Papers by Joel Dinerstein
Here I explore the West African, African-American, and Anglo-American roots of cool through the s... more Here I explore the West African, African-American, and Anglo-American roots of cool through the saxophonist Lester Young's synthesis of these cultural materials. The origins of cool are in the African-American jazz culture of the early 1940s: Young single-handedly disseminated the concept to refer to an ideal state of mind. When Young said, “I’m cool," he meant “I'm calm," "I'm keeping it together," or "I'm relaxed in this environment, and in my own style." Cool was an ideal state of balance, a calm-but-engaged state of mind between the emotional poles of "hot" (excited, aggressive, intense, hostile) and "cold" (unfeeling, efficient, mechanistic). Cool was the precedent for chill.
There were four vital African-American concepts subsumed into the concept of cool and all influence contemporary usage. First, to be cool meant to maintain a relaxed attitude in performance of any kind, whether on-stage or walking in public. Second, to be cool was to project emotional self-control -- as if wearing a "cool mask" in the face of hostile, provocative outside forces. Third, to be cool was to create a unique, individual style -- or sound -- that communicated something of your inner spirit. Fourth, cool was an artistic ideal of emotional communication within an artistic field of rules and restraint (such as jazz or art or basketball). Then and now, cool is also just the word used to express aesthetic approval of any performance ("cool!").
Young's strategies of style were as influential as his artistic innovations. His renowned use of hip slang influenced jazz culture, Beat generation writers, and the counter-culture of the 1960s. He wore shades on-stage at night and indoors as a marker of cool defiance and self-insulation. His renowned sense of humor and trademark pork-pie hat, and silent, expressive sadness generated so much jazzlore he remains a model of the hip jazz musician. He expressed his inner pain artistically and wore blank facial expression to resist the white gaze such that he embodied two aspects of cool that seem contradictory: artistic expressiveness and emotional self-control.
Young created the "cool" saxophone style and he is the father of cool jazz. His ground-breaking solos with the Count Basie Orchestra and Billie Holiday helped bring about a paradigm shift to the individual soloist during the swing era. He burst into recorded jazz history in 1936 with a revolutionary and modern tenor sound: fast, floating, airy, clean, light. His combination of lightning speed, blues feeling, rhythmic balance, precise articulation and inexhaustible melodic ideas made him something like the Michael Jordan of jazz.
Young dedicated his life to being original on the Romantic model -- in music, mannerisms, and deportment. He was 'cool' – calm, relaxed, unhurried, charismatic, self-confident. Jack Kerouac worshiped him and his heirs (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker) disseminated the concept of cool. Young influenced hundreds of musicians during the most dynamic years of the Great Migration.
This article aruges for a new periodization of film noir through seven films released between 194... more This article aruges for a new periodization of film noir through seven films released between 1940 and 1942 called here "emergent noir," and including The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Citizen Kane. These seven films defined the genre’s aesthetics, thematics, visual style, and moral ambiguity. Emergent noir created a new mode of rebellious individual masculinity -- noir cool, a public mask of stylish stoicism – through Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd, and (later) Sterling Hayden. The crucible of this new figure was his masking of emotion -- his cool. To be cool suggested self-control to the point of detachment, and signified an insolent defiance as registered in facial expression and body language. The masking of emotion communicates an inner intensity critical to the self-presentation and a sense of inner suffering. Paramount Studios attempted to float a new term for rising star Alan Ladd in 1942: "the romantic heavy." At the time, the "heavy" meant the villain and the romantic lead was always the hero -- so this is an oxymoron – but it might be translated as the heroic badass. The romantic heavy was a rogue figure we now call cool, even if no one used the term at the time. The case studies here are of High Sierra and This Gun's For Hire.
African American Review 43(1) (Spring 2009): 83-99.
