← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Ira Madison III On The Pop Culture Moments That Raised Him
00:20:59
A new collection of essays from critic, writer, and host of the Keep It podcast, Ira Madison III, documents the key pop culture moments that kicked off his career.
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Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. You can learn a lot about journalist and podcast host Ira Madison III by reading his new book of essays, Pure Innocent Fun. Growing up as a kid in Milwaukee, he leaned on pop culture as a way to express his desires, his joy, his anxieties. You learn that his grandm gran, as he called her, was there for him, but so was Jerry Springer. The book was released yesterday and Ira Madison III joins us in studio before appearing tonight at the Bell House in Brooklyn at 7:30pm it is nice to meet you.
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B
Nice to meet you too.
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C
So this took about two years to write.
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B
Yeah.
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C
What was your original goal?
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B
My original goal was the state sort of writing introduction was to write my own version of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. It was a sort of seminal text for me in high school and college and I revisited it during COVID and just sort of finally like it came to me. You know, I could do that in book form. I've done it for so long in magazines and for websites.
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C
So what changed the most from that first, the first goal to what you wound up turning into your editor?
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You know, I think I did a lot more writing about myself than I intended to, to be honest. You know, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Fuffs is such a lean essay collection. There's a few more in there in mine because they're really just gets into the heart of Saved by the Bell or Tom Cruise or Britney Spears and then gets out. And I sort of found myself spending a lot more time with myself than I intended to while writing it.
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C
It's interesting cause you really get to know you by reading the book about like challenging moments in the school that was less than hospitable, shall we say to just lighter moments. Your thoughts on Steve Urkel. How did you decide what to put in the book and what to leave out?
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So maybe it was a bit of a procrastination technique as well. But you know, I sell the book in 2021 and I feel like I spent the next five months or so just sort of using the Notes app in my iPhone and I would write down anything that I remembered from that period, I knew that I wanted to write about my adolescence. I knew that the arc of the sort of coming of age story in the book was going to end where it ends, you know, my coming out. And I just would write down anything I remembered, you know, like the great M and Ms. That you used to, you know, be able to hunt for in M and M packages. I remember I found one one year, and then got like a year supply of mms that didn't end up in the book, but wrote that down, like Pizza Hut, like the book, it program, things like that. And then after that, when I finally started to write, I started, you know, picking the things that were really sort of had like a gravitas and weight to them.
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C
In your acknowledgments, you thank Jamia Wilson.
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Yes. My editor.
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C
Yeah. Tell me, how does she help you?
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I think that Jamia was really the first person who I felt got what I was trying to do with the book. When I sold the book to Random House, I had a proposal and I had two sample essays, a couple of these that are in here, like rough drafts of them, maybe something I'd written for my substack a year prior or so. And I had a lot of editors respond to the material. You know, they liked it. But her response to the material was sort of to tell me what she would fix or like to pull something out here and put something there. And I really just sort of liked that back and forth upon meeting her. So I was like, she has to be the perfect editor for me.
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C
We're talking to Ira Madison iii. His new book of essays is titled Pure Innocent Fun. Of course, you can hear him weekly on the podcast Keep it. All right, we learn you're from Milwaukee. You went to Jesuit high school. You're one of the only black kids in school. You knew you were gay. You didn't feel like telling everybody you were gay. How did pop culture help you through those. Those teenage years?
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You know, I think that I just sort of retreated into pop culture when I didn't feel comfortable talking with people at school. I would. My Discman would be on. You know, Brittany would be playing, the Strokes would be playing, and Lil Kim would be playing, and I'd be reading books all the time. I have distinct memories, and family members will always remind me, too. You know, when I'm at family events, they're like, you know, you would always be in the corner, like, with your book, you know, and once I got a TV in my bedroom as a kid, which seems like a novel Thing to, you know, maybe younger people now, but where you could just watch anything on your phone, but a TV in your bedroom was a big deal. Then it was. It was over. You know, I was like. I was watching everything, and I had a VCR as well, so I would record things that aired at night. You know, I did theater at school, so I would record shows and then come and watch them. And what I think really gave me this sort of memory for things that I use on the podcast that I host on using the book, is that I would tape things, like my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance. I would tape an episode, and I would rewatch that episode multiple times before the next one would air. You know, so I've got in the habit of just rewatching things and filing them away in the sort of library of my brain.
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C
You spent a lot of time with. With Gran, who would play Gran in the movie.
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Wow. You know, maybe like a Loretta Devine, because I feel like she's in everything. Right. You know, I think there's. You'd be hard pressed to find a black film from, like, the 2000s or late 90s without Loretta Devine. And then she also pops up in anything else. You know, So I think her and Gran's real name is Bobby, and that's who the book is dedicated to.
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C
Oh, that's lovely. There's a telling moment, I won't give too much away, where your Gran. You could have told your Gran that you were gay. Right. And you just tell a lie, but she leaves you a little bit of wiggle room.
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B
Yeah.
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Which is kind of interesting at that time. Why did you decide to lie?
