Gabriel Ellis is a PhD candidate in musicology at Stanford University. He writes on the aesthetics of contemporary popular music and sings with the vocal early music ensemble “Neuma.” Ellis's dissertation research has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Musicological Society.
SHC Project
Anaesthetics: Popular Music and the Flight from Feeling
Popular music is often understood as an art form devoted to exploring and evoking strong feelings. How can we make sense of music that does precisely the opposite? In "Anaesthetics: Popular Music and the Flight from Feeling," Ellis explores how experiences of nonfeeling are depicted in contemporary genres from shoegaze and dreampop to trap music and cloud rap. He argues that by embracing themes of numbness, coldness, and dissociation, artists in these genres are responding to the emotional demands of care and creative labor in the neoliberal era. At the same time, these artists are developing sophisticated aesthetic strategies for translating sensory deprivation into the sensuous medium of sound. He responds to this phenomenon by developing a theory of "anaesthetics": the aesthetics of anaesthesia.