Grey music embodies unresolved doubt rather than black depression

Evidence

In God’s world the allegorist awakens … This solves the riddle of the most fragmented, the most defunct, the most dispersed. Alleg­ ory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: the secret privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phantasmagoria of the objec­ tive, and, left entirely to its own devices, rediscovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 637 (#expands, via linked claim)

What separated Joy Division from any of their predecessors, even the bleakest, was the lack of any apparent object-cause for their melancholia. (That’s what made it melancholia rather than melancholy, which has always been an acceptable, subtly sublime, delectation for men to relish.) From its very beginnings, (Robert Johnson, Sinatra) 20th-century Pop has been more to do with male (and female) sadness than elation. Yet, in the case of both the bluesman and the crooner, there is, at least ostensibly, a reason for the sorrow. Because Joy Division’s bleakness was without any specific cause, they crossed the line from the blue of sadness into the black of depression, passing into the ‘desert and wastelands’ where nothing brings either joy or sorrow. Zero affect. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 137 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Auto-Tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital airbrushing, and the (over) use of the two technologies (alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, is this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality – a perverse yet ultra-banal normality, from which all flaws have been erased. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 453 (#qualifies-own, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Digital enhancement technologies produce an upgraded normality stripped of flaws — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 453; Allegory loses its melancholy character when viewed from a redemptive standpoint — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 637; Objectless melancholia distinguishes depression from sadness in pop music — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 137 (+1 more)

Related

• Hauntological pop music can express unresolved doubt through an aesthetic of greyness (similarity 0.82)
• Objectless melancholia distinguishes depression from sadness in pop music (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Allegory loses its melancholy character when viewed from a redemptive standpoint #expands (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 637
• Objectless melancholia distinguishes depression from sadness in pop music #contradicts (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 137