In the US, big corporations anxious to stay in touch with rapidly changing youth trends have employed "cool hunters", a type of undercover zeitgeist police whose job it is to trawl through the malls, the cineplexes, the clubs and the Starbucks coffee shops hunting down what's new, what's hip, what's cool. The information they collate - be it Wu Wear is cool in fashion circles, Basement Jaxx is cool in music and self-propelled scooters are cool in transport - is then fed into the marketing department, where "strategies" and "tactics" are based around these "cool" findings.
It's invariably disastrous, as anybody who has witnessed a big corporation (be it Coca Cola, Nike or IBM) trying to "get down with the kids" will testify. Like most worthwhile things, the harder you search for cool, the more difficult it is to find. And the very act of looking for cool things is in itself very uncool.
Cool is an ineffable concept. Even if you corralled all the social anthropologists, the philosophers, the semiologists and the cultural taste-makers around into a world summit, you'd still be left none the wiser as to why Bjork is cool but Kylie Minogue is not, why Larry Sanders is but Jerry Seinfeld isn't, why Martin Amis is but Nick Hornby isn't, why Lars Von Triers is but Guy Richie isn't, Diesel are, Levi's aren't, Mo Mowlam is, Tony Blair isn't . . . feel free to join in yourself.
The latest attempt to anatomise the elusive concept comes in a cool blue jacket with a photo of James Dean on the cover. Written by two academics who are both veterans of underground Leftist causes (I suspect they're recovering hippies - ugh, how uncool is that), it's called Cool Rules: An Anatomy Of An Attitude. Published under the heavy-sounding rubric Focus On Contemporary Issues, it manages to avoid being a sterile intellectual debate and actually succeeds in coming as close as conceivably possible to snaring its protean quarry, but not completely.
For such a seemingly contemporary construct, the best working definition of cool ironically dates back to a Renaissance writer (fitting that it should be an Italian, given they're so effortlessly cool at everything - except wars and football) - Baldassare Castiglione, who in his Book of the Courtier urged his readers to adopt an attitude of sprezzatura. Write it down, it's a good one: "Sprezzatura is an avoidance of affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort."
Getting somewhat giddy by their discovery that coolness existed well before 1950s jazz musicians, the Abstract Expressionists, the Beat poets, the French Situationists and dudes like Jean Baudrillard, the authors unfortunately decided to hark back even further in time for tell-tale signs of cool. They write how cool can be traced back to 3000 BC Africa, where the concept of itutu (which they translate as "cool") was a major facet of cultural life in the animistic religions of the Yorba and Ibo civilizations of west Africa. All fair enough, but when they assert that cool entered the western world due to slavery, their analysis doesn't hold up.
"In Africa, cool belonged to the realm of the sacred, but once transported to America, it evolved into a new kind of passive resistance to the work ethic through personal style," they write. This, coupled with the authors' own definition of cool - "It is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority . . . it is a permanent state of private rebellion . . . cool conceals its rebellion behind a mask of ironic impassivity" - suggests that cool came about because of how black slaves reacted to their white masters. Not only deeply suspect, it's more than a tad derogatory of the emancipation and subsequent civil rights movements in the US.
They are quite correct in identifying cool as being an oppositional attitude to authority, but the crucial difference here is that choice is involved. On slightly steadier ground, they find the first real manifestations of modern cool among Dadaists and Surrealists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, playwrights like Bertolt Brecht and between the pages of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. All were cool largely because they were creatively "outside the pale" (which was then, more so than now, an essential pre-requisite for coolness), and were faintly scandalous and hedonistic. They were also prototypically cool because their's was a "a permanent rebellion". Unlike today, where hip (which is transient and changes from season to season - just look at the fate of combat trousers) is confused with cool, back then coolness didn't have its hand forced by fashion.
From here on in it's a pretty clear run for the authors as they detail cool individuals and movements, seeking to find that quality which unifies them - that which makes them "the other" and therefore desirable. Thus, going from free-form jazz through hard-boiled crime fiction, the Beat movement, the situationists, pop art, rock music, conceptualism, punk and bang-up-to-date with hip-hop and the better end of dance/techno, all these movements are elevated to the Hall of Cool, with special mentions for individuals like Lenny Bruce, James Dean, Andy Warhol and Marlon Brando. The only women who get a look in are Lauren Bacall, Billie Holiday, Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith, but the authors do point that out that society was never that favourably disposed to female cool icons - and women were punished for attempting to be so.
Welcome please, the cool economy. "Cool now is a matter not solely for schoolyard discussions, but also for the boardrooms of all kinds of businesses, from soft drinks and snacks to clothes, cars and computers," they write. "Profits and jobs depend upon what may seem a trivial and juvenile distraction to many people." That mainstream commerce now attempts to adopt the trappings of hipness (which business always mistakes for cool) in search of greater profits is evident in the careers of Richard Branson, Apple's Steve Jobs and Ben and Jerry from the eponymous ice-cream company (who a few years ago brought out a flavour called "Cool Britannia").
As some indication of how a once noble concept has now become a mere commodity, consider the case of Levi Strauss jeans. Two years ago they had to close half their plants worldwide due to a massive slump in sales (which had halved in four years). Once the very unofficial emblem of cool, Levi's jeans (Dean, Brando etc.) were now the very antithesis of cool - the dreaded "naff". Extensive market research by the bewildered company revealed that (in Britain at least) sales had plummeted because paunchy middle-aged men, and specifically Tony Blair and Jeremy Clarkson, had been photographed in Levi's. Overnight, the jeans had become uncool to the under-30s. And there's the rub: these days everybody can be cool. By simply consulting the style magazine oracle, you can at least buy the trappings of cool off-the-peg. No longer confined to subcultures, the marginalised, the bohemians or the just plain elegantly disaffected, it now walks among us all. Cool, it seems, is the new mainstream.
Cool Rules: Anatomy Of An Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins is published by Reaktion Books, price £12.95 in the UK.