How 21st century culture lost its way, with W. David Marx

Just in time for Halloween, we’re hosting a virtual hauntology reading group (specifically, hauntology the music genre) at 4pm ET next Thursday, October 30. If you want to join in, sign up for a paid subscription, or toss a few bucks into our haunted tip jar, and we’ll send you the readings and a link to log into the conversation. We hope it’ll be the first of more group reading sessions to come.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord, an online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can talk about the news of the day; and the Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

We spend a lot of time here talking about the structural forces that turned pop culture into an endless churn of sequels, remakes, and nostalgia plays. But what if the blame for our current “creative recession” lies on more than just economics or platforms? What if our cultural values themselves have shifted in ways that make true innovation harder to sustain?That’s the focus of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, the forthcoming book from Tokyo-based culture critic W. David Marx—and probably the first major exhaustive account of the last 25 years in music, film/TV, internet culture, and fashion. He doesn’t just look at the technological, political, and economic forces that that created a winner-take-all landscape where billionaires and centi-millionaires like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Jay-Z and frankly Donald Trump took up all of the cultural oxygen in the room, making it harder and harder for the next generation of innovators to break through. He zeroes in on the cultural attitudes that have led us here—and that set us apart from our 20th-century forebears—including poptimism, the valorization of entrepreneurial heroism, cultural omnivorism, and more.

In addition to Blank Space, David the author of the mega-influential books Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. He joins us to talk about the mind-boggling task of summing up the past quarter-century of culture, and why most of the coolest, most innovative outputs ended up getting pushed to the margins. We also get into what originality means in a climate of constant churn, and why he believes that fighting for it is still important, even in a postmodern landscape where “everything has already been done.”

Finally, David makes the case that building a healthier cultural ecosystem starts with changing our cultural attitudes. That means embracing and reinforcing social norms that have fallen to the wayside in the past quarter century, like normalizing giving credit to smaller artists, learning the canon so we can break it, and yes, making it lame to sell out again.

Pre-order Blank Space, which is out November 18 via Penguin Random House.

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