Well in terms of beauty (it's a problematic category as it were but let's run with it) the microtonal tonalities in middle eastern music, and blues derived musics, those bending notes, that melisma, those indicate fragility, vulnerability to me. Like sobs caught in your throat. That for me is the human aspect of my listening.
There is a lot of discipline in stuff like this, you could say its imperfect in that way, but I think a lot of popular music criticism today tries to find some place to (over)fetishise psychic damage. To me, what is more subversive is to express pain with a kind of disciplined dignity. You might be at an all time nadir but society demands you function (it demands this as much for the indie artiste as the turkish classical singer.) But what I think one can do by readjusting the gradiants of where despair and pain are looked for is to have a music criticism that escapes the trap of being a surrogate literature and can have a more genuine interaction with contemporary every day life, rather than being a xerox copy of an undergraduate sociology lecture.
Whereas with that Emily song you posted, what I hear is so many wrong notes trying to be right notes, rather than embracing it like the best post-punk, free jazz or noise music. I'm very much not a music traditionalist, as many have said on this forum a lot of the stuff I evangelise for is very amusical. But I think it surrenders to that fact.
