James Blake re-naturalizes Kanye’s Auto-Tune melancholy into unfocused disaffection

Evidence

It’s no surprise to learn that Kanye West is an admirer of James Blake. There’s an affective as well as sonic affinity between parts of Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Blake’s two albums. You might say that Blake’s whole MO is a partial re-naturalisation of the digitally manipulated melancholy Kanye auditioned on 808s: soul music after the Auto-Tune cyborg. But liberated from the penthouse-prison of West’s ego, unsure of itself, caught up in all kinds of impasses, the disaffection languishes listlessly, not always even capable of recognizing itself as sadness. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 456

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hauntology thesis running through this book — Blake as spectral, digitally-processed affect. — connects to: Blake’s unresolved music evokes faith without an object of belief — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303

Broader Connections

• Blake’s unresolved music evokes faith without an object of belief #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303