Alison Stewart: 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 grandmother 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 7:30 PM. It is nice to meet you.

Ira Madison III: Nice to meet you too.

Alison: This took about two years to write. What was your original goal?

Ira: My original goal was, the state write an introduction was to write my own version of Chuck Klosterman's, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. It was a seminal text for me in high school and college. I revisited it during COVID and just finally it came to me I could do that in book form. I've done it for so long in magazines and for websites.

Alison: What changed the most from the first goal to what you wound up turning into your editor?

Ira: I think I did a lot more writing about myself than I intended to, to be honest. Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs 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. I found myself spending a lot more time with myself than I intended to while writing it.

Alison: It's interesting cause you really get to know you by reading the book about challenging moments in this 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?

Ira: Maybe it was a bit of a procrastination technique as well. I sell the book in 2021 and I feel like I spent the next five months or so just 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 coming of age story in the book was going to end where it ends, my coming out. I just would write down anything I remembered, like the great M&Ms that you used to be able to hunt for in M&M packages. I remember I found one one year, and then got a year supply of M&Ms. That didn't end up in the book, but wrote that down, like Pizza Hut, the book it program, things like that. Then after that, when I finally started to write, I started picking the things that really had a gravitas and weight to them.

Alison: In your acknowledgments, you thank Jamia Wilson.

Ira: Yes. My editor.

Alison: Tell me, how does she help you?

Ira: 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, rough drafts of them, maybe something I'd written for my substack a year prior or so. I had a lot of editors respond to the material.

They liked it, but her response to the material was to tell me what she would fix or to pull something out here and put something there. I really just liked that back and forth upon meeting her. I was like, "She has to be the perfect editor for me."

Alison: 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. We learned 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 teenage years?

Ira: I think that I just retreated into pop culture when I didn't feel comfortable talking with people at school. My Discman would be on. Brittany would be playing, the Strokes would be playing. 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, when I'm at family events, they're like, you would always be in the corner with your book. Once I got a TV in my bedroom as a kid, which seems like a novel thing to maybe younger people now, but where you could just watch anything on your phone, but a TV in your bedroom-

Alison: Was a big deal.

Ira: -was a big deal. Then it was over. I was watching everything. I had a VCR as well, so I would record things that aired at night. I did theater at school, so I would record shows and then come and watch them. What I think really gave me this 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. I've got in the habit of just rewatching things and filing them away in the library of my brain.

Alison: You spent a lot of time with Gran. Who would play Gran in the movie?

Ira: Wow. Maybe a Loretta Devine, because I feel like she's in everything. You'd be hard pressed to find a black film from the 2000s or late 90s without Loretta Devine. Then she also pops up in anything else. I think her, and Gran's real name is Bobby. That's who the book is dedicated to.

Alison: Oh, that's lovely. There's a telling moment, I won't give too much away, where you could have told your Gran that you were gay. You just tell a lie, but she leaves you a little bit of wiggle room, which is interesting. At that time, why did you decide to lie?

Ira: I think there's still this thing where someone might know something about you, but you're not ready to maybe say it out loud. There's still some subtext that exists. You're not ready for the full text yet. I think that you can have a silent understanding with someone like that and just still not be ready to acknowledge it yourself. I think that that's just where my brain was at the moment.

Alison: Now that you're a grownup, what do you make of her response? Leaving you a little bit of wiggle room?

Ira: I think it's a good response to have. I think that that's a lovely way to let a kid know that you see them, but you're not going to keep staring.

Alison: 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?

Ira: 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 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 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.

Alison: That's Ira Madison III reading from Pure Innocent Fun. What did the Disney universe mean to you?

Ira: Ugh. Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was Disney. There's so much Disney now where you see these live action remakes like Mufasa just came out. When you were in the Disney Renaissance, as that was called then, 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 could lose a whole afternoon watching those films, rewatching one of them. The magic of just seeing these animated films with original songs in them, it's something that we don't have now.

