Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #747707 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.

From Booklist
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

Customer Reviews

From "this sounds good" to "this is good."
There is a lot to say about "Performing Rites," or rather there is a lot to say about the many different trajectories cameoed as this book progresses. It is a work that deliberately seeks to question rather than to answer, offering provocatively fertile and arguable points rather than a systemic totalizing argument.

Keeping this in mind, the basic question Frith seeks out is: "Well, we know we make value judgments about popular music all the time. How and Why are these made?"

That's a tall order. And Frith seeks to start from the listener's "common sense" perspective, but also incorporates production as well. Of course the first problem is the notion of "value" in cultural studies--where words like "good" and "bad" are either spoken from a condescending sneer, highly interrogated, or avoided altogether. Rather than seeing value for music in its "popularity," Frith contends that music is always already deeply woven into schemes of value--and that's why it becomes both popular and inherently political. Music has authors, intentions, narratives, and these cannot be separated from questions of value. Challenging capitalistic market measures of measuring both popularity and value (such as Billboard), Frith takes a cue from Kant, seeking to discover and refine the logic in 'common-sense' responses to music--from genre rules, to poltical distinctions between noise and sound. Frith treats rhythm at length, and challenges the notion that rhythm is 'inherently' tied to erotics, seeking instead historical and postcolonial explanations for this.

Along the way, Frith demonstrates that much of the ninetheenth century cultural judgments and ideologies about music are still with us, albeit in mutated form. Folk, Art, and Pop are Frith's interwoven discourses about how music is perceived in Western Culture. "Folk" promises tradition, immediacy, and a critique of commercialism. "Art" promises mental and cultural transcendence. "Pop" promises access and portability. Songs are not mere texts or poetry--music gives sense and a frame for lyrics. Technology, Performance, and their meeting in the Microphoned Amplified Vocalists all play roles. Technology not only disseminates, but inseminates. Digital recordings and remasters do not uncover "the original object," but instead construct a new sound object according to changing cultural codes about music. Pop Performance involves constructing an image that gives the impression of truth and sincerity, but also offering seduction and danger as a lure. Vocalists DO play an instrument-- a microphone as well as a voice, and this alone has an enourmous impact on the meanings of music.

All this leads Frith to argue that for the 'meaning of music.' Music means something because it offers not argumentation, but experience. For Frith, music constructs a "sense of identity" through the experiences it offers of time, sociability, and the body. Music makes possible a new-kind of self-recognition--one that through all these historical discourses places us in different 'imagined' (but no less real) communities, coherent cultural narratives. This "fusion" as Frith calls it, of bodily practice and imaginative fantasy--is the integration of aesthetics and ethics:

From: "This sounds good."
To: "This is good."

That this all sounds very religious--a "fusion" of bodily ritual practice, and imaginative phantasy---should not be lost on the reader. Given the title of the book, it is certainly not lost on Frith.

From Performers to Listeners and Everyone Else In to Music's Path
I'm always amazed with writers who can produce a whole book out of philosophical contemplation, creating a winding path of questions, some answers, opinions, quotes, observations, study results, and random but relevant thoughts ultimately exploring cultural responses, consumption of, perceptions of value, aesthetics and social patterns related to music whether originating in Africa, Western popular or classical "art" music, ritualistic music, and beyond. Frith does offer some "bottom lines" such as the need to dissolve perceived approaches to the various types of music. He relies on extensive research and historical context to develop his views and there is plenty of credible "food for thought." Meanwhile, his writing style is very approachable, sincere, and carefully crafted. I'm not certain that the book title does its contents justice - there is so much more than the parameters of the title. All in all, a worthwhile and intriguing read!

Great book
This is an excellent book for everyone who like music. Simon Frith style is clear and all parts are interested. The best part is that the author hates all kind of prejudice in music, and makes a very good debate about it. There is no "bad" music for him.