Synopsis
What is it that makes us nod our head in time with the rhythm, tap our feet, grin, grimace, flip the dial? What is it that makes music "good" and what leads us to make these myriad critical decisions about popular culture each day? This text considers these questions and seeks to uncover the meaning which is manufactured by popular music. From Toscanini to the Pet Shop Boys, "Performing Rites" ranges over and beyond popular music in its exploration of the influence of popular aesthetics. Value judgements are made constantly in all our life-decisions, monumental and mundane, intellectual and apathetic. Simon Frith seeks the root of these decisions which inform our apprehensions of the very culture we daily construct.
Review
An engaging exploration of the meanings, overt and hidden, of popular music.
İ"Performing Rites" is¨ quite simply one of the best books I've ever read about music. Any music. -- Nicholas Till "BBC Music"
İAn¨ assumption-storming book about how and why we listen to popular music...İand an¨ eloquent and flawless case for pop music as a complex and multifaceted social event...Frith, a faultlessly astute and erudite critic and academician...manages to dismantle just about all of the most widely accepted paradigms and conventions of music theory and criticism. -- Geoff Pevere, Toronto "Globe and Mail"
İThis 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. -- Sarah Vowell "San Francisco Weekly"
İFrith¨ dissolves the spurious distinction between 'high' and 'pop' culture with a wit and erudition that is all too rare among pontificators who seek to find the terminal decline of moral values behind every Madonna song. Pop music "matters" to Frith, and he gives one of the best accounts yet written of how and why this should be so...Frith is not afraid to venture into the demanding realms of ethnomusicology to support his arguments...İA¨ very necessary book. -- Peter Aspden "Financial Times"
İ"Performing Rites" is¨ an innovative, virtuosic and important book. Frith has succeeded in organizing a huge terrain and makes valuable contributions to some of the most pressing current debates on popular music studies...I was rewarded with insights and clarifications that will be of continuing value in my own work. For every passage that I had time to mention in this review, there are at least three of equal merit and interest...Perhaps the best indication of the importance of this book is that now, after filling the space available to me, I have a strong desire to keep writing, to keep discussing the many avenues that Frith has opened up. If others find "Performing Rites" as provocative and rich as I have, then it is sure to become a key text in popular music studies. -- William Echard "Journal of Musicological Research"
Frith...is the kind of scholar the best rock and roll deserves--a true fan first, a critic/cultural commentator later. Like his American counterpart, Greil Marcus...Frith's ideas are always important: What values justify high' and low' art? What mandates the various genres' of pop music? What role does technology play in our appreciation of the music we hear? These and the other high-minded questions Frith examines don't necessarily find their final answer here, but the process is more fulfilling than the slick music magazines flooding the newsstand. Nowhere among his discussions of aesthetics does he offer answers about what it will be hip to listen to next week, but Frith's socio-philosophical quarrel with history about the value of pop music and popular culture more than earns its place among the growing canon of worthwhile pop culture texts.
İFrith suggests that¨ since in the era of mass reproducibility all music is potentially popular music, talk about music is a key component of a popular aesthetic, and any music that can be heard particularly to recognize and encourage that talk becomes (a) pop music...If you agree with Frith that this process is wonderful in its circularity, then you must read "Performing Rites." If you think of such circularity as less than wonderful...you should still read Frith's book...for the frustrations--and consequently the arguments--it is likely to cause are mostly provocative and productive ones...Paramount among "Performing Rites"' strengths is its synthesizing, connective work. Frith casts a wide interdisciplinary net across a number of fields--sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, literary studies, cultural history and studies, and philosophy--and succeeds in drawing out a number of useful and illuminating parallels and intersections. -- Arthur Knight "American Music"
Performing Rites is...destined to become another classic.
[ Performing Rites is] quite simply one of the best books I've ever read about music. Any music.
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