Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, and: Teenagers: An American History (review)

Literature is not cool. Now that I’ve read Cool and Teenagers, I know why. Coolness depends on transience. Anything that sits on the shelf is, by definition, beyond its “best-before” coolness date. Because it is ephemeral, literature is not cool. The only work of Young Adult (YA) literature mentioned, incidentally, by both Palladino and Danesi is so uncool it has ossified into a school book: The Catcher in the Rye.

My little introduction on the incompatibility of YA literature and teenage coolness is more than a mildly funny, casual observation. It reflects, I think, something darker but more central to the versions of teenagerhood drawn by both Danesi and Palladino. They aren’t writing about teenagers, because, like coolness, teenagerhood is too evanescent. Rather, they are writing about creation of teenage markets, and the exploitation of those markets by adults. The history of exploitation of teenagers runs as an undercurrent through both books; and both are less guides to understanding teenagers than warnings for adults.

Of the two books, I found Palladino’s “American history” (her subtitle) more riveting reading. Danesi’s approach to “the signs and meanings of adolescence” (his subtitle) sometimes bogs down in metacodes and becomes “waaaaaay” too boring. Forgive my attempt at what Danesi would call “pubilect.” “Waaaaaay” is an example of “Emotive Language Programming (ELP),” a “pattern of overstressing highly emotive words by prolonging their tonic vowels” (97). See what I mean?

Neither Danesi nor Palladino attempt the magisterial (and heavily critiqued) approach to teenagerhood that Philippe Ariès brings to his Centuries of Childhood. That, in itself, is not a problem. The history of teenagerhood is shorter, dating only, both authors agree, from about 1945. So it has only been about fifty years since sex, drugs, rock and roll—and other consumer items—came to be linked inextricably with teenagers. The best lessons I learned from both Danesi and Palladino were about the genesis of those associations.

From Danesi I learned that the term “cool” came from the smoke-filled jazz clubs of the 1930s. When the atmosphere became too hot and heavy inside, the doors and windows were opened to let in the “cool air” (37). By extension, coolness came to mean male jazz musicians, then any man who exhibited the smooth, languid style of those who cared about jazz. According to Danesi, coolness is still defined as “self-conscious aplomb” (38), even though females can be cool now too, and cool music has rung the changes in the decades from rock and roll and punk to heavy metal and fusion.

Both Danesi and Palladino argue that musical (and musician) fashions determine the specifics of coolness. And both agree that sexual innuendo is the heart of musical cool. Sex, affirms Danesi, is “the underlying biological basis” of coolness (60). I learned a lot about music and sex.

Palladino informs me that “rock and roll” and “jelly roll” were common codes for sex. I didn’t know that. As it turns out, my lack of explicit knowledge was shared by 1980s teenagers listening to their own brand of cool music. Danesi cites a study of college age students listening to “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. Half of the regular listeners didn’t know that “beat it” meant masturbation—despite the video (83). Danesi teases out the implications and suggests that teenagers absorb the sexual text in that song and others by “signifying osmosis” (60). That, he explains, is the way in which coolness codes are transmitted.

As I write, in the late summer of 1997, “shock rocker” Marilyn Manson (a guy) raised the ire of righteous grown-ups in Toronto. They wanted to ban his concert. Manson’s version of in-your-face archetypal sex and violence was an affront to those good burghers who seem to have forgotten that their own variants on the same themes shocked their parents.

Though sex, drugs, and rock and roll are...