"The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool's origins in European, Asian and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. Dick Pountain and David Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema and literature, moving from the dandies and flaneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as 'cool' advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society."--BOOK JACKET.