[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. A quick glance at the chapter titles by Aisha Harris' new book offers clues to the guiding principles of her collection of memoir-esque essays. There are a lot of song titles. There's a chapter, Parents Just Don't Understand that touches on intergenerational trauma, Ebony and Ivory, about the on-screen trope of the Black friend, and Isn't She Lovely. In it, she shares how she learned one of her own personal narratives turned out to be not true. Even the title of the book, Wannabe: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me is a nod to the Spice Girls tune.

MUSIC-Spice Girls: Wannabe

Alison Stewart: What Aisha Harris wants is to do her job being a cultural critic, reviewer, and host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour but as she writes in her book, it isn't always simple as giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. For example, she writes about the tension between supporting Black artists and art and critiquing their work, like King Richard or Red Tails if you're inner cinema nerd is telling you the movies might be just meh. Of course, like all writers, she knows her own history affects the way she analyzes culture.

Aisha grew up in suburban Connecticut and was used to being one of the only Black girls in the room, answering invasive questions about her name. She came of age in the ‘90s and early 2000s consuming memorable and influential pop culture like the Sex and the City girls, the Spice Girls, the Mean Girls, all the girls. Her book Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me is out now. Aisha Harris will be at The Strand tonight at 7 PM and she joins me now. Hi, Aisha.

Aisha Harris: Hi, Alison. Thanks so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. What's a piece of pop culture, it could be a movie, book, TV show, or a song that really influenced you, and continues to influence you today. How has pop culture informed how you see the world? Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to us at this number now. How do you think the internet has changed how we consume and talk about pop culture? What's a piece of pop culture you used to love but maybe as you have matured, you see it differently? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 is our phone number.

Aisha, this book weaves your personal stories about childhood and friendship, and dating and then connects them with the pop culture you grew up with and around. Why do you think pop culture can be a helpful reference when trying to tell your own story and make sense of your own story?

Aisha Harris: Of course, I've been doing this for years now. This is part of my profession and I am probably a little bit more obsessed with pop culture than the average person. But I do think everyone in some way, unless they were kids growing up where TV or movies were definitely not allowed in the household, we're all influenced, especially at early ages by the pop culture we consume. Because it's an entertainment medium, there's ways in which those ideas and notions that are reflecting society just become a part of who we are and how we see the world through the pop culture we consume.

I think that for me, it's really fun and challenging to look at how the things that I've loved and the things that I maybe haven't loved have really shaped who I am and how I see the world.

Alison Stewart: What was your gateway piece of pop culture, the one that hooked you, that you knew pop culture would be really important to you in your life?

Aisha Harris: Oh, man. It's hard to tell but I think what lead me on the path of pop culture as a profession, something I wanted to study, was probably my gateway of Some Like It Hot, the 1959 comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. It was one of the first movies I remember seeing that hooked me on classic movies and old movies and Turner Classic Movies. I spent a lot of my middle and high school years taping on VHS movies from Turner Classic Movies and becoming obsessed that way. Then later, I learned about people actually write about it for a living. That opened my eyes to wanting to study it and talk about it on a professional level.

Alison Stewart: I think for mine, as a young kid, it was Broadway musicals and Singing In the Rain the movie.

Aisha Harris: I love that.

Alison Stewart: Then, as an adolescent, it was the Rolling Stones. I think it was Let's Spend the Night Together film and Purple Rain.

Aisha Harris: Nice. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Those just turned certain keys in adolescent me, [laughs] and in a lot of other adolescents, I think. You mentioned your love of old movies. You have a bachelor's degree in theater from Northwestern and a master's in cinema study from NYU. As a professional consumer of pop culture and writer about pop culture, does Aisha the critic always agree with Aisha the person?

Aisha Harris: Oh. [laughs] Definitely not.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Aisha Harris: That's part of the challenge, right? I write about this a bit in Wannabe. Just there are some things where from a critical standpoint, an esthetics standpoint, from a, "Do I think this is the greatest thing ever made?" no. Sometimes that is in direct conflict with what actually I-- [sound cut]

Alison Stewart: Did we lose Aisha's Comrex? Let's see. We're going to do some magic on the production end, the technical end, while I reintroduce our guest. Aisha Harris is the cohost of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Her new book is called Wannabe: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me. She'll be at The Strand tonight at 7 PM. Listeners, we're taking your calls. What's a piece of pop culture that really influenced you as a kid and continues to influence you today? How has pop culture informed how you see the world? You can call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Aisha's back. You were finishing your thought about how civilian Aisha sometimes doesn't agree with critic Aisha.

Aisha Harris: Yes, definitely. Yes, just one of the things I think of is Sex and the City and how I was very obsessed with that show when I was younger. I still enjoy it, but there's definitely parts of it where I just cringe when I look back on it.

Alison Stewart: You dedicate a part of the book to nostalgia and the role it plays in culture in our lives. Where do you stand on nostalgia as a storytelling device today?

Aisha Harris: I think it's what drives so much of our pop culture today for better and for worse, but more so for worse, I think. I write about the over-franchiseification of everything and how especially in Hollywood, there's this sense that we don't like endings. We don't like things that end and don't come to a closure. Everything has to be rebooted, or recycled, or reheated. It's just this loop that I think we're stuck in.

