On Blank Space

I read this as a free advance copy from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review; the opinions are entirely my own.

W. David Marx’s Blank Space is an outstanding book that narrativizes the cultural touchstones those of us raised in the United States grew up with. Its real achievement is to synthesize economic transformation with cultural history into a biting — and, I think, correct — critique of the increasing unity of capital and culture.

I’m thirty now, and I barely remember the cultural scene before 2001; what I have after that is mostly impressions — NSYNC and Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, the spread of Pokémon. What I do remember clearly is the rightward shift in American culture after 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq. That moment gets little attention here; what gets a great deal is the movement of cultural figures away from New York.

Marx returns to a handful of themes, the most important being the spread of “poptimism” (the idea that culture exists to appeal to all people all of the time), “cultural omnivorism” (blending and combining genres rather than siloing them into “rock,” “hip hop,” or “country”), shifting attitudes toward technology, and the rise of the “counter-counterculture.” The discussion of poptimism is the most interesting part of the book. He opens with Pearl Jam panicking that they’d sold too many records — like it or not, they’d be selling out — against a present in which musicians are praised for chasing profit. How did that happen? Marx points to the supposed democratization of culture, through social media and the language of inclusivity. There’s been an enormous push against elitism in the United States, and “gatekeeper” is now a slur. Yet, as he rightly notes, gatekeeping serves a purpose: structurally, it gives smaller, independent musicians room to find a voice without collapsing into the monoculture. The anti-elitism was originally aimed at the likes of Vogue and other Condé Nast titles, but they weathered the storm while smaller creators did not.

Cultural omnivorism is related to poptimism without being the same thing. Marx grants that all cultural innovation blends and remixes what came before, but it has rarely been as blatant and opportunistic as in the twenty-first century. Rather than drawing on the canon, or fighting it, the canon is all but ignored — one digital artist admitted he doesn’t even know what Abstract Expressionism is — while the current scene is mashed and combined. The latest instance is hip-hop/country, but nearly every genre has gone through it; and because nothing is allowed to be “current,” musicians are pushed to look backward, though not too far, fueling an age of retromania.

The internet, for its part, produced waves of technological enthusiasm. The millennium opened with a nerd culture that crested into techno-optimism, but by the mid-2010s the determinism pushed by Silicon Valley met wider criticism and collapsed into the techno-nihilism of the present: we doomscroll, we have little faith in Big Tech, we know we’re being surveilled at all times, and we feel helpless to do anything about it. Finally, the pop ecosystem needs some oppositional force to stay vibrant. Rather than the traditional Leftist counterculture filling that role — it had been wholly absorbed by the establishment — right-wing edgelords (Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, the two women of Red Scare) stepped into the gap, and the past quarter century has watched the “counter-counterculture” gain traction, first online and now offline. As the monoculture moves to absorb everything before it, the counter-counterculture only grows more visible.

Against all this, it’s genuinely alarming that the two biggest musicians of 2025 (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé) were also the two biggest of 2006. When else in the twentieth century was that the case?

Marx makes a strong, theoretically informed case for the total cultural stagnation of the early twenty-first century; Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, Theodor Adorno, and Simon Reynolds, among others, matter a great deal to his writing. He’s strong on celebrity culture, music, fashion both “high” and “low,” and internet culture. Fashion is well outside my wheelhouse, so I’ve left it mostly alone here, but it’s important to his argument.

If we agree to look at pop culture in these terms, Marx is right. But a lot is missing — he can’t include everything, of course, though a wider view does weaken the narrative somewhat. This is, more than anything, a cultural history of America in the twenty-first century. He nods to the rising popularity of Latin American pop culture, to television and music from Japan and Korea, to the mark China is making on consumer taste, but the book stays centered on the United States. Certain forms are short-changed: he fixates on reality TV in the first half and then drops television entirely in the second, even though — derivative work aside — the late 2010s into the early 2020s struck me as a kind of golden age for the medium. Film, nearly all of it derivative, gets little attention. Video games are more popular than ever, with indie games a huge part of the draw, and literature, increasingly commercialized, surely has something to say too — the rise of romantasy as a genre says something about us, doesn’t it?

I’m left wondering where American culture goes from here, and I’m not convinced by Marx’s closing call to action: build a new counterculture and gatekeep it. Fine — but given the amount of finance being thrown at “creators” (not “artists”), it’s only a matter of time before people give in. The deeper story here is the cross-fertilization of capital and culture, and the solutions to that are going to be found in political economy, not in culture. Even so, this is a welcome narrative history of how popular culture developed in the twenty-first-century United States; Marx shows how the many parts of the culture industry fit together, and he does it in an eminently readable, digestible book. My reservations are real, but they’re minor.