Customer Reviews

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

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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.

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!

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.

I bought this book when it was first published some years back. A mistake. Frith takes a subject, pop/rock music, which offers so much joy, inspiration and pleasure then systematically removes all the fun with an over-educated academic hodge-podge of verbiage which should never have seen the light of day - let alone been put between the covers of a book. There are many books on popular music and culture which capture the rock'n'roll spirit or at least acknowledge it's existence, Frith should take his thesaurus and footnotes somewhere more suitable - maybe a study of nineteenth century novelists? Let's hope he's inflicted his last outrage on pop music.