Low Brow: A Column by Pranavesh Subramanian
How do we make sense of 21st century popular culture in a singular narrative? W. David Marx embarks upon this ambitious project in Blank Space, writing about a wide range of cultural touchstones including but not limited to The Strokes, the advent of 4chan, the optimistic figure of Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, HBO’s Girls, Donald Trump, Me Too, Soundcloud rappers, NFTs, Elon Musk and ChatGPT. Marx is cautious to not position these as disparate events but as symptoms of the prevailing rapidly accelerating economic and socio-political conditions.
Marx divides the book into four parts: 2001-08, 2009-15, 2016-19, and 2020-25. He maps five ideologies onto these four parts. Omnivorism is the rejection of distinctions between high and low art, which he ascribes as a symptom of postmodernity at the turn of the millennium, further expanding into poptimism, which for Marx, is the tonal shift in criticism where the popularity of a cultural artefact is valued more than its aesthetic or artistic merit. The middle two periods in time are characterised by entrepreneurial heroism, or the celebration of the artist as a business genius, while the middle of the 2010s gives rise to counter-counter-culture. While progressive values were largely regarded as desirable in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it became ‘cool’ to be positioned as reactionary to this school of thought. Finally, Marx proposes digital norm evasion: elevating technology as objectively superior to morality; initially as an antithesis to conservative dogma, but quickly becoming the mode of enforcing the same.
Marx’s writing is at its best when he explores the depth of a cultural moment. In the first chapter, he isolates the figure of the hipster as an aesthetic reaction to late-stage capitalism blending the visuality of subculture with the sensibility and purchasing power of the hegemonic class. This figure is a useful way to make sense of the initial poptimism wave, the shift to progressive values being framed as desirable, all while tracking the hipster as a derisory figure catalysing the rise of counter-counterculture. Marx also positions Lena Dunham’s television show Girls as the first television show made by a millennial for a millennial audience. The show’s characteristic oversharing is a sensibility Marx identifies as central to millennial media, and its well-meaning but ultimately misfiring, tokenistic attempt at diverse representation is an inadvertent encapsulation of the very thing the hipster class is guilty of: the aesthetics of subversion shrouding the ideals of the dominant class. Marx’s analysis of Taylor Swift and Beyonce in the latter half of the book is also especially interesting within the framework of entrepreneurial heroism and ultrapoptimism. There are two strands that stand out here: fandom and the popstar as a business mogul. He draws on Mark Fisher’s framing of fandom as ‘masochistic’: with ups and downs; in contrast, Swift represents a new wave of fandom where every release is a ‘masterpiece’. Similarly, he posits Swift as transgressing the figure of a musician and becoming a ‘franchise’, making money not only for themselves but also for the executives who represented them.
If Marx’s writing is at its best when he focuses on depth, it tends to feel rushed when he focuses on breadth. Some sections of the book feel like a millennial cover of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire: cataloguing or name-dropping cultural events to paint a picture of the time rather than drawing upon their socio-political or economic ramifications. This is to be expected of a project as ambitious in its scope, as is the eventuality of notable omissions. Marx acknowledges as much in his introduction, stating that the book overrepresents American popular culture, and that several significant moments will, by consequence, be missing in a book of this nature. Yet, the lack of focus on the Korean Wave stands out to me here. This is, afterall, the decade that saw the global rise of BTS, BLACKPINK and EXO; Bong Jo Hoon’s Parasite winning an Oscar, the penetration of Korean restaurants in far-flung corners of the world where the country simply did not hold the sort of soft power it presently does. All that we get, however, is a short section on Gangnam Style. While Marx himself mentions in passing the rise of Korean music and beauty products in his introduction, the rise of a new cultural soft power in this century feels deserving of more attention. In a project framed as ‘global’, what does it then mean for a new cultural power to be relegated to a lone couple of paragraphs?
While the book does the important job of cataloguing newer forms of media, there is a curious absence of cinematic analysis, especially post-Trump. Marx’s analysis is centered largely around media that is political in the second half of the book, and even television shows take a backseat here. While he is astute to identify counter-counterculture, he centers this around the fulcrum of the overtly political: Trump, JD Vance et al. He briefly mentions the Gen-Z New York creative class in Dimes Square, and I wonder if there’s more to unpack within Dimes Square itself as a counterpoint to the early 2000s New York hipster creative class. I was intrigued that its most notable alumni do not get a mention: the Red Scare podcast with Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, emblems of 2020s counter-counterculture in their journey from edgy Bernie-bros to buddying up with Alex Jones. There are several other cultural intersections of this sort that could have made for an interesting foil alongside the overtly political markers that Marx sharply identifies — something even the first half of the book achieves better.
Finally, despite Marx’s self-awareness, the book does not feel truly global: there is certainly a sense of the internet as an American cultural space that is influenced — almost aberrationally — by outposts; rather than a rhizomatic entity. Towards the end of the book, Marx outlines the emergence of China as a ‘luxury’ market, but even this feels both insufficient and untimely. Even significant global elements in the anglosphere — Brexit, for instance — only get a paragraph’s worth of mention with Cambridge Analytica. To my pleasant surprise there was an entire paragraph on the widespread access to unlimited free 4G internet in India with the launch of Mukesh Ambani’s Jio — a precursor to the oligarch-ruling ideology nexus in the Indian context — but this did not lead to any meaningful analysis as much as paint the picture of a changing user-base for the internet.
Yes, Marx’s work is an important foundational text that documents and cements the canon of post 2000s popular culture, and sets a foundation for critics, cultural theorists and historians to build upon. But I found myself wondering what the purpose of a singular narrative such as this serves: this is not as much a slight on David W. Marx as much as it is on this mode of writing.
John Akomfrah’s film The Stuart Hall Project (2014), ends with Hall reflecting on his praxis as a cultural thinker: […] “hard thought, hard graft, recognising what the world is like, recognising the way the terrain is set against you, and then remembering the openness of history and seeing what way one can intervene”. Ultimately, the structure of a ‘singular narrative’ ends in a dismal fizzle, closing itself out from the openness of history, stuck in a limbo between prescriptive and interventionist.
About the Author:
Pranavesh Subramanian is a writer who teaches critical thinking at Ashoka University. He is @pranavesh on Instagram and @pranxvesh on Twitter.