A genealogy of cool
A friend from college was here yesterday for another friend’s party. He studies linguistics at the University of Illinois and we had a good conversation on his Ph.D. dissertation, a study of Parisian residents’ perceptions of other Parisian residents’ ways of speaking. I eventually steered things towards one of my side-interests: what it has meant to be cool, historically, and the origins of what is cool in contemporary America. I think a good idea for a book—an academic text with an eye towards popular readership—would be a genealogy of cool, spatially, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically.
I’ve always wanted to know a) what the concept of cool was (if any) in the 16th century Polish hinterland (for instance) and b) who influenced what was cool there. I’m pretty sure no concept of cool can exist without massive amounts of leisure time and some sort of print media, so it must be relatively new (note that I’m not referring to what is known as “popularity”).
I’d like to find evidence of when occurred the shift during which people in the United States and Europe stopped obsessed over the things their economic-elite were buying and doing and saying and began to care more about what their immigrants and impoverished were buying and doing and saying. Were the former Irish and German residents of our inner-cities as “cool” as the current residents of our urban cores? Was it like that in 16th Century Poland?
Creative Commons Licensed photo credit: Pesterussa
If you're new to Tightgrid, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army now a European soccer anthem
Five years since its 2003 release, The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army has found a place among those big, blaring European soccer anthems.
Like tiny scooters and the renaissance, this trend began in Italy. Despite Seven Nation Army not being particularly well-known (some called it simply the “po po po po po pooo pooo song”) it became the anthem of the Italians’ world cup win in 2006. A version - with fans singing the chorus - even got to No 1 in the country and Jack White was moved to comment on the matter. “Nothing is more beautiful in music than when people embrace a melody and allow it to enter the pantheon of folk music,” he said, though this process may have passed fans of the Azzurri by.
It has since been adopted by Liverpool fans for their player Javier Mascherano (sing his name to the beat and you’ve pretty much got it) and this year it’s an anthem for everybody.
Roads in Japan sing when you drive on them.
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.
Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.
This isn’t the future (or maybe it is; it’s just not evenly distributed yet): the melody roads have already been installed!
There are three musical strips in central and northern Japan - one of which plays the tune of a Japanese pop song. Notice of an impending musical interlude, which lasts for about 30 seconds, is highlighted by coloured musical notes painted on to the road. According to reports, the system was the brainchild of Shizuo Shinoda, who accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer before driving over them and realising that they helped to produce a variety of tones.
In heavy traffic the melody must play mournfully slow; that’s nothing to sing about. Still, I like the idea.
Radio ratings racism?
Think of Arbitron as the Nielson ratings people for radio. It used to measure these ratings by having participants record their listening into diaries.
New York is the third PPM city, and Arbitron has said it is still fine-tuning the system. October and November ratings are “pre-currency” books, meaning they won’t be used for ad sales.
Nevertheless, some fear that blacks and Hispanic listeners may be undercounted in the new system.
“These numbers could put us out of business,” said Vinny Brown, program director of WBLS. “And it’s not just us. Listeners need to know this could threaten the future of black and Hispanic radio across the board.”