Lee McKinstry, the GMP’s new Pop Culture Editor, is calling for your submissions. To begin, she recounts tales of her own super fan past.
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As the new pop culture editor, I’d like to introduce myself. Or rather, I’d like to flash my credentials…the important ones. I’m not talking about the number of times I’ve squeezed to the front row during a concert, or the first editions I’ve fantasized about collecting on a tasteful wooden bookshelf. I’m talking about my skeletons, memories from what I’ll call the “coming-of-age” period of any self-anointed cultural maven’s ascent to “in-the-know status.” I’m talking about my first obsessions. I’m talking about Weezer and James Dean.
Not smushed together of course (though if anyone out there has somehow created a hybrid Weezer-James Dean fan fiction, please email me that strange, beautiful link, and become my hero). I worshipped both band and movie star as separate, equally awe-worthy demigods.
James Dean, iconic man-child of Hollywood lore, illustrious forebear of a legion of misunderstood pretty boys, first swaggered onto my radar at 12, when I stumbled upon a TCM showing of Rebel Without A Cause. It makes me cringe to admit this, but I cried that night before I fell asleep, sure that no love could ever be as grand and dangerous and cinematic as Jim Trask’s and Judy’s.
I was an intense kid.
The “Rebel” incident was followed by marathon viewings of Dean’s other two films (becoming a Dean completist is admittedly not very hard). I also gave a fervent and misguided speech for a 7th grade English assignment about why James Dean was the most important American of the last century. The crowning moment came during a road trip to his birthplace in Marion, Indiana, when an incredibly kind museum official led my father and I to an old Dean family barn. There, pressed into a battered cement floor, were my hero’s signature and hand prints, age 12, palms I bent to press my own into, a thrill humming through me like the roar of his Porsche Speedster.
After a year though, I broke up with James, finally sated from biography reading and interview watching. I’ll still read any articles about him I happen to stumble across, but he’s stayed tucked in my past, a dusty shrine I no longer attend to. But I still admire and understand the same qualities that first made me idolize him—his impassioned, often misunderstood devotion to his art, his fearless fuck-you to those who laughed at his methods, his hopeless idolatry of those who didn’t always love him back (looking at you, Marlon Brando). Even heartthrobs can nurse a few scars. After James, I didn’t want a perfect hero. I wanted one who burned, who stumbled, who tried to get up.
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My love for James Dean paled when it came to Weezer, a devotion I nursed for about five years with daily album listenings and a multitude of messy collages. I was home sick from sixth grade when I stumbled upon the music video for “Keep Fishing,” a bubblegum-light power-pop staple with a crunchy bass beat at its backbone. The video had the band sharing the stage with the Muppets, including a particularly randy Ms. Piggy who tied up drummer Patrick Wilson to keep as a love slave.
But it was Rivers Cuomo who really caught my eye, the lead singer who looked like an awkward high school physics teacher, complete with prematurely thinning brown hair and thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses. Bashful, he tried to steal the microphone from Beaker, and grinned like an embarrassed kid when the puppet swatted him away. For a girl just graduating from the requisite crushes on glossy, hairless boy band clones, he was transfixing; a man leading a rock band who still seemed vulnerable in a way that wasn’t broodingly packaged or neat. He looked like a normal guy. I was in love.
I became a fan. I became the fan. One of those horrible people you avoid at concerts, because she got to the venue before the tour bus did, because she is quivering with pre-show shivers two hours before the opening act takes the stage, because she cries during an acoustic number. Within six months, I owned all four of their LPs, ten posters, and two t-shirts. I joined their online fan club, whose message board I frequented daily. I scrounged back issues of any music magazine I could find for articles on the band, and I considered the week stellar with the unearthing of a rare B-side. I counted down the days until the release of their new album with the fervent devotion of an evangelical awaiting the Rapture. My binders and shoes were stenciled all over with the winged Weezer W, and I talked of a tattoo and a Weezer-themed wedding.
That love later went on to spawn a Weezer-themed sweet 16 party, three concerts (attended instead of family gatherings and high school dances), and eventually, my college application essay. My loyalty to Weezer was surpassed only by my loyalty to family, friends, and the fulfillment of basic survival needs.
In my status as a superfan I thought I knew who I was, in a time when most of my friends were just beginning to try to figure themselves out. By the time I wrote that college application essay, though, I’d mostly outgrown my favorite alt rockers. I’d discovered early 90s indie rock, and the wicked cynicism of Stephen Malkmus and Frank Black had overshadowed my bespectacled first love. So my essay was fashioned as a thank you note, a love letter to a band who’s offbeat voice had encouraged my own. Their music was something to swathe around myself like a tattered raincoat, a shield against the perils of coming-of-age. As a superfan, I had an identity.
I felt spoken for. But what does such passion preclude? What does and obsession teach the obsessive? I think that is the real question. Loving them and valuing their art gave me the first clues to what I might value in my own. Feeling so much love and camaraderie with what seemed like just a silly little rock song reminded me of the bigger world outside of my head, a piece of culture I could find myself in.
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It is not lost on me that both of my first obsessions were men, though I don’t consider them my only heroes by any means. But as a new member of the Good Men Project team, I thought I’d present my first male heroes to you upfront. Admittedly, I know a certain level of burgeoning pre-pubescent attraction probably aided into my love for them, but I promise not to make this a section about all the men I think are dreamy.
The point is, I have experience looking for good men among the annals of pop culture, and my criterion for that distinction is varied and usually off-beat. I tend to shine the spotlight on the dreamers, the men who press their bones into their art, the awkward upstarts who are just getting their footing in a tumultuous digitized industry. I’m still looking for myself in them, and my standards are probably a little higher than they would be for women, of whom I assume and expect to be impressed at all times. I can promise my section of the Good Men Project will continue to root out these worthy objects of adulation, as well as pinpoint the fellas who aren’t getting it right. We search for ourselves in those we admire, we model our goals after their triumphs as well as their pratfalls. I hope to help you navigate the tricky trends of pop culture while still uncovering a few worthy lessons and moments of adulation to take with you.
I’ve idolized both a doomed icon and a geeky pop maestro, and seen myself in both of them. In this way, perhaps I’m trying to understand what it means to be a good man just as much as you are.
So now, I’m turning it back to you. Have any pop culture idols you’d like to laud? An album or movie that changed your life? A new TV show you love to hate? Email me your submission ideas at [email protected], and let’s find new heroes together. Here’s to our first loves, the ones that come wrapped in plastic jewel cases, bound in leather, or flickering in celluloid.
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photo by author
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