All contributions gratefully received!

Hip:

Blossom Dearie
Stan Freberg
Quentin Tarantino
Robert Crumb
Dave Brubeck
Woody Allen
Martin Amis
James Ellroy
Billy Wilder
Mel Torme
Robert Mitchum

Cool:

Nat King Cole
Keith Richards
Alain Delon
Kim Gordon
Humphrey Bogart
Muhammad Ali
Bob Dylan
Howard Hawks
Henry Miller
The Dude

Interesting post, Brownshoe, if a tad eccentric.  Are we talking about now or at some remote point in history?  Martin Amis is about as hip as his Dad, i.e. not at all.  Robert Mitchum - hip and cool, on and off, mainly in his private life (he was also a prize asshole).  Keith Richard (not Richards) is an ancient junkie scumbag, barely worthy of anyone's attention since around 1967.  Bogart was hip and cool in 'The Maltese Falcon'; not otherwise.  (Oh, okay, as Marlowe if you must).  Dylan?  Fuck, fuck, fuck!  Henry Miller?  Splutter, splutter!!  Tarantino?  You're way behind the times, man...

Heh Chet--


I guess I mean I see cool as a sort of sublime natural elan, and hip as maybe a degree removed from that by a process of intellectualization.

Alex, I'll hunt down that article.  I like Cohn.

Cheers, brother!

BTW, my fave philosophical book, not that I've read many, but it's a good rant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own


you might appreciate this stuff! he really encourages you to think out of the box!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_GrmYVF6c

I have Straight From The Fridge, Dad, "a dictionary of hipster slang" by Max Decharne (former drummer with Gallon Drunk, fact fans). It's a great book. It isn't quite as academically thorough as, say, the OED (yes, ironic understatement), but the first instances it mentions are from 1924. A jazz recording by The Georgia Melodians, "How You Gonna Keep Kool?" and - interesting - a Coolidge slogan: "Keep Cool with Coolidge". So looks like the word was appropriated and diluted of meaning early on. The thing is, English isn't a prescriptive language, and slang especially isn't by definition (there's an irony there). The meaning and power of such words have to change.

People use the word differently, and kids use a whole different set of words to charge with "underground" (another painful word for me) meaning. We had a different subset where and when I was a kid. The chance of new slants catching on as much as "cool" once did is small, much to the delight of older people. I don't mind the word "cool", as I say, even at the level of sentence filler within reason. I harrumph about enough, I understand the urge but I certainly don't have it. Don't have room to get worked up over it apart from anything else. Smiley doing a wink.

Lester Young had it, may be he was the first, although some would argue Beiderbecke was when he laid down 'In a Mist' on piano.

Whatever, it is an early to mid 20th century construct that is no longer with us: cool is now how we describe a commodity, a 'thing', it has been kidnapped by admen and lost its meaning and power through Burroughs word-virus. Back in the fifties and early sixties prime, it was a quality and emotional style of a person.

It was a way, an ethos for living combined with a jazz sensibility. A specific jazz, not hot, but that of Young, Getz, Baker and the MJQ. Norman Mailer was close too, when he stated "the source of the hip is the Negro." It is an outsiders art.

It can still be cultivated and practiced today, this art of the cool.

Jazz and Ivy are two disciplines that will take you there.