Between 1938-1952, five African-American writers killed off the figure of Uncle Tom with literary... more Between 1938-1952, five African-American writers killed off the figure of Uncle Tom with literary executions, starting with Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938). Chester Himes literally buried Uncle Tom with a full funeral in "Heaven Has Changed" (1943) and Ralph Ellison killed him off symbolically in the opening chapter of Invisible Man (1952). Duke Ellington's objective for his Los Angeles revue Jump for Joy (1941) was to "take Uncle Tom out of the theatre and eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway." A key survival strategy of the Jim Crow era and the segregated South, Uncle-Tomming was a form of masking one's feelings and thoughts in front of whites. These literary executions signaled a symbolic repudiation of the racial order and a call for social change. In this generation before the civil rights movement, a new mask emerged from jazz culture to replace Tomming: the mask of cool.
By 1957, for example, even the editors of Jet magazine had called Louis Armstrong an "Uncle Tom" and the magazine claimed he bore some responsibility for reassuring the world that "the Negro's lot in America is a happy one." During the white riots that year to prevent the Little Rock 9 from integrating the public schools of Arkansas, a reporter asked Armstrong for his opinion. Armstrong called President Eisenhower "two faced" and claimed he had "no guts." Many whites were outraged at Armstrong's insubordination; many Blacks were surprised by his political consciousness. It was as if the Uncle-Tom mask had spoken outside of expectations. "It's getting so bad a colored man almost hasn't got any country," Armstrong said. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." Armstrong was masked so convincingly as an Uncle-Tom that when the reporter's editor read his interview, he insisted Armstrong sign the article.
"Solid," Armstrong wrote across the bottom, "don't change a single word."
American Music 25(4) (Winter 2007): 441-476., Dec 1, 2007
This article theorizes soul music as a performance ritual derived from the gospel service and ana... more This article theorizes soul music as a performance ritual derived from the gospel service and analyzes Bruce Springsteen's adaptation of the genre's performative gestures for his concert persona. Springsteen translated James Brown's stagecraft for a white working-class audience through a theatrical style based on physical intensity, high-energy showmanship, call-and-response, self-reflexive monologues, and sermonizing. The soul genre is theorized, historicized (1954-1975), and analyzed as a response to redemptive impulses within modernity (especially African-American). The article makes four claims: (1) African-American musical practices float freely in popular music and Springsteen adapted soul's underlying ontology for his stage sermons, existential affirmations, and exhortations for social justice; (2) Springsteen became adept at interactive performer-audience bonding by emulating soul singers (and soul revues) during his musical apprenticeship; (3) Springsteen's unacknowledged debt to the soul tradition has resulted in the fetishizing of saxophonist Clarence Clemons’s blackness in concert; (4) Springsteen should be considered a Euro-American avatar of the soul tradition. There are two analyses of Springsteen's soul ritual from the 1999-2000 concert tour, and a shorter, concluding section on his performance at the first post-Katrina JazzFest in New Orleans in Spring 2006.
Keywords: Bruce Springsteen; soul; modernity; gospel; race; James Brown; performance; ritual; African-American music.
American Quarterly 58(3) (September 2006): 569-595.
A theory and historical analysis establishing technological progress as the unspoken theology of ... more A theory and historical analysis establishing technological progress as the unspoken theology of US culture. Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American superiority within modernity and its underlying mythos traffics in what James W. Carey called "secular religiosity." Lewis Mumford called it the "mechano-idolatry" of US culture as early as 1934. This analysis contrasts the original concept of social progress with its replacement by technological progress through the visions of GNR scientists (genetics or biotech, nanotechnology, robotics). The article traces the whiteness of this technological vision from the early nineteenth century to the space program and into the future through popular culture (e.g., The Terminator, Star Trek). The conclusion is that the post-human is an escape from the necessary work of establishing a pan-human future.
First-person ethnographic essay of Prince of Wales second-line describing its cultural politics a... more First-person ethnographic essay of Prince of Wales second-line describing its cultural politics and racial codes, ritual and spectacle, musical functionality and dance moves, aesthetics and kinesthetics. Published in Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker's *Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas.* Photos by Pableaux Johnson.
