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, distil 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 centre of the aesthetics that structure our culture and colour 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 poplar 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 judgements but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #240495 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

Colin McCabe, New Statesman & Society
"This is a good, and arguably a great book."

Review
Frith understands precisely what pop music is actually for, and thus has a right to write about it that few others share. (Pete Townshend )

This is a good, and arguably a great book. (Colin McCabe, New Statesman & Society )

quite simply one of the best books I've ever read about music (BBC Music Magazine )

Pop music matters to Frith, and he gives one of the best accounts yet written of how and why this should be so ... a very necessary book. (Peter Aspden, Financial Times )

Peter Aspden, Financial Times
"Pop music matters to Frith, and he gives one of the best accounts yet written of how and why this should be so ... a very necessary book."

Customer Reviews

Probaby the best book on any knid of music ever written !
Even 10 years on from it's publication I occassionally return to this volume for it's learned and probing insights into music ( and Sound per se ) - of all kinds - ( it's not only about Rock and Pop , there's as much about Classical , Folk and Jazz in here too ) , the nature of time , space , human experience in general , gender, history , social attitudes , politics and many other topics . It always offers something provocative,and illuminating. I really wonder whther the reviewer above has actually read it. The chapter called ' Rythm , Sex , Time and the Mind ' makes it worth buying alone . But the entire book's a classic. This is the book that bought the run of writing about popular music in the 80's and 90's effectivley to an end. When will we hear from Simon Frith on some new topic ? I for one can't wait .

Buy a CD instead.
The question is: do we need an academic study of pop music? Any right-thinking person would answer 'no'. So there's the problem with this book, and I write as one who bought it. A terrible mistake. Academics write whatever they feel like about whatever subject then support their arguments with highly selective quotes from other books - footnotes compulsory. With pop music this approach is completely superfluous, either you 'get it' or not. Mr Frith would be better advised using his 'talents' in another field of endeavour.