Performing Rites

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.

This is a good, and arguably a great book. I've long been a bit of a Frith groupie, but with Performing Rites he suddenly becomes the object of that one genuine academic emotion: envy. For more than 25 years, Simon Frith has held three very different commitments in balance. As a journalist he has commented on pop for the quality papers with accuracy and wit...He is also an academic, trained in classical sociology...[and he] is a soixante-huitard, fundamentally affected by the explosion of sex, drugs and rock and roll that at the cusp of the 1960s turned into the grim whinings of political correctness...In Performing Rites, Frith...[brings these commitments] together into a magisterial work...This is a deeply learned book., This is Simon Frith's long-awaited book about value and popular aesthetics. He starts off from a sociologist's assumptions about musical taste--that taste is socially formed--and moves toward a theory of popular aesthetics where value judgments carry enough ethical weight to serve as shapers of community and individual identity. Aside from the book's valuable and controversial arguments with cultural studies, it is a courageous model of what to do with sociology itself. In making social observation the basis for aesthetic inquiry, it takes the kind of risks that are rarely found in the field of sociology of culture. To say that Frith's approach is interdisciplinary is prosaic. His command of musicology, discography, cultural theory, journalistic savoir-faire, and political pragmatism provides a blend of the scholarly and idiosyncratic that is quite unique, even in a field as eclectic as cultural studies., [This book is] bursting with juicy morsels about the intersections (or lack thereof) among conversation, criticism, and academic analysis, as well as thoughts on the aesthetics of sound, the voice, the relationships between music and sex, and the artificial divide between high art and low, and a lot of ruminations on the social, intellectual, and emotional ways we listen to music...This book is less an academic analysis and more like a joyous pogo., A learned, wide-ranging, often brilliant investigation of pop music aesthetics from a sociological perspective, and of pop music sociology from an aesthetic perspective...Performing Rites stages a dialectical encounter between the two professional and philosophical positions Frith has occupied, trying to arrive at a theory of pop music's value that will do justice to both identities...The 13 chapters of Performing Rites develop a steady stream of provocative ideas, explicating them in the widest context of scholarly and journalistic explorations of popular culture...[T]his is an impressive and entertaining book, one that deserves crossover success among critics and listeners. Resoundingly discrediting the old saw that about tastes there is no disputing, [Frith] demonstrates how deeply the manner in which we dispute our tastes is bound up with our identities and our communities., Performing Rites is...destined to become another classic.

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.