American Quarterly, 2003
... This strategy works best when he stakes out these intellectuals' conflicting objecti... more ... This strategy works best when he stakes out these intellectuals' conflicting objectives regarding the function of the spirituals ... He was the star of his brother's band (drummer Lee Young), enjoyed playing "Uncle Bubba" to nieces and nephews who remember his high standards for ...
In the 1970s, African-American culture transformed professional and college football (as well as ... more In the 1970s, African-American culture transformed professional and college football (as well as basketball) through aesthetics, kinesthetics, style, and humor, all of which can be traced to various cultural traditions, from social dance to celebratory rituals. NFL and college football offenses were transformed by the open-field running style of African-American halfbacks (the ground game) and by quarterbacks "airing it out" to explosive receivers. In an era when black quarterbacks were a rarity, the Heisman trophy and MVPs were won by either white quarterbacks or black running backs. This serves a larger thesis that American sports are often permanently transformed by African-American participation and protest, style and emotive expression, aesthetics and kinesthetics.
American Quarterly 61(3) (September 2009): 615-637.
This article is a historical analysis of African-American second-line parades in New Orleans and ... more This article is a historical analysis of African-American second-line parades in New Orleans and of the first major post-Katrina parade. At a moment of crisis, The Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club raised funds to sponsor its annual parade and help rejuvenate local cultural spirit. The article defines a weekly second-line parade as a "mobile (or rolling) block party," a four-hour and five-mile long community celebration that carnivalizes and colonizes the public sphere. For more than a century, brass bands have created a mobile musical platform for cultural affirmation, dance, style, self-expression, cooking, public grievance and ethnic customs. The club-sponsored second-line parade is the social institution that carries the Black cultural matrix which has always enculturated jazz musicians, as shown in testimony by Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. The article argues that the repression of these parades post-Katrina -- and the lack of recognition for its cultural importance and continuity -- constitutes aesthetic racism.
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Papers by Joel Dinerstein
There were four vital African-American concepts subsumed into the concept of cool and all influence contemporary usage. First, to be cool meant to maintain a relaxed attitude in performance of any kind, whether on-stage or walking in public. Second, to be cool was to project emotional self-control -- as if wearing a "cool mask" in the face of hostile, provocative outside forces. Third, to be cool was to create a unique, individual style -- or sound -- that communicated something of your inner spirit. Fourth, cool was an artistic ideal of emotional communication within an artistic field of rules and restraint (such as jazz or art or basketball). Then and now, cool is also just the word used to express aesthetic approval of any performance ("cool!").
Young's strategies of style were as influential as his artistic innovations. His renowned use of hip slang influenced jazz culture, Beat generation writers, and the counter-culture of the 1960s. He wore shades on-stage at night and indoors as a marker of cool defiance and self-insulation. His renowned sense of humor and trademark pork-pie hat, and silent, expressive sadness generated so much jazzlore he remains a model of the hip jazz musician. He expressed his inner pain artistically and wore blank facial expression to resist the white gaze such that he embodied two aspects of cool that seem contradictory: artistic expressiveness and emotional self-control.
Young created the "cool" saxophone style and he is the father of cool jazz. His ground-breaking solos with the Count Basie Orchestra and Billie Holiday helped bring about a paradigm shift to the individual soloist during the swing era. He burst into recorded jazz history in 1936 with a revolutionary and modern tenor sound: fast, floating, airy, clean, light. His combination of lightning speed, blues feeling, rhythmic balance, precise articulation and inexhaustible melodic ideas made him something like the Michael Jordan of jazz.
Young dedicated his life to being original on the Romantic model -- in music, mannerisms, and deportment. He was 'cool' – calm, relaxed, unhurried, charismatic, self-confident. Jack Kerouac worshiped him and his heirs (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker) disseminated the concept of cool. Young influenced hundreds of musicians during the most dynamic years of the Great Migration.
