Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI) [Paperback]

Dick Pountain (Author), David Robins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1861890710 | ISBN-13: 978-1861890719 | Publication Date: September 2000

Cool Rules introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool's history, psychology, and importance.

The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool's ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flâneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What do Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette, Bertholt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones, Billie Holiday, James Dean, Lenny Bruce's irony, Eldridge Cleaver, Chrissie Hinde, heroin and gangsta rap all have in common? They are, for lack of a more precise word, cool. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag's germinal 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," Pountain and Robins attempt to delineate that ambiguous and elusive entity, a cultural sensibility. Declining to investigate the "ontological status" of cool ("is it a philosophy, a sensibility, a religion, an ideology... an attitude, a zeitgeist?"), they claim that we all know cool "when we see it." Their working definition is that "cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals to express defiance to authority"Aand while this might seem obvious, the pleasure of their brief, elucidating study is in the delicious details. Casting their net widely, to include films like Trainspotting, Hollywood icons, obscure books (e.g., an Italian Renaissance etiquette guide), British punk bands, Dadaists, pornography, the American Beats and gay sensibilityAthey chart how rebellions against standards of sexuality, gender, race, class, artificiality and "decency" lead to coolness. The most adventurous and insightful aspect of their investigation emerges when they trace a concept of "cool" back to the ancient Yoruba and other West African cultures. This is a cool book on cool.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

packed with interesting stuff the authors investigate with a fair measure of their own detachment, and the breadth of their study indicates that they really do know where it's at. Independent on Sunday a fascinating, scholarly work, pinning down a determinedly elusive subject. Literary Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Reaktion Books (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861890710
• ISBN-13: 978-1861890719
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The coolest book on Amazon!, October 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI) (Paperback)

This is a terrific book. If you believe in Platonic essences and you want to touch the essence of cool, then read this book. If you do not believe in Platonic essences, reading this book may change your mind.

Whether looking at music, drugs, work, consumption, politics, aesthetics or relations, Pountain and RObins identify Cool as the dominant attitude of the age. Combining obsessive aversion to authority, ironic detachment, hedonism and narcissism, Cool rules indeed. But, it no longer stands for rebellion, at least not a rebellion which threatens directly market-led consumerism. On the contrary, Cool discovers in rebellion a style, an attitude of mind which can easily be satisfied by fashion, image and advertising.

This book deserves to be ranked with Sennett's and Ritzer's recent works as one of the sharpest cultural critiques of our fin-de-siecle.

What is cool then?

Cool is unpredictable, unconventional, non-routine, anti-bourgeois, anti-domestic, dangerous, uncomfortable, non-rational, detached, engaged, self-contradictory. It is youthful, it is thin, it is passionate but not sentimental. It is dying in many different ways.

Cool rules! But for how much longer?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional, August 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI) (Paperback)

This book is important reading. I read a great deal,and
I have used ideas from this book in my college classrooms.
It is a kind of academic yet popular treatment of a subject deserving of a more lengthy study. COOL is very underrated as an attitude and way of life and that is why this book seems important to me. One reviewer said it was uncool. In a sense, yes, because it tries to be impartial rather than just being another youth culture "cool" book. I liked it so much that I bought the book AFTER I have read it from the library. The book is more of an introduction to the subject and it makes good points that young people in particular should know about.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shows how the concept of "cool" evolved, February 10, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (FOCI) (Paperback)

In Cool Rules: Anatomy Of An Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins successfully collaborate to provide readers with insights into American popular culture from African history and jazz, through 60s cinema, to 90s loft living -- all in service to defining "cool". Cool Rules reveals the line between "hip" and "cool"; shows how the concept of "cool" evolved in different cultures, the influence of British attitudes and styles on American fads and reflections of the "cool"; and a great deal more. Always informative, occasionally iconoclastic, Cool Rules is highly recommended reading for students of cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, semiotics, and the evolution of American lifestyle fads and fancies.