoods: in musical families, in brass bands, in high school marching bands. You can read about the process in interviews in Talk That Music Talk. Connick (mentored by James Booker) and Marsalis (family band) represent two examples of this tradition, but even transplanted musicians find a supportive community across racial lines.
Gentrification is a bulldozer, not a generator of culture. So why was this group of CEOs compelled by our city’s story? Perhaps because New Orleans is the last non-generic city in America. Our musical culture is understood as irreplaceable and non-reproducible, in contrast to the nation’s gentrified upscale neighborhoods. Will our musical culture survive? I am not optimistic.
Jazz cool in the new millennium
Dublin’s Phoenix magazine features a monthly playlist and I was honored to create one aligning the current UK jazz resurgence with the US fusion of jazz and hiphop. Dig in here to hear the Sons of Kemet and Ashley Henry grooving alongside Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding and the living New Orleans tradition. Sequencing the set made me nostalgic for my 10-year stint as the Monday morning jazz DJ on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans — but not for those 5am wake-ups.
Illustration by James Boast in The Phoenix.
Cooling the planet down
This is the best activist slogan for climate change I’ve seen — admittedly, I’m biased — and it seems to have originated as an ad campaign from Stonyfield Yogurt. If so, good on them. And so it shall be my new mantra, as phrase and image: to visualize this Cool Earth rising. Happy 2019 from New Orleans.
MSNBC & LL Cool J Present: The Story of Cool
MSNBC presents a three-episode documentary, The Story of Cool, over the next three Sundays (starting on July 1). I show up in the first episode to tell the origin story. LL Cool J exec-produces and his presence connects icons of cool such as Ice Cube and Shepard Fairey with CEOs and cultural critics. The trailer hits some good keynotes: cool as "the perfect balance between substance and style," cool as "authenticity." American cool is a vernacular tradition of rebellion so let's finally reject the ahistorical analysis of Thomas Frank and Malcolm Gladwell -- cultural critics for whom cool is only a consumer process. Selling cool may work for the early adolescence set (say, 11-16) but during the crucible of self-creation -- between 17-25 -- no one really believes buying something makes you cool.
How the Light Gets In
I am on my way to the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye (UK) to give a talk on "The Secret History of Cool" and, as well, to serve on a panel debating the meaning of rebellion within consumer capitalism. Nice timing as it follows Tulane's graduation, for which I donned a fedora and shades when I couldn't find my cap. My friend and Tulane photographer Sally Asher caught me congratulating the newly-minted MA Jamal Cuthbertson and I like the look enough that I will probably keep it in the years to come.
And I tip my hat to the HTLGI people: Leonard Cohen possessed a rarefied cool worthy of having a "philosophy and music festival" named after his most hopeful turn-of-phrase.
African-Americans invented cool
African-Americans invented cool as a stylistic defiance against racism during World War II. This is simply well-documented social, historical, and linguistic fact. To be cool in the 1940s referred to the ability to be relaxed in one's own style in any environment, an act of courage and mental strength for any Black person during the Jim Crow era. Whether meaning high praise ("Cool!"), vetting someone to others ("she's cool"), or referring to a relaxed state of mind ("I'm cool, man") -- our modern usages all began in jazz culture. Jazz fan Jack Kerouac caught the new word at clubs and wrote of his "theory of cool" to Neal Cassady in 1950 and William Burroughs registered this "new word in the hipster vocabulary" in Junky (1952). By the time The Jazz Lexicon came out in 1963 -- the definitive dictionary of jazz jargon -- Robert S. Gold called cool "the protean word" of jazz culture. There were two pages of citations from magazines and a page each for "uncool" and "cool it," as well as for "hip" and "unhip." Jazz was the dominant subculture of the post-World War II era in NYC and jazz musicians' slang became the first rebellious code of cool.
from The Jazz Lexicon (1963)
Jazz legend Lester Young was the first to spread this underground gospel of cool. To be cool meant you would not Uncle-Tom -- i.e., produce a fake smile -- to show white Americans you knew your place. Young then added stylistic markers to defy the white gaze: a personal, impenetrable slang; wearing sunglasses at night; inhabiting a smoky alcohol haze for insulation. Both black and white jazz musicians put on their shades, torqued up their slang, smoked dope or shot heroin, and became cool cats. Within a decade, sociologists began writing about cool, Norman Mailer became obsessed with the concepts of hip and cool (in his Village Voice columns on "The Hip and the Square") and Leonard Bernstein registered its presence in national consciousness with "Cool" in West Side Story (1957). White appropriation and dilution of "cool" and "chill" continues, then as now. (Read more in chapters one and five of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.)
From Bogart to Brando and Dean -- The Cool Podcast
How is it that Bogart and Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck are cool and yet so are their opposite numbers, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis? I discuss this key aspect of my Cool book on Mark Lynch's podcast, Inquiry, on WCIN. The short answer: these icons spoke to different generations. Bogart, Mitchum and Stanwyck were exemplars of surviving with dignity and style -- of existential cool -- and represented the generation that grew up in the Great Depression and fought WW2. For those too young to fight and for the youngest Boomers, Brando, Dean and Elvis embodied an edgy, eroticized badboy masculinity that subverted the monolithic image of the good father from 50s sitcoms, organization men, and that great daddy-o, POTUS Dwight Eisenhower. They were rebels for adolescents (at first), representing the hollow middle of an affluent consumer society. And that's what made Jim Stark here (on the right) "tick ... *like a bomb.*"
Best review so far
By far the most comprehensive review of my arguments in The Origins of Cool has been novelist Benjamin Markovits' engaged analysis in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Markovits aptly refers to a generation's icons of cool as akin to cultural kites:
Kendrick Lamar, 2017
"There is a lot to be said for 'cool theory' as a way of talking about art and books. Dinerstein uses his cast of actors, writers and musicians as kites that show which way the cultural winds are blowing.
