Table Of ContentTAKING POPULAR MUSIC SERIOUSLY
As a sociologist Simon Frith takes the starting point that music is the result of the play of
social forces, whether as an idea, an experience or an activity. The essays in this important
collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous process
of negotiation, dispute and agreement between the individual actors who make up a music
world. The emphasis is always on discourse, on the way in which people talk and write about
music, and the part this plays in the social construction of musical meaning and value. The
collection includes nineteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field,
along with an autobiographical introduction.
ASHGATE CONTEMPORARY THINKERS
ON CRITICAL MUSICOLOGY SERIES
The titles in this series bring together a selection of previously published and some unpublished
essays by leading authorities in the field of critical musicology. The essays are chosen from
a wide range of publications and so make key works available in a more accessible form.
The authors have all made a selection of their own work in one volume with an introduction
which discusses the essays chosen and puts them into context. A full bibliography points the
reader to other publications which might not be included in the volume for reasons of space.
The previously published essays are published using the facsimile method of reproduction to
retain their original pagination, so that students and scholars can easily reference the essays
in their original form.
Titles published in the series
Critical Musicology and the Reesponsibility of Respose
Lawrence Kramer
Music and Historical Critique
Gary Tomlinson
Titles to follow
Music, Performance, Meaning
Nicholas Cook
Sound Judgment
Richard Leppert
Reading Music
Susan McClary
Tal<ing Popular Music Seriously
Selected Essays
SIMON FRITH
Tovey Professor ofM usic, University ofE dinburgh, UK
ASHGATE CONTEMPORARY THINKERS ON
CRITICAL MUSICOLOGY SERIES
First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2007 Sirnon Frith
Sirnon Frith has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN 9780754626794 (hbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Frith, Simon
Taking popular music seriously: selected essays. -
(Ashgate contemporary thinkers on critical musicology series)
I. Popular music - History and criticism 2. Popular music -
Social aspects
I. Title
781.6'4
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2006940013
Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction IX
Complete Bibliography XIII
1 Youth and Music (1978) 1
2 'The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth
of the Rock Community (1981) 31
3 Rock and Sexuality (with Angela McRobbie) (1978/79) 41
4 Afterthoughts (1985) 59
5 Fonnalism, Realism and Leisure: the Case of the Punk (1980) 65
6 Art vs Technology: the Strange Case of Popular Music (1986) 77
7 The Industrialization of Popular Music (1987) 93
8 Playing With Real Feeling: Making Sense of Jazz in Britain (1988) 119
9 The Suburban Sensibility in British Rock and Pop (1997) 137
10 The Discourse of World Music (2000) 149
11 Pop Music (200 I) 167
12 Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television (2002) 183
13 Music and Everyday Life (2003) 197
14 Why do Songs have Words? (1987) 209
15 Hearing Secret Harmonies (1986) 239
VI TAKING POPULAR MUSIC SERIOUSLY
16 Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music (1987) 257
17 Adam Smith and Music (1992) 275
18 Music and Identity (1996) 293
19 What is Bad Music? (2004) 313
Index 335
Acknowledgements
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use copyrighted
material:
Cambridge University Press for 'The Magic That Can Set You Free' in R. Middleton and
D. Horn ed., Popular Music 1, 1981, pp. 159-68; 'Pop Music' in S. Frith et al ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, 200 I, pp. 93-107; 'Towards an Aesthetic of Popular
Music' in R. Leppert and S. McClary eds, Music and Society. The Politics o/Composition,
Performance and Reception, 1987, pp. 133--49.
Constable and Company Ltd for 'Youth and Music' in The Sociology of Rock, 1978, pp.
37-58.
Manchester University Press for 'Hearing Secret Harmonies' in C. MacCabe ed., High Theory/
Low Culture. Analysing Popular Television and Film, 1986, pp. 53-76.
Media, Culture and Society for' Art vs Technology: the Strange Case of Popular Music', 8,
1986, pp. 107-22.
