Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me

I was prepared to love this. Harris starts out with a story about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show I adore, which doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere anymore FOR SHAME.

I knew Harris's voice from Pop Culture Happy Hour (where she is one of the four main hosts), and she reads her own audiobook as well, but as I was listening I realized I didn't actually know anything about her. This book was part personal essay, part cultural criticism, part discussion of race as it applies to the pop culture we're raised on.

Harris and I are of the same generation, and have a lot of the same cultural touchstones (except that she's a pop culture critic and I've missed a lot of the TV shows and movies that have come along in the last five years). I generally like her dry, wry humor. And so I was enjoying Wannabe with its discussions about The Lion King, and The Babysitters' Club, and the one Black friend in every teen romcom from the '90s.

But the further I got into the book, the more annoyed I felt. There's a chapter about the rehashing of intellectual property and how nobody has new ideas anymore (which is true and also we all already know this). There's an essay about how Harris as a 30-something doesn't want kids, and how pop culture makes parenting seem awful, rife with examples about how kids ruin everything. (You do you, but I don't care, and I don't need to hear people shitting on being a parent - just experiencing it is hard enough.) Megyn Kelly shows up in an essay about there being more people of color and women in re-imaginations of existing IP, and how white has always been the default, and how white people can't or won't tolerate non-white people being centered in things. Yes, AND ... if you know anything about cultural criticism already, none of this is NEW.

The best parts were where she was applying things to her own life, like how her white middle school friends always expected Harris to be Scary Spice when they pretended, how she thought she was named after a Stevie Wonder song, and how her dad didn't want her to have white dolls growing up but she was desperate to play Ariel from the Little Mermaid (the ‘89 version), with ridiculous results.

I'll still enjoy Harris' work when she's on PCHH, but this was only okay.

I found some of her essays okay but the pacing of the book felt so slow and didn't finish it because it wasn't engaging anymore.

Pop culture essays by a Black Millennial. Interesting if not groundbreaking. Best chapters discuss being a Black critic of Black art; why so many TV shows/movies are sequels, reboots and remakes; and the 15 minutes of viral fame the author experienced when Fox News' Megyn Kelly took umbrage at Harris' suggestion that Santa Claus isn't a white man.