The Hard Core Of Cool

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Cool's Dangers

Of course, there are worse things to be mistaken for than the doorman. Washingtonian Kenny Barnes's rasp of a voice sinks to a whisper when he says: "My son being cool may have contributed to his murder." His only son, Kenny Barnes Jr., 37, owned a Northwest urban clothing boutique where he was shot to death during a robbery on Sept. 24, 2001, by a neighborhood 17-year-old.

With his brightly colored, custom ensembles and "huge" diamond necklaces, his son "seemed like someone with lots of money in his pockets," Barnes, 61, says. "He wasn't a basketball player or a rapper. What image was he portraying?"

Barnes answers his own question: "A gangster way of life . . . that can be a death sentence."

"Once, cool wasn't about violence, it was about being dapper," explains Barnes, who after his son's death founded the anti-gun-violence group ROOT (Reaching Out to Others Together).

"Now, I work with kids who think it's cool to have a gun around."

Hip-hop, whose beats provide cool's most recent soundtrack, has plenty to do with that. Though it now markets everything from cars to computers, hip-hop has always been anchored in rebellion and social consciousness. Certainly, no one foresaw early gangsta rap's thuggish performers sparking a billion-dollar industry and becoming heralds of a powerful outlaw form of cool. Gangster images weren't new in black communities. Neither was the misogyny in videos that reduced women to glistening body parts. But gangsta made both so lucrative that other rappers "had to embrace them to be bankable," Neal says.

It's no coincidence that hip-hop ascended as the blue-collar jobs that had sustained families and paid for working-class kids' college educations disappeared. Increasingly, poor black kids saw three clear roads to cool-conferring success: sports, music and crime.

Computer technician and student Will Boykin, 25, of Greenbelt, knows some young men are drawn to the harsh side of cool because they "don't have a father, or any parent who cares. The only way to have recognition, to feel important, is to have people say, 'Look at you.' "

Cool is coolest when it's a facet of -- not the purpose of -- a man's existence. As a doctoral student in psychology five years ago, Barnes knew white youths fixated on hip-hop cool who still "got their degrees and became part of the mainstream," he recalls. But for black boys who see education as unobtainable or irrelevant, cool often becomes "a way of life."

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