Anaesthetics : popular music and the flight from feeling
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation argues that themes of self-dissolution, emotional emptiness, and empathetic absence are becoming increasingly central to contemporary English-language popular music. It historicizes this phenomenon by relating popular music's "flight from feeling" to late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century transitions in popular music production, drug culture, media, and labor. And it theorizes the aesthetic paradoxes that emerge when themes of nonfeeling are taken up by popular song, often understood as an art form preoccupied with describing, evoking, and producing emotion. This dissertation's three central chapters explore three registers of nonfeeling: dissociation (deprivation of sense of self), numbness (deprivation of sensation or emotion), and coldness (deprivation of empathy or affect). Its first chapter takes up three recent pop, hip-hop, and hyperpop songs that not only describe dissociation in their lyrics but also enact it texturally and formally, theorizing these songs' performances of self-dissolution by relating them to changing music production norms and to the alleged "death of the subject" in postmodern cultural production. Its second chapter traces a history of popular music's engagements with the word "numb," beginning with Pink Floyd's 1979 "Comfortably Numb" and concluding with Em Beihold's 2022 "Numb Little Bug." Its third chapter explores coldness as a metaphor, a sound, and an affect in popular music from the 1970s to the 2020s, arguing that although coldness once represented a term of condemnation directed at unfeeling lovers, it has increasingly become a value that popular songs attribute to their own lyric subjects. Its conclusion reflects on the uses and pleasures that nonfeeling offers these songs and that these songs offer their listeners, asking under what circumstances nonfeeling might come to feel good.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ellis, Gabriel Zane |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gill, Denise |
| Degree supervisor | Kronengold, Charles |
| Thesis advisor | Gill, Denise |
| Thesis advisor | Kronengold, Charles |
| Thesis advisor | Greif, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | Hadlock, Heather |
| Degree committee member | Greif, Mark |
| Degree committee member | Hadlock, Heather |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Music |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Gabriel Ellis. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Music. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bx866gs0302 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Gabriel Zane Ellis
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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