Methuen and Co. Ltd. for' Playing With Real Feeling. Making Sense of Jazz in Britain', New
Formations, 4, 1988, pp. 7-24; 'Adam Smith and Music', New Formations, 1992, 18, pp.
67-83.
New Statesman for 'Afterthoughts' August 23 1985.
Popular Music for 'Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television', 2113,
2003, pp. 277-90.
Routledge for 'The Suburban Sensibility in British Rock and Pop' in R. Silverstone ed.,
Visions o/Suburbia, 1997, pp. 269-79; 'Music and Everyday Life' in M. Clayton et al ed.,
The Cultural Study o/Music, 2003, pp. 92-101; 'Why Do Songs Have Words?' in A.L. White
ed., Lost in Music. Culture, Style and the Musical Event, 1987, pp. 77-106; 'What Is Bad
Music?' in C.l Washbume and M. Demo eds, Bad Music. The Music We Love To Hate, 2004,
pp. 15-36.
Sage Publications, Inc. for 'The Industrialization of Popular Music' in J. Lull ed., Popular
Music and Communications, 1992 edition, pp. 49-74; 'Music and Identity' in S. Hall and P.
du Gay eds, Questions of Cultural Identity, 1996, pp. 108-27.
VIII TAKING POPULAR MUSIC SERIOUSLY
Screen Education for 'Rock and Sexuality' (with Angela McRobbie) in Screen Education, 29,
1978/79, pp. 1-19; 'Formalism, Realism and Leisure: the Case of Punk' originally published
as 'Music for Pleasure' in Screen Education, 34,1980, pp. 163-74.
University of California Press for 'The Discourse of World Music' in G. Born and D.
Hesmondhalgh ed., Western Music and Its Others, 2000, pp. 305-23.
Introduction
Although this volume is appearing in a series devoted to 'critical musicology' it will be
obvious from the essays that follow that I am not in any conventional sense a musicologist. I
was trained in sociology and approach music as a sociologist. My starting point is that whether
as an idea, an experience or an activity, music is the result of the play of social forces. And it
is the play of social forces (rather than musical notes) that these essays address.
I studied sociology as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in
the late 1960s and as a neophyte lecturer at the University of Warwick in the early 1970s
(teaching a subject is the best way oflearning it). In these places, at that time, it was probably
inevitable that my approach to music was influenced in equal part by Marxism and symbolic
interactionism, 'a somewhat barbaric neologism', in the words of the man who coined the
phrase, Herbert Blumer. Blumer (who chaired the Berkeley Sociology Department while I
was there) suggests that:
Symbolic interactionism rests in the last analysis on three simple premises. The first premise is
that human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them.
The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of: the social
interaction that one has with one's fellows. The third premise is that these meanings are handled
in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the thing he
encounters.l
From this (and, in particular, from Blumer's student, Howard S. Becker, whose 1950s work on
'the dance musician' was still inspirational for me in the 1960s) I understood that music is an
effect of a continuous process of negotiation, dispute and agreement between the individual
actors who make up a music world. One aspect of this argument became especially significant
in my own work: the emphasis on discourse, on the way in which people talk and write about
music, and the part this plays in the social construction of musical meaning and value.
Marxism, meanwhile, was a rather vague academic label by the time I was a graduate
student. In broad terms I understood that to study contemporary music was to study a culture
industry, a term first developed by the Frankfurt School in Germany (and, in particular, by the
music scholar, T.W. Adorno) as part of its critique of mass society in the 1930s (I was taught
the Sociology of Culture at Berkeley by a Frankfurt exile, Leo Lowenthal). The starting point
of my Sociology ofR ock was the Marxist approach to mass culture: music involved processes
of production and consumption mediated by ideology. But my approach differed from mass
culture critique in two respects.
1 Herbert Blumer: Symbolic lnteractionism. Perspective and Method, Englewood Cliffs NJ:
Prentice-Halllnc 1969, 1-2.