I think that I can be just as nostalgic as the next person. We all have those things that we look back on and we're like, "Oh, I love that," but I'm also the type of person who says, "But I love it as it is and I don't necessarily need a new form of it." Like The Little Mermaid, the most recent version of that definitely falls into that category where I did not need this remake. I love the original for what it is even if it is problematic in some cases and I don't think the remake actually improved on it in any way.

Alison Stewart: That dovetails into another issue that you write about in the book where an instinct, understandably, is to support underrepresented artists and their art. In this case, The Little Mermaid is featuring a Black actor as the little mermaid but then when it's meh, what do you do? What does that push and pull feel like internally for you?

Aisha Harris: Look, every critic is going to face these challenges of how you respond to something you don't really like. But there's this extra layer of scrutiny and existential crisis that for me at least, as a Black critic, and when I'm talking about Black art that arises and that I feel as though I don't want to completely trash something because there's this fear that, "Oh, there's a scarcity of good Black representation and we have to take what we can get."

I used to feel like that and I used to approach my criticism like that but I don't anymore in part because I think we're in this space now where there is so much great programming and art that is being created out of Black minds and Black creativity to the point where not all of it is going to be good and it's okay for us to say it's not good. I think we should treat Black art as seriously as we do every other art, which can sometimes mean we also have to critique it and call it out when it's not up to standards or at least up to the standards that we might expect.

Alison Stewart: You write about how six-year-old Aisha loved The Lion King and an 11-year-old Aisha saw Lion King on Broadway, and then you find yourself as a 31-year-old movie journalist seeing The Lion King live-action reboot and you feel strange. You write this great series of sentences that says, "I'm six. I'm 11. Actually, I'm 31. I love it, I love it, I hate it."

Aisha Harris: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What changed? How’d you go from, “I love it, I love it, to I hate it?” What changed? What did you see as a 31-year-old that gave you pause about Lion King?

Aisha Harris: The thing is I still love the original animated- -Lion King and I love the Broadway version of it because I think the Broadway version was in many ways, it took this familiar piece of art and then it created something completely new, the puppetry, the songs that were added. It felt like it was additive to the lore of The Lion King. Whereas the “live-action remake”, which is really just all CGI because it's all animals was just this creatively bankrupt endeavor that was meant to purely just rack up nostalgia and also let the cash flow in.

Certain scenes were almost word-for-word and sell-for-sell the same imagery as the original. I just have to wonder like, what are we doing here? What is being added here? My disdain for the newer Lion King is just rooted in my disdain in general of these Disney live-action remakes and all these other remakes that really just trade on nostalgia and don't add anything new to what they are taking from.

Alison Stewart: Here's a text we got. The song that has really influenced me is Dear God by XTC, I learned I wasn't alone in being a nonbeliever. It gave me so much comfort, and it still does. This is a great segue into the idea that pop culture has become hyper-personal. What impact does this have on the content we consume if pop culture in 2023 is so personal?

Aisha Harris: The thing is that I think so much of our lives are now lived online and lived through social media. What I've found is that because we have our in real life selves and then we have our online selves, we're able to in our online selves in a way that often dovetails directly with pop culture. You have people finding community amongst various fandoms, whether it's Star Wars, or Beyoncé, or Taylor Swift.

I think there's good that comes out of that because you can connect with people all over the world over these shared loves and interests. I think there's also a dark and insidious side of it, which is that people take it too far and start arguing with strangers on the internet about their favorite musical artists or about this movie. Then it sometimes turns as bad as one moment I mentioned in the book is an incident where a rapper who had some beef with Kanye West was basically attacked on stage. They were throwing objects at him in part because his public feud with Kanye West was causing them to side with Kanye West.

I just think it's tricky. I wanted to trace just how we've gotten to this point where everything is so personal to the point where some people are losing their minds in ways that are not healthy.

Alison Stewart: You write that an artist who one might not expect to nail the issue gets it.

Aisha Harris: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Kenny G gets it when it comes to our engagement with pop culture. What does Kenny G get?

Aisha Harris: Well, There was this really interesting documentary from a couple of years ago called Listening To Kenny G and it really wrestles with his fame, and his popularity, and how he sold millions of millions of copies of albums and is probably very rich for the rest of his life, but there's lots of people who criticize him as not being real jazz. He is just so game and understands that this is true. I quote him in the book, I'm going to paraphrase here, but he basically says, "When you like something and someone else says they don't like it, then it feels like a personal attack on who you are."

Again, this is how pop culture can make us-- I think it's just as sometimes defining and definitive for people as politics or the way we move in the world every day because pop culture just feels like something that seems so personal. People just get really wrapped up in the things that they love even if they don't necessarily recognize it or understand it clearly. It's something that really affects us on a day-to-day basis.

Alison Stewart: It's also a signal to other people. I think about when I see a little baby in like a Nirvana onesie. That kid doesn't like-- [laughs] The parents are trying to let you know that, “I've got my kid in a Queen drag t-shirt who's four.” There's some sort of signal out, “I'm a cool parent still, see? Here, look at my kid.”

