Pop melancholy marks the moment a commodity achieves selfconsciousness

Evidence

On 808s and Heartbreak, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st century pleasuredome. Kanye’s lachrymose android shtick reaches its maudlin depths on the astonishing ‘Pinocchio Story’. This is the kind of Auto-Tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-Oedipus David from Spielberg’s AI (2001) to sing; a little like Britney Spears’s ‘Piece Of Me’, you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves selfconsciousness, or when a human realises he or she has become a commodity. It’s the soured sound at the end of the rainbow, an electro as desolated as Suicide’s infernal synth-opera ‘Frankie Teardrop’. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 454

Categorization

• DEFINE: The commodity-achieving-selfconsciousness trope cleanly names the ambivalence of emotional Auto-Tuned pop.
• XREF: connects to: Destranged music culture conditions acceptance of capitalist ordinariness. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 71; Identifying with the alien powered 20th century popular music’s political charge — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 103; The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Marcuse’s account of self-recognition in commodities prefigures the postmodern structure of feeling #corroborates (0.82) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 148
• The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism #expands (0.80)