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I think there's still this where, you know, someone might know something about you, but you're not ready to maybe say it out loud. You know, there's still some subtext that exists. You're not ready for the full text yet. And I think that you can have a sort of silent understanding with someone like that and just still not be ready to acknowledge it yourself. So I think that that's just where my brain was at the moment.
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Now that you're a grownup, what do you make of her response? Leaving you a little bit of wiggle room?
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I think it's a good response to have. You know, I think that that's a lovely way to let a kid know that you see them, but, you know, you're not gonna keep staring.
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The book is filled with pop culture references that become meaningful in your life. I actually asked you to read a section on Disney could you read the first page of Hero to zero?
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Yes. Sometimes your mom drops you off. Other times you catch the bus to school. When you get home, no one's there. You throw on Batman or Power Rangers and make yourself a snack from the fridge or heat up whatever your mom left you on the stove. You make sure to take the chicken out of the freezer so it can stop so it can thaw. Most of the time, you forget to actually do this and quickly run the frozen chicken underneath scalding water in the sink before your mom gets home to cook dinner. My mother couldn't afford a babysitter, so when family friends weren't available, my babysitter was usually a rotating series of Disney movies on vhs. Before you could access every single Disney animated feature on the streaming service Disney plus, you had to physically own a Disney film to rewatch it. We didn't have a bookshelf displaying our tastes in literature, but we did have one of those wooden TV consoles that had built in shelves to display your film collection. And the most visible titles in that collection were always the Disney films that mom or my gran or some other relative had bought for my sister and I to watch. If you've seen a VHS tape, you know they usually came in a slim cardboard box that you could slide the VHS out from. But Disney films came in large, pillowy clamshell cases that felt soft and squeezable, puffy and unnecessarily large boxes that took up a lot of space on a shelf but were also immediately recognizable as Disney films with large, bold lettering on them. My mom drove the same car for most of my childhood, so I wasn't familiar with the smell of a brand new car. But I was immediately. But I was intimately familiar with the smell of opening a brand new Disney vhs. Every millennial Disney fan is familiar with that. Rip me out the plastic I've been acting. Brand new scent of a new Disney vhs. They smelt like money, like wealth, and through marketing ploys like the Disney Vault, wherein Disney claimed their VHS tapes would be returned to after being on sale for a few months to drum up sales and the idea that some titles were scarce, it made every single Disney film you had on your shelf feel like a prized possession. I found myself playing with the VHS boxes just as often as I rewatched the Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.
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C
That's Ira Madison III reading from Pure Innoc Fun. What did the Disney universe mean to you?
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Ugh. Disney was. I mean, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was Disney, okay. And there's so much Disney now. And where you always see. You see these live action remakes, you know, like Mufasa just came out. But when you were in the Disney Renaissance, as that was called then, you know, that was Little Mermaid to Tarzan. That's what the breath of the Disney Renaissance, that was like original films, hand drawn films, they were so important to me. They were important to friends. I think that, you know, you could lose a whole afternoon watching those films, rewatching one of them. And the magic of just seeing these animated films with original songs in them, it's. It's something that we don't have now. You know, I think. I think people were so enamored with Wicked, you know, because it's fun songs, but it's bright, it's colorful, and it's not. Everyone's intimately familiar with the Broadway show, you know, so it felt like you were getting something new. And I think people's reticence towards watching musicals, you know, right now is just. We didn't always have that. Those movies were musicals. You would watch these, you would get original songs, you'd come away humming them, singing them. All of us still know those Disney songs from our youth, you know, what.
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Is a Disney film you shouldn't sleep on? People maybe have slept on it. You want them to think about it. They like it. They like it.
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You know, Emperor's New Groove, Rescuers Down Under. The Rescuers franchise is really top notch, but Rescuers down under is fantastic.
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In your book, you mentioned three teachers who taught you a lot in school. Ms. Halston, who was actually kind of mean. Mr. Elliot, who attempted to use pop culture as he could, and Mr. Collins, who was from Austin, Texas, and a real Gen X teacher. What did these people have in common?
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I think for me, there's always that Internet meme where someone says a gay kid's best friend in high school is their English teacher. You know, I think it's just when you are. Maybe it's just because you're closeted and there's a lot of books in there, I don't know. But I think reading these different worlds and immersing yourself in them and like learning language and learning how to communicate with other people, learning how to express yourself is something that's just a great tool for people who are figuring themselves out. But these English teachers were very important to me. They were, I guess, the front line of me learning language, learning about myself, learning that I wanted to become a writer, or learning how important education is, you know?
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C
Yeah, you're also not shy about letting your feelings be known. In one section, you write something that if you don't like something, quote, find some taste. When did you gain the confidence to have opinions and share opinions and to have taste?
