This article examines knowledge production in the sociology of music. Focusing on the idea of cool music, we interrogate the nature of music researchers' relationship with their object of research. While the qualification and connotation of cool is widespread in popular music, sociology has largely neglected to engage with it as an object of research. Instead, the sociological investigation of music audiences is divided between two opposed but co‐constructed paradigms that ultimately do not account for how cool emerges as a qualifier and connotation, how it performs as a discourse on music, and to what effect. Using the example of aging music researchers as a departure point, we examine how the cool connotations of music function as a mode of discourse that legitimates particular knowledge, practice, and taste, demarcating insider/outsider status. We explore how music acquires social connotations such as “cool” and whether that alters music researchers' approaches to it. We argue that apart from the disclosure of inclinations, social characteristics, and relationships to the object of research (music scenes, preferences, fandom, and so on), the tradition of reflexive empirical perspectives in music sociology should incorporate further deconstruction of the transformative dimensions in the relations between music and researcher. Music, as a complex and dynamic object, thus, requires sociology to produce accounts that both encompass people's enjoyment and experience as well as its boundary‐defining capacity.

中文翻译：

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我们从不酷：研究音乐社会学中酷的知识生产和话语

本文考察了音乐社会学中的知识生产。围绕酷音乐的概念，我们询问了音乐研究人员与其研究对象之间关系的性质。虽然酷的限定和内涵在流行音乐中很普遍，但社会学在很大程度上忽略了将其作为研究对象。相反，对音乐观众的社会学调查被分为两种对立但共同构建的范式，这些范式最终没有解释酷如何作为限定词和内涵出现，它作为音乐话语如何表现，以及产生什么效果。以老年音乐研究人员的例子为出发点，我们研究了音乐的酷内涵如何作为一种使特定知识、实践和品味合法化的话语模式，区分内部/外部状态。我们探索音乐如何获得诸如“酷”之类的社会内涵，以及这是否会改变音乐研究人员的研究方法。我们认为，除了揭示倾向、社会特征以及与研究对象（音乐场景、偏好、狂热等）的关系外，音乐社会学中反思性经验视角的传统应该包括对研究对象的进一步解构。音乐与研究人员之间关系的变革维度。因此，音乐作为一个复杂而动态的对象，需要社会学来产生既包含人们的享受和体验，又包含其界定边界能力的描述。