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Simon Frith
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Simon Frith is a former rock critic and a sociologist who specializes in popular music culture. He read PPE at Oxford and did a doctorate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. He is the author of many books including his first, The Sociology of Rock, ISBN 0-09-460220-4, Sound Effects (Panteon, 1981), Art into Pop ([Methuen, 1987] written with Howard Thorne), Music for Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music.
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Simon Frith is a former rock critic and a sociologist who specializes in popular music culture. He read PPE at Oxford and did a doctorate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. He is the author of many books including his first, The Sociology of Rock, ISBN 0-09-460220-4, Sound Effects (Panteon, 1981), Art into Pop ([Methuen, 1987] written with Howard Thorne), Music for Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. He also co-edited other key anthologies in the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies including: On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word and The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Most recently, Frith has edited a four volume set entitled: Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media & Cultural Studies. He has chaired the judges of the Mercury Music Prize since it began in 1992. His popular music criticism has appeared in a range of popular presses including the Village Voice and The Sunday Times. He taught in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick and the English Studies Department at Strathclyde University. In 1999 he came to the University of Stirling as Professor of Film and Media. On January 1 2006 he took up the Tovey Chair of Music at Edinburgh University. He is also the brother of guitarist Fred Frith and psychologist Chris Frith.
The Sociology of Rock
In The Sociology of Rock (1978) Frith examines the consumption, production, and ideology of rock music. He explores rock as leisure, as youth culture, as a force for liberation or oppression, and as background music. He argues that rock music is a mass cultural form which derives its meaning and relevance from being a mass medium. He discusses the differences in perception and use of rock between the music industry and music consumers, as well as differences within those groups: "The industry may or may not keep control of rock's use, but it will not be able to determine all its meanings - the problems of capitalist community and leisure are not so easily resolved."
Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music
In Performing Rites (1996) 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.
"Bad Music"
Frith (2004, p.17-9) argued that "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:
- "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
- "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"
and "rock critical lists," which include:
- "Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
- "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p.28)
Sources
The Sociology of Rock.Frith, Simon. "What is Bad Music" in Washburne, Christopher J. and Derno, Maiken (eds.) (2004). Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-94366-3.Frith, Simon (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music.
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