by David Kordahl
No one sells out anymore. The first pages of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx’s overview of the past quarter-century of popular culture, give a striking example of this cultural shift. In 1992, the Seattle-based grunge band Pearl Jam elected to stop making music videos because they were worried about becoming too commercial. Marx writes, “Pearl Jam’s principled stand resonated with their fans: If rock bands were so desperate for money, they might as well be bankers.” This contrasts with the Lollapalooza festival in 2022, thirty years later, where David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, performed as “DJ D-Sol,” playing electronic dance music for party-goers at the Tito’s Handmade Vodka stage after arriving in Chicago on his corporate jet.
How did this shift occur? One thing that makes Marx’s analysis bracing is that the figures he picks as being most significant in our broader cultural history are not the usual musicians or writers. Much more time is spent on Pharrell Williams and Kim Kardashian than, say, Arvo Pärt or Elena Ferrante. This is not a failure of taste, but a decision to focus on figures who managed to understand, before the rest of us, how fundamentally the Internet had altered the logic of cultural change.
Blank Space further develops the model that Marx described in his 2022 book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Cultural change in earlier eras, from high culture to low, ran something like this. Small groups of innovators would try new things in relative obscurity. Popularizers would notice them, and would streamline and repackage their ideas to be fed to a mass audience. The public might never experience the original source of such ideas, but the kitsch they consumed might still be directional, moving culture forward, even if at a lag.
Subcultural scarcity was important to such changes. Knowing about trends before others did gave one social capital, and that capital rewarded risk. It made sense for Pearl Jam to stop making music videos, since overexposure was a form of contamination. The gesture worked because the market was suspect, underground knowledge was elevated, and selling out was a real category with real stakes.
Enter the Internet. Read more »
A thought has been nagging at me lately. Are most shitty people not very bright?
Kipling Knox: Thanks, Philip. Yes, that’s true—both books share a world with common characters. But that wasn’t my original intent. Between publishing these two, I started two other novels, with different settings. I put them both aside because I found myself drawn back to Middling. The story “Downriver,” in particular, ended so ambiguously that I was curious to know what would happen to its characters, Morgan and Arthur, and how their mystery would play out. It’s a difficult trade-off—sticking with one fictional world versus exploring others. When you write a book, you are deliberately not writing others, and there can be a sense of loss in that. But it’s very gratifying to explore a world you’ve built more deeply. I think of how a drop of ocean water contains millions of microorganisms, each with their own story, in a sense. So the world of Middling County (and also, in my second book, Chicago) has infinite potential for stories!
Sughra Raza. Finding Color. Boston, January, 2026.
Any sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said, but even small advances–if well-placed–can seem miraculous. I remember the first time I took an Uber, after years of fumbling in the backs of yellow cabs with balled up bills and misplaced credit cards. The driver stopped at my destination. “What happens now?” I asked. His answer surprised and delighted me. “You get out,” he said.
Several years ago I was the moderator of a bar association debate between John Eastman, then dean of Chapman University School of Law, and a dean of another law school. The topic was the Constitution and religion. At one point Eastman argued that the promotion of religious teachings in public school classrooms was backed by the US Constitution. In doing so he appealed to the audience: didn’t they all have the Ten Commandments posted in their classrooms when growing up? Most looked puzzled or shook their heads. No one nodded or said yes. Eastman appeared to have failed to convince anyone of his novel take on the Constitution.