"'What’s cool' is a question of taste … whereas coolness depends on the interaction of a contemporary audience.
"That is why jazz matters so much here -- jazz improvisation is supposed to offer an immediate expression of what the audience (in a club) is feeling. It responds, as it were, to market forces, and fame works in a similar way."
We used to call such artists emblems of the zeitgeist (literally, the "spirit of the times"), but that word has become a cliché and fallen out of favor. That's why cool – the word -- remains the password to an American mythos: it is the exclamatory term invoked when pointing to innovative artists groping for a new cultural pattern of individuality for a given audience with consequences for social change.
The cover of Miranda Lambert's The Weight of These Wings (2016).
Kendrick Lamar (above) is one such cultural kite -- Black Lives Matter supporters chant his songs on marches -– and Miranda Lambert is another, for her embodiment of a new female country persona (right). Both have galvanized new audiences into being by publicly wrestling with the winds of change. Such artists should not be conflated or confused with celebrities – e.g., Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez -- who are more commodities (whats that are cool) than windsurfers.
The Origins of Cool in the NYTBR
In a quick, evocative notice in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, reviewer John Williams quoted two definitions of cool and then half-praised my "nerdy and convincing arguments." He then connected the instability of the postwar period to our historical moment and, in referring to the influential personae of Bogart, Kerouac, Billie Holiday, Elvis, and Brando (left), he wondered: "When have we needed their relaxed calm more?"
Passing the Page 99 Test
Book blogger Marshal Zeringue challenged me to take the p.99 test and The Origins of Cool passed the mystical test with flying colors. The reader lands on my analysis of This Gun for Hire and a definition of noir cool. Although often derided as a "pulp existentialism," noir cool was instead a stylish stoicism, a state of thoughtful calm conveyed by artistic expressions of stylized resilience. As for the early noir This Gun For Hire, it featured the first pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (left) -- looking here like the Hollywood goddess of Night -- and caught the soon-to-be Greatest Generation's youthful desire for the new cool register represented by Ladd-and-Lake's low-key eroticism.
PopMatters Understands The Origins of Cool
Popular culture can usefully be thought of as a society thinking out loud. It is a running narrative of a nation's collective mind, its conscious and unconscious. If a new word and concept arises -- as cool did in the early 1940s -- then something new is afoot in the world. Cool was a term for a brand new kind of encoded personal rebellion before social movements had mobilized, something you could feel more than explain in the actors, musicians, and writers that turned you on, whether Paul Newman (right) or Sidney Poitier, Miles Davis or Elvis, Jack Kerouac or Lorraine Hansberry. In an insightful review in the hip webzine PopMatters, reviewer Megan Volpert cuts to the quick of cool: "To be cool is to interrogate the social norms that hold us down. It’s a form of rebellion that doesn’t let cards show to police or politicians. Cool is the means by which we can cope with our lived experiences of injustice, a means of enacting hope that after these injustices are unmasked as such, there will be something better on the other side."
Volpert noted my tripartite approach to cool "as a theorist, historian and lover of popular culture [in] a book that synthesizes the best of all three domains." The Origins of Cool in Postwar America is a history of cultural workers -- actors, writers, and musicians -- at a specific moment in time and how their artistic and iconic rebellion sowed political consciousness. In short, a cool rebel draws a public line in the sand against oppression or persecution and his or her action galvanizes an audience or generation.
A great first review for The Origins of Cool
'Twas a rave from the Times Higher Education (London) and effectively summarized several of its key concepts. Robert Eaglestone called the book "superb" and "riveting," and better yet, "accessible, historical, and personable." Two weeks before that, Publisher's Weekly gave The Origins of Cool a *starred review -- meaning, keep an eye out for this one The book hits the stores officially in a week (May 17) so get 'em while they're cool. Today's plug: there are two chapters on existential cool through its literary and cinematic avatars, Albert Camus (left) and Humphrey Bogart.
The Origins of Cool
Cool has a history. My new book on the beginnings of this key American word and concept will be published on May 22 by the University of Chicago Press. The Amazon page is now up with a great cover evoking film noir and the existential crossroads of 1945 -- after all, that's why Americans needed to be cool during the Cold War. Cool did not correspond to superficial popularity or being in vogue until the '80s. In the beginning, Cool was an underground password for searchers, a public mode of covert rebellion.
Nonstop Jewish Metropolis
So, nu?, I made The Forward. This rave review of Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas frames the City through a very Jewish lens and quotes a few lines from my short essay, "The Lost World of Jewish Flatbush." If the paper only knew editor-at-large and Jamaican-American Garnette Cadogan also goes by Ethan Levy, even more Jewish love would have showered down upon my Brooklyn homeland.