WANNABE: Reckoning with the pop culture that shapes meby Aisha Harris
Being a black critic in an age of exceptional art made by black people has enormous rewards and countless risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when it deals with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity shape a critic’s work? And should it?
Harris laughs at the demands of endorsing positive representations of blackness, however trite (“If you encounter black arts in the wild, be wary of Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She brazenly pushes Issa Rae’s now famous awards proclamation – “I am black to everyone” – to the most absurd extent: “It’s only right that we take her at her word and support all black artists and art, no matter how questionable , incompetent or just plain hurtful.’
But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” mediocre, she bellows back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,'” she insists. “I want inwardness and surprise and characters who feel like they have a reason for being beyond retelling history.”
However, it is complicated. Harris talks about his disappointment with “A Wrinkle in Time,” directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was booming. Harris, who writes movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at DailyExpertNews, feared a lukewarm piece could mean it would be “decades before another studio handed a movie of this size to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being damning.”
“Wannabe” is a mix of memoir and cultural analysis framed as “reckoning with the pop culture that shapes me”. Harris boasts a wide range of credentials and moves easily between decades and arenas. She makes clever use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisiting ‘Key & Peele’ sketches and dissecting bell hooks’ analysis of experimental film hero Stan Brakhage.
The book is especially effective when the author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials and tribulations of “The Black Friend” growing up in white settings.
“These black friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt like I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I tried to befriend.”
Harris interweaves her personal pain with scathing critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, such as Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Winston from Lamorne Morris in “New Girl.”
She deftly links the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“Pop culture’s over-personalization produces bitterness and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision not to have children through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory of an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”
Still, for the entire range, “Wannabe” includes occasions that require a more rigorous commitment. The battle with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I acknowledge that the current Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I can’t pretend that some of his old jokes are no longer true.” (She then quotes several.)
And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, risking the book being dated.
The Groundbreaking Success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” will probably matter for a long time to come; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” movie or Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” could lose power for readers not engaged in the mostly online #discourse.
But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’ expertise, arriving at “unintentional self-education through popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is compelling confirmation that they’re looking in the right place.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces”, a DailyExpertNews Notable Book in 2022.
WANNABE: Reckoning with the pop culture that shapes me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99