Mainstream media commodities simulated emotion while Burial severs voices from biography

Evidence

New Labour Britain is intoxicated by consensual sentimentality, hooked on disposable simulated emotion. With the ubiquity of TV talent shows, religiose emoting has become a fast track to media recognition, secular UK’s equivalent of sanctification and salvation. In this process, singing has become almost incidental – it’s lachrymose back stories that the media really hungers for. Burial’s strategy with singing is exactly contrary to this: he removes voices from biography and narrative, transforming them into fluttering, flickering abstractions, angels liberated from the heavy weight of personal history. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 223

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ pattern of class/identity signaling — here the talent-show backstory is a form of emotional spectacle that Fish opposes with abstraction.
• XREF: Echoes of Adorno’s culture industry critique — emotion manufactured and commodified vs. art that refuses instrumentalization of feeling. — connects to: Ghosts are not-recognizable faces and shrunken everyday presences — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 227; Unexpressed emotion and retained dignity move audiences more than drama does — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 443; Hauntology marks media palimpsests spooked by themselves out of sync — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1107

Broader Connections

• Unexpressed emotion and retained dignity move audiences more than drama does #contradicts (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 443