In Chapter 6, Rice would like us to realize many things. According to Rice’s section on Farris Thompson’s discoveries, “itutu” is the original word for the word “cool” in the Yoruban Language. He also wants us to see the implications of this discovery, which indicates “‘cool’ is a way of writing, it identifies this form of writing as visual and traces the natural heritage if the word back to African culture”. Rice also references the playwrght Amiri Baraka, intending for us to adopt the appropriations of cool supported by Baraka’s book, Blues People. Baraka believes “cool” indicates the feeling experianced by African Americans when they are detached, uninvolved, and nonparticipatory, being denied the right to participate politically, culturally, and economically.
Rice has a very clear argument on the cultural origins of
“cool” and it’s tie to African Americans. It’s fascinating to see the almost direct correlation between the meaning of “cool” and the African American history of oppression. Even today many clothes, slang, music, and dance styles are taken from the African American culture and considered cool.
While chapter six explains the appropriations of cool in terms of history, politics, and culture, chapter 7 concentrates on explaining Baraka’s appropriaion in terms of modern day pop culture. His best example of this hip-hop music, where more often than not, music and ideas are borrowed from previous artists to make a new composition. Two examples Rice uses for this is P Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” song which samples from The Polices‘ “Every Breath You Take” and Will Smith’s “Gettin Jiggy Wit It” which is sampled from Sister Sledge’s “He’s the Gratest Dancer”. Frequently these songs are viewed as new and cool, but are really just an altered version of someone else’s old idea.
Rice points out at the end of chapter 7 that we need a way to differentiate between the two areas of sampling and plagiarism. Plagiarsim, as defined by the book, is a deliberate attampt to pass someone’s work off as your own, stealing ideas.
