Review Transparency

I received a free digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are entirely my own.

W. David Marx’s Blank Space is an outstanding work that narrativizes some of the cultural touchstones that those of us living in the United States have been raised with. To its credit, Marx synthesizes economic transformation with cultural history to put forth a biting–and I think–correct critique of capital and culture’s increasing unity.

As someone who is now 30, I hardly remember the cultural scene before 2001 and, even after, most of what I have are impressions. I remember N’SYNC and Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, the spread of Pokemon, and so on. At the same time, I clearly remember the rightward shift in American culture after 9/11 and in the lead-up to Iraq. While this moment does not gain a significant amount of attention, what does appear a great deal is the movement of cultural figures away from New York.

While there are a handful of themes that Marx comes back to, the most important are the spread of what he calls “poptimism” (the idea that the purpose of culture is to appeal to all people all the time), “cultural omnivorism” (which combines and blends genres rather than siloing them into genres like “rock,” “hip hop,” or “country”), changing attitudes toward technology, and the rise of the “counter-counterculture.”

His discussion of poptimism is fascinating and it’s really the most interesting part of the book. He begins with an anecdote about Pearl Jam panicking because they sold too many records: whether they liked it or not, they’d be selling out. Today, on the other hand, musicians are praised for their pursuit of profit. How did this come about?

Marx points to the theoretical democratization of culture, whether through innovations like social media or the language of inclusivity. There has been an enormous push culturally against elitism in the United States, and “gatekeeper” is widely used as a pejorative. Yet, as the author rightly points out, this gatekeeping does have a purpose. When looked at structurally, it allows smaller, independent musicians the space to carve out their own voice without collapsing under some monoculture. This anti-elitism was originally pointed at magazines like Vogue and other Conde Nast publications, but they have been able to weather the storm while smaller creators have not.

Cultural omnivorism, on the other hand, is related to poptimism, but is not the same thing. While Marx admits that all new cultural innovation relies on blending and remixing that which came before, it had hardly been so blatant and opportunistic as it has been in the 21st century. Rather than taking bits and pieces of the canon (or fighting against it), canonical pieces have been all but ignored (one digital artist recently explained that he doesn’t even know what Abstract Expressionism is), while the current scene is blended, mashed, and combined. The most recent case of this sort of blending is the emergence of hip-hop/country music, but virtually all other genres have been subjected to the same process. At the same time, by nature of not being “current,” musicians are forced to look backwards (but not too far!) to pull on what came before, fueling an era of retromania.

The internet, for its part, has led to waves of technological enthusiasm. The millennium began with a wave of nerd culture that crested into techno-optimism. However, by the mid-2010s, the sort of determinism pushed by Silicon Valley executives and tech circles began to face wider criticism, collapsing into techno-nihilism in our current moment. We doomscroll, have little faith in Big Tech, and understand that we’re being surveilled all the time. At the same time, we feel helpless to do anything about it.

Finally, the pop culture ecosystem needs some sort of oppositional force in order to maintain its vibrancy. Rather than the traditional, Leftist counterculture play this role, the traditional counterculture had become totally incorporate by the larger establishment. As a result, right-wing edgelords (think Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, the two women from Red Scare Pod, and so on) filled in the gap, and the past quarter century has seen the “counter-counterculture” gain increasing traction; initially online, but now in offline spaces. As the monoculture seeks to absorb everything before it, the counter-counterculture gains widespread visibility.

Recognizing these major threads, it becomes even more alarming that the two biggest musicians in 2025 (Taylor Swift and Beyonce) were also the two biggest musicians in 2006. At what other point in the twentieth century was this the case?

Marx’s makes a strong case for the total cultural stagnation of the early 21st century, and his book theoretically-informed. Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, Theodor Adorno, and Simon Reynolds and a few others are really important for his writing. The book is also strong in its discussions of celebrity culture, music, fashion (both “high” and “low”), and internet culture. Fashion is something that’s pretty far outside of my wheelhouse, so I haven’t touched on it much in this review, but it is important to Marx’s book.

Should we look at pop culture in these terms, Marx is right. But there is also a lot that’s missing. Obviously, Marx can’t include everything, but a wider view weakens his narrative somewhat.

For one, this is–more than anything–a cultural history of America in the 21st century. He nods to the nascent popularity of Latin American pop culture, television and music coming out of Japan and Korea, and the mark that China is making on consumer tastes, but the book remains centered on the United States.

At the same time, there are cultural forms that are short-changed throughout the book. For example, although he fixates on reality TV in the first half of the book, he drops his discussion of TV series in the second half. While there are many derivative works on television, the late 2010s (into the early 2020s) have also struck me as a sort of Golden Age for the medium. Film, on the other hand, is nearly entirely derivative, but it finds little attention here.

At the same, video games are now more popular than ever before, and indie games are an enormous part of the draw to larger audiences. Literature receives less attention than other forms, and it is increasingly commercialized, but I’m sure that there’s something to say about it here, especially the rise of romantasy as a genre–does that not say something about us?

I am left wondering where American culture goes from here, and I’m not entirely convinced by Marx’s final call to action: create a new counterculture and gatekeep it? Ok, that’s fine and well, but given the amount of finance being thrown at “creators” (not “artists”), it’s only a matter of time before people give in. In fact, the ultimate narrative here is about the cross-fertilization between capital and culture, and the only solutions to the problem are going to be found in political economy, not culture.

Even so, Marx’s book is a welcome narrative history of the development of popular culture in the 21st century United States; he does a good job of outlining how the culture industry’s many parts fit together while creating an eminently readable and digestible book. Recommend with minor reservations!