Cool Consumers

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.4 • 997 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cool Consumers: Laurie Taylor considers how music acquires the social connotations of “cool” & its implicit association with youth and outsider status. He's joined by Jo Haynes, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Also, the way in which racial marketing promoted menthol cigarettes to African Americans, linking them to notions of ‘cool’, with enduringly harmful effect. Keith Wailoo, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, unpacks a poignant and intricate story which reveals why 85% of Black smokers prefer menthol brands and how difficult it has been to ban them, not least because of the way that tobacco companies forged deep connections with Black media publishers and civil rights campaigners. He argues that the cry of 'I can't breathe' has multiple meanings in America's painful racial history.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of
0:07.0	Happiness Podcast.
0:08.0	For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want
0:14.4	to share that science with you.
0:16.1	And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley.
0:19.4	I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that
0:25.4	calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:36.0	This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about
0:42.2	thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co. UK. UK. Lester Young. I can still remember the day when my good friend Dave took me back to
1:07.4	his Liverpool home and gently explained that it was time for us to abandon
1:11.8	traditional jazz to give up our present that was
1:24.5	well less frantic less less upfront more laid back jazz that took its time jazz that that was cool. But this wasn't merely a question of musical
1:36.8	preference. Cool was to be a way of living, a lifestyle. In the words of one
1:41.9	analyst it meant a certain elegant, smooth charm and
1:45.2	self-possession. It was a way of being in the world which was perfectly captured by
1:49.9	one critic's description of John Dankworth as Kuth, Kempt, and Shevelled.
1:56.3	Now a new research article in the British Journal of Sociology asked how this word cool
2:01.3	emerged and how it became attached to certain forms of music how it
2:05.6	determined insider outsider status and how it affected the manner in which
2:10.2	music researchers went about their business.
2:13.2	Well, that article is entitled,
	...

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