CJ The X
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A Conversation With W. David Marx on Status, Study, Critique, Experts & Adison Rae
🕑 Added 2025-12-18 13:37:53 +0000 UTC(Recorded June 19th in Vancouver, 1 day before my YNGiAM Lecture at Rio Theatre)
W. David Marx is a Tokyo based writer on fashion, culture, and the interdisciplinary, ever present pressure of status competition. He is the author of Status & Culture (2022), a wide ranging exhaustive synthesis of great thinkers on the subject of our innate drive for status, and a core source for one of my lectures and upcoming video essays.
In this talk we do not cover any of his fundamentals of status at all. Instead we barrel direclt yinto a complex and evolving first conversation about the research process, academia, poptimism, critics, experts, metrics, and his contrarian disregard for Adison Rae. Some sword sparks fly too as we have interesting disagreements about whether or not we should re-establish elites to fix our problems (classic CJ The X Monarchy moment) "Come the fuck on" i believe i say at one point as a result of my terminal inability to be anything except myself
A very in-progress artifact for me, a behind the scenes conversation with an expert that reveals me halfway through thoughts, but rewatching I found so much of what David says wickedly insightful, including things I didn't hear in the moment cause I was busy with my own thoughts. Overall definitely a very flowstate-y conversation which is probably evidence that it's interesting enough for others.
cheers
Comments
Patrick James
Oh I'm mildly embarrassed because I didn't finish listening and then popcasts Joe Coscarelli came up. Point still kinda stands though. David knows critics are serving plenty more than Addison Rae.
Patrick James
Not to be a disagreeable, but flagging I first heard about 100 gecs from Nytimes Popcast during the pandemic, they championed them (and ice spice pretty early in her cycle). I don't really enjoy that podcast anymore, but their poptimist blending of a love of Madonna and Taylor Swift and ye (who shall remain nameless and shameless) on end of year lists alongside more niche art gave me a "if you like this big thing, I like it too, but hey, also, you might like this smaller thing"... ie. the infrastructure being discussed/criticised here remains somewhat intact and continues to promote varied art ... I don't think the YT algorithm does that to the same extent as any human recommendation system (if at all). This happens especially with end of year lists when critics do lookbacks and give their own picks, which doesn't happen as much with the weekly shows/content that are more likely focused on industry promo cycles. With human recommendation in mind I'm gonna recommend the No Encore podcast, which is would be professional millennial Irish music critics plugging away at the art of criticism for the love of it long after the money disappeared locally - random sample - episode 351 - best songs of 2022. A good way to break out of only being algorithmically fed is just to go to any human source and see what they really love. If you wish for a world where art critics continue to support formation of new art, then you've got to keep paying attention to those critics (and not just to critical theory)
phil e the theyby
Wow, I LOVED this. Status and Culture is one of the most impactful books I've ever read, and seeing CJ and W. David Marx flesh out the implications of those ideas and elaborating this idea of choosing our own elites according to our values, and how awareness of the role of status empowers us to do that, was incredibly rewarding. One of the core ideas I keep coming back to is something CJ said at the San Franscisco show, which is (paraphrasing) "You don't win people over by convincing them, you win people over by enchanting them." I think W. David Marx talking about really advocating for the people and the ways of being that we feel should be high status also speaks to that. I think some people could misinterpret the conversation at the end to say "you should go on the internet and bash everything that you think is bad about popular culture," but I think both CJ and W. David Marx are much more focused on *advocating for the culture that you think is good* rather than *attacking the culture that you think is bad*. That doesn't mean there's no room for cultural critique; it's more that, if you provide cultural critique without actually providing an image for better cultural values, then you're not actually helping anything.