I think people were so enamored with Wicked because it's fun songs, but it's bright, it's colorful, and it's not everyone's intimately familiar with the Broadway show, so it felt like you were getting something new. I think people's reticence towards watching musicals right now, 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.

Alison: What 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. You like it.

Ira: Emperor's New Groove, Rescuers Down Under. The Rescuers franchise is really top notch, but Rescuers Down Under is fantastic.

Alison: In your book, you mentioned three teachers who taught you a lot in school. Ms. Halston, who was actually 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?

Ira: 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. Maybe it's just because you're closeted and there's a lot of books in there, I don't know.

I think reading these different worlds and immersing yourself in them and 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.

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.

Alison: You're also not shy about letting your feelings be known. In one section, you write something that if you don't like something, "find some taste." When did you gain the confidence to have opinions and share opinions and to have taste?

Ira: I think it was middle school and high school. One thing that I really remember is that before streaming, before you were picking 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.

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 would watch Survivor, American Idol. 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. I think that you have to learn early on to have a strong opinion to stand amongst the pack.

I think I miss that era because when you see people arguing about music now, it's one fandom and stand up has permeated the debate culture, because now people argue about someone's position on the charts. Back then, no one cared if your artist was number one. We didn't know any of that stuff. it was, is this song good? Is it bad? Can you defend your taste? Can you defend liking Britney Spears? Can you defend liking Fall Out Boy?

Alison: This is not really a question, but I just want to get your thoughts on it. Fran Leibowitz, whatever you think about her--

Ira: Love her.

Alison: Good. She said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that we really lost a generation of taste makers due to AIDS, but that seems to be coming back. What are your thoughts on that?

Ira: I think that we lost, obviously, a lot of queer taste makers who were influencing the culture at the time. We really have no idea what we did lose because so much of the culture that we have consumed is just from people who survived, people who are still making culture.

I think that my generation, millennials, I think that 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. Culture died maybe during that period, but it doesn't die forever. Like the Library of Alexandria burned down, but we kept getting books.

Alison: My guest is Ira Madison. His new book of essays is titled Pure Innocent Fun. I'm not going to 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. Why did you decide to come on back to New York?

Ira: I think that this is just the city that I feel the most comfortable in. It's a city that makes you work to live here. I've lived in the Midwest, I've lived in LA. Those are places where, one, you can drive and you can 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, it's game on immediately.

The street is alive, the city is alive. Also, the city can also meet you in your apartment here. I live in my apartment in West Village. I can hear the streets. I can hear people having arguments outside. It's there. I don't know, the being with so many people just living their lives, I feel like this city, it means a lot to me. I came here when I was 20. It's where I just came of age again.

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. The culture here, theater, even movies, going to the Film forum, going to Metrograph, IFC. There's just so much that the city has to offer culturally. As a person who loves culture where else would I be?

Alison: 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?

Ira: 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 sit down and listen to it.

Alison: Who's a guest that you really love speaking to on your podcast?

Ira: Honestly, one of my favorite interviews ever was Alexander Skarsgård. People bring this up all the time, mostly because he's fun, he's cheeky, he's like a bit of a flirt. 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 at an after party, but then turned around and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Can I get you a drink? The eye contact there, I was like, "Wow." Then he leaned into that in the interview after I brought that up with him. So love that interview. Love him.

Alison: 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 touched you?

Ira: I think what's really touched me is the fact that when you're in the midst of your career and writing, it's a bit like you're Aladdin, like jumping from one building to the next. You've been doing the podcast for long. You just feel like, "This is my life" and you never really step outside of it. I had an interview with a lovely woman, Tamia Faulks, at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

She told me she grew up listening to my podcast. 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.

Alison: What's happening tonight at the Bell House?

Ira: I am doing a reading of one of the essays from my book. I'm going to have a discussion about the book, and there's going to be a signing.

Alison: 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 Bell House at 7:30 PM. Thank you for coming to the studio. It was really good to meet you.

Ira: Thank you for having me.