Formal incompleteness in music can convey longing more deeply than resolved expression
Evidence
On Blake’s albums, there is a simultaneous feeling that the tracks are both congested and unfinished, and that incompleteness – the sketchy melodies, the half-hooks, the repeated lines that play like clues to some emotional event never disclosed in the songs themselves – may be why they eventually get under your skin. The oddly indeterminate – irresolute and unresolved – character of Blake’s music gives it the quality of gospel music for those who have lost their faith so completely that they have forgotten they ever had it. What survives is only a quavering longing, without object or context, Blake coming off like an amnesiac holding on to images from a life and a narrative that he cannot recover. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 460
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The ‘gospel for the faithless amnesiac’ description plus the mechanism of unfilled longing naming an emotion everyone recognizes but can’t index is a top-tier articulation.
- XREF: Connects to Fisher’s framework of hauntology and lost futures across this book, and to the broader concept of unfinished forms elsewhere in aesthetic theory. — connects to: Hauntological pop music can express unresolved doubt through an aesthetic of greyness — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 447; Some music conveys feeling through unresolved ambiguity rather than certainty — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303; Unresolved music can express longing detached from any remembered object of faith — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Some music conveys feeling through unresolved ambiguity rather than certainty
#corroborates(0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303 - Unresolved music can express longing detached from any remembered object of faith
#expands(0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303