By 1957, for example, even the editors of Jet magazine had called Louis Armstrong an "Uncle Tom" and the magazine claimed he bore some responsibility for reassuring the world that "the Negro's lot in America is a happy one." During the white riots that year to prevent the Little Rock 9 from integrating the public schools of Arkansas, a reporter asked Armstrong for his opinion. Armstrong called President Eisenhower "two faced" and claimed he had "no guts." Many whites were outraged at Armstrong's insubordination; many Blacks were surprised by his political consciousness. It was as if the Uncle-Tom mask had spoken outside of expectations. "It's getting so bad a colored man almost hasn't got any country," Armstrong said. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." Armstrong was masked so convincingly as an Uncle-Tom that when the reporter's editor read his interview, he insisted Armstrong sign the article.
"Solid," Armstrong wrote across the bottom, "don't change a single word."
Keywords: Bruce Springsteen; soul; modernity; gospel; race; James Brown; performance; ritual; African-American music.
There were four vital African-American concepts subsumed into the concept of cool and all influence contemporary usage. First, to be cool meant to maintain a relaxed attitude in performance of any kind, whether on-stage or walking in public. Second, to be cool was to project emotional self-control -- as if wearing a "cool mask" in the face of hostile, provocative outside forces. Third, to be cool was to create a unique, individual style -- or sound -- that communicated something of your inner spirit. Fourth, cool was an artistic ideal of emotional communication within an artistic field of rules and restraint (such as jazz or art or basketball). Then and now, cool is also just the word used to express aesthetic approval of any performance ("cool!").
Young's strategies of style were as influential as his artistic innovations. His renowned use of hip slang influenced jazz culture, Beat generation writers, and the counter-culture of the 1960s. He wore shades on-stage at night and indoors as a marker of cool defiance and self-insulation. His renowned sense of humor and trademark pork-pie hat, and silent, expressive sadness generated so much jazzlore he remains a model of the hip jazz musician. He expressed his inner pain artistically and wore blank facial expression to resist the white gaze such that he embodied two aspects of cool that seem contradictory: artistic expressiveness and emotional self-control.
Young created the "cool" saxophone style and he is the father of cool jazz. His ground-breaking solos with the Count Basie Orchestra and Billie Holiday helped bring about a paradigm shift to the individual soloist during the swing era. He burst into recorded jazz history in 1936 with a revolutionary and modern tenor sound: fast, floating, airy, clean, light. His combination of lightning speed, blues feeling, rhythmic balance, precise articulation and inexhaustible melodic ideas made him something like the Michael Jordan of jazz.
Young dedicated his life to being original on the Romantic model -- in music, mannerisms, and deportment. He was 'cool' – calm, relaxed, unhurried, charismatic, self-confident. Jack Kerouac worshiped him and his heirs (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker) disseminated the concept of cool. Young influenced hundreds of musicians during the most dynamic years of the Great Migration.
By 1957, for example, even the editors of Jet magazine had called Louis Armstrong an "Uncle Tom" and the magazine claimed he bore some responsibility for reassuring the world that "the Negro's lot in America is a happy one." During the white riots that year to prevent the Little Rock 9 from integrating the public schools of Arkansas, a reporter asked Armstrong for his opinion. Armstrong called President Eisenhower "two faced" and claimed he had "no guts." Many whites were outraged at Armstrong's insubordination; many Blacks were surprised by his political consciousness. It was as if the Uncle-Tom mask had spoken outside of expectations. "It's getting so bad a colored man almost hasn't got any country," Armstrong said. "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." Armstrong was masked so convincingly as an Uncle-Tom that when the reporter's editor read his interview, he insisted Armstrong sign the article.
"Solid," Armstrong wrote across the bottom, "don't change a single word."
Keywords: Bruce Springsteen; soul; modernity; gospel; race; James Brown; performance; ritual; African-American music.