My guest is Aisha Harris. She's co-host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. The new book is called Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me. Aisha will be at The Strand tonight at 7:00 PM. You start the book with a personal moment. You believe that your name and you are connected to a real genius and one of his songs. For years, you always thought your name was inspired by Stevie Wonder’s song, Isn't She Lovely, which is about his daughter Aisha, spelled the same way you spell it. Let's have a little audio refresher.

MUSIC-Stevie-Wonder: Isn't She Lovely

Alison Stewart: Spoiler alert, you learned that wasn't actually the case. Why did this narrative being named after a Stevie Wonder song matter to you?

Aisha Harris: Stevie Wonder is one of those artists who I think even if you are not the hugest fan of him, you still respect him. He is just the pinnacle of popular music with also actual respect from people of all backgrounds and races and musical tastes. I really thought that that was the case in part because my parents had the album, Songs in the Key of Life, and my dad would sing it to me as a kid.

It wasn't quite that way, but I created this narrative because I felt as though to have that name would make me seem even more interesting or cool than the song that they often associated with it, which is a song I-- [sound cut]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Aisha Harris. She's co-host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. The new book is called Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me. Aisha will be at The Strand tonight. What do you remember feeling about when you learned that story wasn't true, that you weren't named after a Stevie Wonder song?

Aisha Harris: I just remember feeling like, “Oh man, I've been lying to myself for a really long time.” I really had to unpack why that was the case. I do that in that chapter. It really was in some ways rooted in some anti-Blackness, some feelings about how Black names are perceived in real life, whether it's seeming “ghetto”, which is a word that all the kids used when I was in school. All these other characters in pop culture like Sheneneh in Martin.

The blacker their name sounded, and I use that in air quotes, the more in some ways dehumanizing the characters could be or seem. Yes, I definitely felt as though I just wanted to position myself with Stevie Wonder, and that'll make me feel better about who I am.

Alison Stewart: You let us know that your parents named you and your siblings with specific names. For those of you don't know your sister is Zakiya Dalila Harris, who she was one of our Get Lit with All Of It book club authors. She wrote The Other Black Girl. Can you explain your parents' thought process behind naming you and your sister?

Aisha Harris: It was the ‘80s and I think that was one of the peak times where Black Americans were trying to really connect with their African roots. It was a wave of Black kids like myself being given African names even if our parents' names were not quite like that. I think they wanted something that would be a little bit different from a lot of our white peers, and what also just sounded good, just sounded nice, sounded pretty. It was part vanity and then part also just trying to connect to the roots.

Alison Stewart: As you mentioned, you've been working as a professional culture critic for a long time. When you were starting out your career, you wrote a piece for Slate called Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore. You were about 25 years old. The piece went viral in part because Fox News and Megyn Kelly jumped on it, as you can imagine, and you even received threatening messages as a result. Do you remember why you originally wrote this piece?

Aisha Harris: Yes, I wanted it to-- We were pitching ideas for various holiday themes and I had grown up, there was always a Black Santa in our house, but as a kid, I didn't understand why Santa was Black in my home, but white pretty much everywhere else I saw him. I thought, “You know what? How fun would it be just to write a tongue-in-cheek article about how we're going to get rid of Santa Claus, the white guy, and turn him into a penguin because first of all, who doesn't love penguins? Everyone loves penguins and he's an animal or it's an animal. You don't have to deal with kids wondering why the- -penguin looks a certain way."

Of course, the thing is is that our cultural myths and traditions are very hard to shake. Santa as a white man is still the default and people got really upset about it even though Santa is fictional. It could be anyone or anything if we wanted them to.

Alison Stewart: Got a text. “My name is Aisha and I was also that middle school kid who taped TCM on VHS. Silent movies from the ‘10s and ‘20s really impacted me. While most of my friends at school had posters of NSYNC and Backstreet Boys on their lockers, I had photos of Rudolph Valentino, a famous silent movie actor who emigrated from Italy and became the first Hollywood heartthrob.” Okay, how many Aishas have come out of the woodwork while you've been on the tour?

Aisha Harris: Not too many actually yet interestingly enough, but that's so funny because I had James Dean all over my walls, James Dean, Gene Kelly, yes, we were similar, Aishas.

Alison Stewart: If you could recommend right now just a really truly like trash binge, something that perhaps doesn't have cultural cache but that you just are enjoying right now?

Aisha Harris: Yes, The Ultimatum: Queer Love on Netflix. Yes, it's just a reality dating show. It's very trashy and it's about people wanting to get married. A lot of them are in their early 20s and I don't understand why they're so eager but yes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Aisha Harris: It’s kind of a spinoff-ish of Love is Blind but people who are already in couples giving ultimatums to their partners, “Marry me or I’m going to find someone else.” So yes, that’s it, very trashy and fun.

Alison Stewart: There’s your summer trashy binge courtesy of Aisha Harris. The name of the book is Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me. Aisha Harris will be at The Strand tonight at 7:00 PM. Aisha, thank you so much for making time today.

Aisha Harris: Thank you. It was great.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.