Pure Innocent Fun: Essays - Hardcover

Madison III, Ira

 
9780593446188: Pure Innocent Fun: Essays
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593446186 ISBN 13: 9780593446188
Verlag: Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A blast of nostalgia that harkens back to a simpler time with addictively witty essays on NSYNC, Passions, and The O.C.—from the beloved pop culture critic and host of the Keep It podcast.

In this inviting and joyfully raucous collection of sixteen original essays, written with a rare combination of humor and sharpness, Ira Madison III combines memoir and cultural criticism to offer an updated pop-culture manifesto. 

As a teenager in the early 2000s, Madison’s life changed when he read Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Inspired by the revelation that discussions of pop culture could be rigorous, not only reserved for the likes of At the Movies or Buffy the Vampire Slayer message boards, Madison went on to make a career of dissecting pop culture from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Britney Spears. Here, he reveals his journey to becoming a prominent cultural critic and screenwriter, sharing stories about growing up as a Black, gay man in Milwaukee and unearthing the pop phenomena that shaped his youth and the lives of so many. In this enlightening, unforgettable trip through the ‘90s and the 2000s, Madison reflects on learning about gay sex from his mom's Lil' Kim CDs; the most devastating election of his adolescence (not George W. Bush winning re-election in 2004, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and never getting his driver’s license in high school, making him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “A virgin who can’t drive.”

Revel in his examination of Black fatherhood through The Cosby Show and Family Matters, and discover how Jerry Springer impacted queer representation on-screen. In each essay, Madison unearths how pop culture shapes us, both for the better and for the worse. Alternately irreverent and emotionally resonant, Pure Innocent Fun will leave you laughing and inspired.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ira Madison III is the host of Crooked Media’s pop culture podcast Keep It. His television credits include Uncoupled, Q-Force, Nikki Fre$h, and So Help Me Todd. He has written for GQ, New York magazine, Interview, MTV News, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. Nylon named him one of the “most reliably hilarious and incisive cultural critics writing now.” He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Watch What Happens Live, The Wendy Williams Show, and the second season of Netflix drama You. He lives in New York City

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Welcome to the O.C., bitch.

—Chris Carmack, The O.C. (2003)

White Boys

Saying you read Playboy magazine “for the articles” was a joke I heard often growing up. At the root of it was an acknowledgment that it was kind of shameful to look at pictures of naked women for pleasure, but when I first discovered porn, via vintage Playboys my gran’s then-boyfriend Thomas used to hide in his favorite leather reclining chair, I actually was drawn in by the articles, and also the glamour of it all—the feathered hair, the campy lingerie, the visually striking photos. I was already obsessed with the divas on Gran’s daytime TV shows, and now here were divas splayed out in centerfolds. The concept of the Playboy centerfold was prevalent in pop culture at the time. It was a thing that men looked at and teenage boys snuck behind their backs. It was lite pornography, something that turned on heterosexual boys. In the period of my adolescence, before I was willing to admit an attraction to other boys, I was convinced that my admiration for these centerfolds was an attraction to Playboy’s Playmates.

This is why I thought my obsession with the lead of my favorite TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was because I was attracted to her. And because of this, I got a subscription to Teen People magazine so I would never miss a cover with Sarah Michelle Gellar on it. As it turned out, she appeared on exactly one Teen People cover, the one I already had, but I discovered something else in the pages of the magazine that interested me even more than my beloved vampire slayer—a Calvin Klein ad.

In the early 2000s, Korn drummer David Silveria posed for a series of Calvin Klein ads that involved him wearing a pair of Dirty Denim jeans (knee-length jean shorts because those, unfortunately, had everyone in a choke hold then). In the ads, he’s either lying on the ground of a desert or perched under the open hood of a car. Both ads feature him with frosted blond hair and an unfortunate black soul patch, but the most important part of these ads is that he is shirtless. And if the first piece of media to ever give me an erection as a kid was a sex scene in the 1981 Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson film Excalibur, the first one that made me realize I was gay was an ad of Silveria’s muscled body lying on the ground in the masculine version of Kate Winslet’s “draw me like one of your French girls” naked pose for Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

