Hauntological pop music can express unresolved doubt through an aesthetic of greyness

Evidence

The depressive’s world is black and/ or white, (you only have to remember the covers of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer), but North does not (yet) project a cold world entirely swathed in snow. North is the direction that the album is heading towards, not a destination it has reached. Its landscape is colourless rather than black, its mood tentative – it is grey as in unresolved, a grey area. This is an album defined by its negative capability of remaining in doubts, disquiet and dissatisfactions that it unable to name. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 447

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fisher articulates what ‘grey’ means as an aesthetic category here — unresolved, tentative, colourless rather than black — useful as a working definition for hauntology writing.
• XREF: connects to: Grey music embodies unresolved doubt rather than black depression; Some music conveys feeling through unresolved ambiguity rather than certainty — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303; Formal incompleteness in music can convey longing more deeply than resolved expression — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 460 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Grey music embodies unresolved doubt rather than black depression #exemplifies (0.95)
• Some music conveys feeling through unresolved ambiguity rather than certainty #qualifies (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303
• Formal incompleteness in music can convey longing more deeply than resolved expression #qualifies (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 460
• Contemporary pop is trapped between a vacuous present and an unrecoverable past #contradicts (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1314
• Objectless melancholia distinguishes depression from sadness in pop music #qualifies (0.72) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 137
• Unresolved music can express longing detached from any remembered object of faith #qualifies (0.70) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303