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Rax King, author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer. Nikki Austin-Garlington/Nikki Austin-Garlington / Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group hide caption
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Rax King, author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer.
Nikki Austin-Garlington/Nikki Austin-Garlington / Knopf Doubleday Publishing GroupFor writer Rax King, "tacky" has always been a word associated with her family.
King remembers her mother using the word to describe her mother-in-law's heavy jewelry and fur coats worn in the summer. Part insult, part arbiter of taste, "tacky" conjured strong emotions for King.
"I would always hear my mom calling her [mother-in-law's] stuff tacky and calling her taste tacky, and feeling these early twinges of shame about it," she says. "Because all the stuff that I was hearing described as tacky was stuff I really liked. I didn't know what the word tacky meant, but I knew it was bad."
In her latest book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, King writes essays unified by her love of the tacky. It's a heartfelt defense of enjoying things that give you pleasure, with no guilt involved.
"If you experience a piece of art and have an immediate, joyful reaction to it, and then you find yourself trying to backtrack and walk back your own reaction because it's not in line with what other people are saying about this piece of art, that's where I think we make a lot of mistakes," she says.
Coming of age with Creed
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King grew up in the late '90s and early 2000s, the height of popularity for rock bands like Puddle Of Mudd and Creed. In Tacky, she recalls identifying with the angst in Creed's music. But an experience listening to a Creed CD on a school bus made her question herself.
"I sat down next to this kid on the bus ... and he saw my Creed CD, and scoffed at me and said, 'Wow, I can't believe you like Creed.' And that was probably the first conscious moment I had of [realizing that] stuff that you like can be the wrong stuff."
Now that she's older, King is reconsidering critics who panned Creed albums as soon as they came out.
"Just about all the write-ups I could find didn't give me something I could even argue with. It was just like, 'Creed sucks. Creed is bad. If you like them, you're going to like them, no matter what we say.' That was the energy that people tended to bring to the entire project of thinking about Creed. And to me, that was wildly unfair."
The Cheesecake Factory is for everybody
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An outpost for The Cheesecake Factory in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. PR Newswire hide caption
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An outpost for The Cheesecake Factory in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
PR NewswireLike the word "tacky," the restaurant chain The Cheesecake Factory is something King also associates with her family. King would often dine with her family at the chain when she was young, and that tradition has continued to the present day.
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King believes part of The Cheesecake Factory's appeal is the chain's fanciness yet accessibility.
"It's opulent, but it's too opulent. It's got plush surroundings, but they are too plush. They're right in that sweet spot where it's elegance, but it's also so silly because it's like a little kid's idea of a rich person's mansion, you know?"