Then, instead of sneaking away to read the Playboy magazines hidden in the recliner, I was returning to the same copy of Teen People. Eventually, I’d move on to Tommy Hilfiger model turned singer Tyrese’s sex scene with Taraji P. Henson in the 2001 film Baby Boy, which I rewound several times. Soon after, Tom Cruise’s 2002 Vanity Fair spread became my new Bible. The cover, a shirtless Cruise, immediately caught my attention during one of my weekly visits to Barnes & Noble at the Mayfair mall. Inside, a spread with two additional photos. In one, he flexes his biceps while gripping his tousled brown hair. In a second, his arm is behind his head, showing off his slightly hairy armpit. Since then, he has managed to remain one of our few lasting A-list movie stars—judging from the wild success of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the fact that Top Gun: Maverick seemingly brought a pandemic-ravaged box office back to life, and his dizzying skydiving stunt at the 2024 Olympics closing ceremony. Given his long-standing association with the creepy cult of Scientology, this fame has to be in part thanks to that 2002 Vanity Fair spread.

Every recent generation has a moment when they fell in love with Tom Cruise. Gen Xers have Cruise in tighty-whities in Risky Business and his soft-core sex scene with Kelly McGillis in the original Top Gun. Millennials have him shouting “Show me the money!” at Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. Gen Z has his death-defying stunts in recent Mission: Impossible films. For me, it’s the Vanilla Sky era, when he divorced Nicole Kidman and began his rebrand as a hot nearly forty-year-old sex symbol. What was so enamoring about this white man with perfect teeth and beautiful hair? Well, for one, he had the biggest cosign of them all—Oprah.

I blame Oprah for many things, which I’ll get to later in this book, but I’ll say I’m thankful for the yearslong obsession with Cruise I’ve been given. It’s hard out here for a Cruise fan. On the one hand, he’s part of an evil cult. On the other, most of the films in his forty-year career are masterpieces, the majority of which belong in the Criterion Closet: Jerry Maguire, Interview with the Vampire, Minority Report, The Color of Money, The Firm, Magnolia, Legend, Eyes Wide Shut, every single Mission: Impossible film (except the second, which is possibly John Woo’s worst American film, which I guess is my coming-out as a Paycheck fan, but I find it very hard to resist the charms of Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman), Edge of Tomorrow, Collateral, Vanilla Sky, War of the Worlds, Tropic Thunder, American Made, and maybe even Knight and Day—who’s to say?

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We don’t have to lie that Cruise has never made a good film just because he maybe (probably) knows something about Shelly Miscavige’s disappearance (this is absolutely a joke). Morally dubious people make great art all the time. Justin Timberlake’s Justified is a great album, for instance. When Los Angeles was locked down due to the pandemic, I rewatched Jerry Maguire for the first time in years. I always knew it was a fantastic film (Cameron Crowe’s best to me, but I know Almost Famous stans would riot if such an opinion were the general consensus), but I was unprepared for how utterly moved I would be. I’m sure it was in part from a lack of human contact during lockdown, but I truly uncontrollably sobbed on my couch watching not just the “you complete me” scene but also when Cuba Gooding Jr. survives what appears to be a life-threatening injury in the third act and embraces Cruise after his victory. Granted, I’ve sobbed at every Pixar movie since WALL•E, but that doesn’t make my emotions any less real.

Unfortunately, there’s just something mesmerizing about this short man who appears tall in his films and his perfect smile that seems to betray a near-psychotic evil brimming just beyond his porcelain veneers. For some, their unconscious uncoupling with Cruise began with Scientology and him leaping onto a couch on The Oprah Winfrey Show. On May 23, 2005, during an interview with Oprah where Cruise was supposed to be promoting Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remake, he spent the entire time talking about his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes, like your best friend does when they’re drunk and just met a guy last night who they believe is the love of their life. (They’ll never speak of this person again the next morning—or maybe that’s just me.) This entire interview is key to understanding Oprah’s ringleader, cultlike hold over Americans in the early 2000s and how big of a star Cruise was then. Before Cruise sets foot on Oprah’s stage, she is commanding an audience of screaming, gasping women in near ecstasy. If you weren’t a regular Oprah watcher in the show’s heyday and only saw it through this clip, then you would be forgiven for mistaking the energy in the room as Cruise fandom. But actually, it was Oprah fandom. And since she’s...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593446186
ISBN 13 
9780593446188
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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