The Pop Story

Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool (1954)

‘Birth of the Cool’. There’s another one of those jazz titles, all knowing hyperbole. And so for the first time in this little musical adventure, though not the last I’m sure, we come to the question of ‘cool’. Is it born here, in the modern sense, with Miles Davis?

I contemplate this question as many contemporary writers announce the death of cool - or at least, the death of that embodiment of a certain type of cool: the hipster (Time magazine has a round-up of the main, erm, ‘arguments’). The hipster, I suppose, was originally an acolyte of this man playing on my stereo now, a man who never contemplated his own coolness (which is cool), yet nonetheless released an album entitled ‘Birth of the Cool’ (not cool… but then maybe the record company named it and Davis didn’t care because he’d already moved on to a new sound - which is cool… right?)

The thing about cool, the thing about hipsters, is that our culture is built on the foundations laid down by people who worry about the width of their collar, the number of buttons on their suit, the skinniness of their jeans, the particular make of their sunglasses. These people - and many of them, let’s be clear, are hugely annoying individuals in the flesh - curate the niche, worry about the stuff that no one in the wider world gives two hoots about, and turn ostensibly worthless artworks into badges of outsider hipness, to be worn with pride (knowingly, but hopefully never ironically), until they eventually get subsumed into the mainstream by copyists and rip-off merchants - at which point the hipsters have already moved on. Just like Miles Davis always moved on: he was gone before the rest of us even noticed what he was doing in the first place.

If you want to see this process in action, I point you to this fantastic documentary about Rough Trade records.

Birth of the Cool on Spotify