Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music - Hardcover

Frith, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674661958 ISBN 13: 9780674661950

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.

Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Frith, Tovey Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, has written extensively on pop music and culture for the Village Voice and the Sunday Times of London. He is the author of the contemporary classic Sound Effects.

Reviews

University professors of a generation ago scoffed at the idea of their students listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan more intently than to their own lectures on history and philosophy. Nowadays universities offer courses in rock and roll and popular culture, which have become the history and philosophy of a very different era. The British Frith (Sound Effects) is the kind of scholar the best rock and roll deserves?a true fan first, a critic/cultural commentator later. Like his American counterpart, Greil Marcus, Frith sometimes waxes academic at the expense of his reader. But like Marcus, Frith's ideas are always important ones: What values justify "high" and "low" art? What mandates the various "genres" of pop music? What role does technology play in our appreciation of the music we hear? These and the other high-minded questions Frith examines don't necessarily find their final answer here, but the process is more fulfilling than the slick music magazines flooding the newsstand. Nowhere among his discussions of aesthetics does he offer answers about what it will be hip to listen to next week, but Frith's socio-philosophical quarrel with history about the value of pop music and popular culture more than earns its place among the growing canon of worthwhile pop culture texts.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A strained and frequently patronizing evaluation of ideological, rhetorical, and sociological elements in popular music. In this study of the relationship of individuals to their favorite performers and music, Frith (Sound Effects, 1982, etc.) takes a relatively simple subject and smothers it with facts and theory. Viewing the act of listening to popular music as a performance in its own right (``we express ourselves through our deployment of other people's music''), Frith identifies how music is categorized for consumption and, in turn, associated--by artists, producers, and, ultimately, by listeners--with larger social and cultural distinctions. But his tone, by turns pedantic and flip (questioning taste, he asks, ``Is the music right for this situation--the Trammps' `Disco Inferno' for a gay funeral? Whitney Houston's `I Will Always Love You' for everyone else's?'') is bound to turn off those readers who manage to keep up with the withering pace of his study. Frith veers off course somewhat in presuming to establish qualitatively and generically the ``aptness of different sorts of judgment.'' He observes: ``We can only begin to make sense of popular music when we understand, first, the language in which value judgments are articulated and expressed and, second, the social situations in which they are appropriate.'' While germane to the dispassionate study of the phenomenon of popular music, this suggestion, and this study as a whole, tells us little about what makes a young fan declare, ``Led Zep rules!''-- and why that is in itself a valid judgment. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Frith (English, Univ. of Strathclyde) here tries to uncover the nature of popular music. In introductory chapters, he explodes the oft-attacked distinction between high and low art, defines pop music as a marketable commodity rather than a type of music, and argues that genres represent markets rather than musical styles. In the second section, Frith contends that popular lyrics only have meaning as part of the musical experience and cannot be considered poetic texts. He also convincingly attributes the perceived difference between a cerebral classical music and a visceral pop to European racism and demonstrates how technological advances in recording have blurred the distinction between artist, producer, and listener. Frith concludes that popular music affects both the social climate and individual identities. Like Theodore Gracyk in his recent Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (LJ 3/15/96), the author buries his sometimes compelling insights in a barrage of academic verbiage that may be difficult for any audience other than academics.?David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For some it's not only rock and roll, it's art. And being art, there simply must be some way--an aesthetic of rock--of judging and evaluating it. Buy into this theory, and you will want to wallow through rock critic-semiotician extraordinaire Frith's latest look at popular music and what it all means. Distinguishing between what's low and what's high--artwise, that is--Frith treads a narrow line between startling, cogent analysis and indulgent overexamination. As usual, his arguments are incredibly well footnoted, and the extensive index makes the book a useful reference as well as an engaging exploration of the meanings, overt and hidden, of popular music. Of course, while Frith's contentions and conclusions are thought provoking and insightful to those who share his fascination with pop culture, casual readers often find that his prose just gets in the way of the beat. After all, how much fun--how meaningful--is "Louie Louie" or "Peaches" if you have to be concerned with its cultural subtext? Although good for comprehensive pop culture collections, this may be a circulation underachiever for other libraries. Mike Tribby

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674661958
• ISBN 13: 9780674661950
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360