It was, objectively and with respect, not a very good column. And it started at a time when a column—like, say, Bill Simmons’ “The Sports Guy” for ESPN—had a lot of power and could be the first thing readers wanted to talk about, as well as when big-deal novelists (who likely didn’t need the paycheck) having one wasn’t unheard of: Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer (which also kicked off in 2003) was, as memory serves, often great. “The Pop Of King” was, however, a really fun, confounding, and way too conversational column, a pop-culture curio that evoked from this EW reader a lot of “What was that?” reactions that nevertheless had, in a guilty-pleasure kind of way, its own addictiveness. And it always left one with an inescapable question: Isn’t this guy, like, the best at writing?
In the column, “Uncle Stevie,” as he sometimes referred to himself, would riff on anything and often in the 700-word range, which is saying something for a novelist whose books could surpass 1,000 pages. (It was his version of tweeting, then, before tweeting was a thing.) The most infamous of these would have to be his random rundown of “who’s cool (and who’s not).” The gist is that no one can define cool and that it’s ineffable (but he can and it’s not), sort of like an expanded version of Marge asking “How the hell do you be cool?” in The Simpsons. Here’s a choice stretch: “Are any actors always cool? Even in bad movies? I’d say there are at least four: Jack Nicholson, Holly Hunter, Morgan Freeman, and the late John Cassavetes. It’s worth noting that Cassavetes directed many films and none were cool.” That last bit, although it’s done in good fun and seemingly on the fly, just might make you want to throw your mag or laptop across the room as the man made, one could argue, the coolest movies ever—beyond being maybe one of the coolest actual humans ever. And then there’s this: “Now, look. We all read EW religiously, and we know about hot—male hotties, female hotties, who’s hot and who’s not—but I’m here to tell you that hot doesn’t matter. Hot is for square bears weighted down with earthly cares. What matters is cool. You know, like Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. Or Natalie Wood starting the hot-rod race in Rebel Without A Cause.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but “male hotties, female hotties, who’s hot and who’s not”? What are we doing here, actual American treasure?
That particular column probably came out, considering the reference to Bruce Springsteen’s Magic, in 2007. (Verdict on the album? “It’s good, but not cool.”) And King did that often, throwing in modern titles (like, say Prison Break) without getting into them and moving on so quickly that you get the sense he didn’t really absorb and isn’t heavily analyzing these albums, shows, and films. And that last bit is very problematic for a pop culture column. It’s almost as if the only note from his editor was to nod to some modern entertainment now and again, even if in name only, so it reads as current and worthy of the “weekly” in the magazine’s title. But some of his entries didn’t do that. His column on “pop music,” from 2010, could have been a memory-lane piece about hearing Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On” at nine years old and having his mind blown (that would have been cool!), but then quickly just becomes a list of all the music he loves, like he was way past deadline in the penultimate graph and didn’t have time to articulate his thoughts properly. “The supply is endless,” he writes. “‘Turn The Page,’ by Bob Seger, and the most excellent cover of same by Metallica. ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning,’ by Richard Thompson, with those amazing guitar licks and terrific lyrics (“Red hair and black leather/My favorite color scheme”). ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,’ by The Ramones. ‘At the Hop,’ by Danny & The Juniors. ‘Shake It,’ by Metro Station. ‘Boogie Shoes,’ by KC And The Sunshine Band.” There is a portion of Frank Vincent’s amazingly titled book A Guy’s Guide To Being A Man’s Man that I was gifted years ago where the Sopranos actor essentially just lists songs that he likes having sex to. This is not totally like that but in the same ballpark, and it’s pretty wild to think the most successful novelist ever and that man’s man have any storytelling instincts in common.
What’s puzzling about this is that beyond all of his success as a novelist, King has been such a force for good about the craft and discipline of writing yet came out with this column that, almost by design, had neither. People swear by his tome On Writing and the advice in it, including Interior Chinatown scribe Charles Yu and The A.V. Cub‘s Jacob Oller, who sang its praises in our AVQ&A on the pieces of pop culture that inspired us to become writers, among many others. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” King notes in the book. “There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” That is essential advice and one also given by one my favorite novelists, Tom Perrotta (Little Children, Mrs. Fletcher, Joe College), who dubbed King “a master storyteller whose voice is so natural and unaffected that it seems to be coming from deep in our collective unconscious.” And maybe that “unaffected” voice (as frustrating if fun and scattered with lame “who’s hot and who’s not” phrases as it could be) was what he was going after in “The Pop Of King.” Or maybe he was striving for something self-consciously “so lame that it’s…cool,” to quote Homer in that aforementioned Simpsons scene. Or maybe the great one was just phoning it in. But the fact that a few of these off-the-cuff pieces from, in some cases, twenty years ago are still rattling around in my head speaks to a sort of impact any writer would dream of.