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You know, I think it was high school, you know, middle school and high school. One thing that I really remember is that when before streaming, before you were picking, you know, something that you just want to watch, and maybe none of your other friends are watching this thing because you just want to pick it. You had to watch what was airing. You had to watch what was syndicated, and what was syndicated was Seinfeld. It was the Simpsons. You would watch Jerry Springer. You would watch Passions, the wacky soap opera with the talking doll. You know, you would watch Survivor, American Idol. And when you got to school, you would talk about what you watched with your friends, and you would debate them, and you would debate the music that you liked. You know, and I think that you have to learn early on to have a strong opinion, to sort of stand amongst the pack. And I think I miss that era, you know, because when you see people arguing about music now, you know, it's one fandom and stand up, you know, has sort of permeated the debate culture, because now people argue about someone's position on the charts, you know, and back then, no one cared, like, if your artist was number one. We didn't know any of that stuff. You know, it was, is this song good? Is it bad? And can you defend your taste? Can you defend liking Britney Spears? Can you defend liking Fallout Boy?
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C
You know, this is not really a question, but I just want to get your thoughts on it. You know, Fran Leibowitz, whatever you think about her, love her. Okay, good. You know, she said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that we really lost a generation of tastemakers due to aids. But that seems to be coming back. What are your thoughts on that?
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Yeah, I think that we lost, obviously, a lot of queer taste makers who were sort of influencing the culture at the time. And, you know, we really have no idea what we did lose because, like, so much of the culture that we have consumed is just from people who survived, you know, people who are still making culture. But I think that my generation, like millennials, I think that, you know, the people who this book has resonated with, people who this book will hopefully resonate with when they read it, is we are taking that culture that we consume, and now we are creating our own stories from it. And culture died, maybe during that period, but it doesn't die. Forever. You know, like the Library of Alexandria burned down, but we kept getting books.
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C
Yeah. My guest is Ira Madison. His new book of essays is titled Pure Innocent Fun. You know, I'm not gonna give away, but you left Milwaukee, went to school in Chicago, went to nyu. You went to LA for a while. Now you're back in New York.
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Yes.
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C
Why did you decide to come on back to New York?
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I think that this is just the city that I feel the most comfortable in, you know, and it is. It's a city that makes you work to live here. It's. I, you know, I've lived in the Midwest, I've lived in la. Those are places where one. You. You can drive and you can sort of be in a nice bubble. You hop in your car, you go to the grocery store, you hop in the car and meet your friends. When you step outside your apartment here, you're. It's. It's game on immediately. You know, like, the street is alive, the city is alive. And also, the city can also meet you in your apartment here. You know, I live in my apartment in the West Village. I can. I can hear the streets. I could hear people having arguments outside. You know, it's like, it's. It's there and I just. I don't know, the being with so many people just sort of living their lives, I feel like this city just means. It means a lot to me. I came here when I was 20, and it's where I just sort of came of age again. Not, you know, not the coming of age that's in the book, but it's a different coming of age that maybe I'll get to in a later book. But, you know, it's the culture here. The theater, the even movies, you know, like seeing going to the Film Forum, going to Metrograph, ifc. And there's just so much that the city has to offer culturally. And as a person who loves culture, you know, where else would I be?
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C
One thing that's interesting in the book is you said that you don't like the sound of your voice, but you are a podcast host. How's that work?
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Well, you know, I don't have to listen to the podcast. Other people do that. I've gotten better at being able to hear my own voice, but I still wouldn't, you know, sit down and listen to it.
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C
Who's a guest that you really love speaking to on your podcast?
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B
Honestly, one of my favorite interviews ever was Alexander Skarsgrd. And people bring this up all the time, mostly because he's fun. He's cheeky. He's like a bit of a flirt. You know, I mentioned when I interviewed him, I mentioned that I had met him at the MTV Movie Awards when I worked at MTV News. He had cut me off in line, like at an after party, but then turned around and said, oh, I'm so sorry. Can I get you a drink? And, you know, it was like, you know, the eye contact there. I was like, wow. And then like, he leaned into that in the interview after I brought that up with him. So love that interview. Love him.
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C
You know, you've been on this book tour for a couple of days. One of I said, Amber went to see you. What is something that either a listener of the podcast or someone who's an early adopter of the book has said to you that really, that really touched you?
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I think what's really touched me is the fact that, you know, when you're in the midst of your career and writing, you're, you know, it's a bit like you're Aladdin, you know, like jumping from like one building to the next, you know, and you've been doing the podcast for long. You just feel like, this is my life and you never really step outside of it. And I had an interview with a lovely woman, Tamia Faulks, at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and she told me she grew up listening to my podcast. And I don't know to hear someone say grew up listening to it. When you still feel like you're growing up yourself, it makes you step out of your own life and think about something like that and just how much maybe you figuring out your life is helping other people figure out their owns as well.
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C
And what's happening tonight at the Bell.
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House, I am doing a reading of one of the essays from my book and I'm gonna have a discussion about the book and then there's gonna be a signing.
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C
All right. Our guest has been Ira Madison iii. His new book of essays is titled Pure Innocent Fun. Of course, you can hear him weekly on the podcast. Keep it. Tonight there'll be an event at the Bellhouse at 7:30pm thank you for coming to the studio. It was really good to meet you.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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A
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