Pure Innocent Fun
Essays
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this nostalgic and raucous collection of sixteen original essays, Ira Madison III—critic, television writer, and host of the beloved Keep It podcast—combines memoir and criticism to offer a brand-new pop-culture manifesto.
“This is the most fun I’ve had reading all year. Like Chuck Klosterman before him, Ira Madison III takes seriously and analyzes the pop culture detritus that took up hours of our lives.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda
You can recall the first TV show, movie, book, or song that made you feel understood—that shaped how you live, what you love, and whom you would become. It gave you an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject—and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.
In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “a virgin who can’t drive.”
Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.
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Keep It! host Madison pairs personal reflection with cultural critique in his irreverent debut. As a Black, gay kid growing up in 1990s and early 2000s Wisconsin, Madison clung to TV, music, and movies as guides to help him understand how to live. In "Being Steve Urkel," Madison explains his theory that "the sitcoms you watched in your formative years tended to mirror the family unit you wish you had." In "Oprah Ruined My Life," he divulges how the talk show host's emphasis on weight loss exacerbated his own struggles with body image. Throughout, Madison hits familiar beats of millennial nostalgia—he finds common ground with his straight peers through The O.C., while Jerry Springer offers a surprisingly robust queer education—but freshens them up with sharp analysis, highlighting, for example, the catharsis Jerry offered in contrast to his buttoned-up Black family. Not everything works, however. Madison's somewhat excessive reverence for his idols (he writes of hating Coldplay because Chuck Klosterman does, then coming to love them in secret, only to gain permission after Beyoncé collaborates with them, "because baby, if Beyoncé loves Coldplay, then I love Coldplay") lend the proceedings a slightly glib undertone. Still, there's enough cheeky humor and genuine passion on offer here to satisfy pop culture junkies.
