For anyone working in popular music studies, Simon Frith has been obligatory reading for the past 30 years or so. It is over this period that popular music studies has developed as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, and during that time Frith has been central to its development. His book The Sociology of Rock (1978), later revised as Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n' Roll (1983), helped pave the way, and his subsequent work has played a formative role in establishing the study of popular music as a serious concern. This is his first major publication since Performing Rites, which appeared in the mid-1990s, and it is significant enough because of that. It does not consist of new writings but of articles which more or less span the period in question, from the late 1970s to 2004. This makes it the only retrospective collection of his since the occasional pieces put together in Music for Pleasure (1988). Two of the essays which appeared in that collection, ‘Why do songs have words?’ and ‘Hearing secret harmonies’, are reprinted here, but that is the only duplication, and so minimal enough. The rest have not previously been collected together and given unity of presence. It is certainly useful to have them between two covers, partly because they come from rather disparate sources, and partly because they cover a broader period than the collection which precedes it by 20 years. These are not inconsequential bibliographical details, for they help set the book in context, within the field and within Frith's own career. They also provide some measure of how long and consistently well he has been producing insightful and influential contributions to the task of taking popular music seriously.
This has not always been easy. In the 1970s and early 1980s it was common enough to meet with derision or disdain (at times veiled, at others not) when you announced that some of your work at least was devoted to studying popular music. If that now seems a long time ago, it is in part because the argument has been won and we no longer have to justify what we do by special pleading or any other means. The strength and substance of Frith's work have been enormously important in this respect, but on the evidence of it here it is clear that it has served other, more significant, purposes among which helping to give direction and form to the field of popular music studies is primary. In his introduction, Frith notes that each of the essays was, at the time they first appeared, polemical in intent and designed to challenge ‘developing orthodoxies’ (p. xi). The second piece collected here is one example of this, for there Frith tackled the growing sentimentalism and sloppy romanticism associated with rock and its ‘community’ of fans. That was very useful at the time, as was his piece with Angela McRobbie on rock and sexuality, which of course brought ‘cock rock’ into the frame for the first time. It is good to have that included in the collection, along with his ‘Afterthoughts’ on the piece, written in 1985, which acknowledges the problems with their intervention of the late 1970s but should not detract from the importance of their debunking of the nonsense that rock was sexually liberating and of the claim that, whereas pop was sexually dishonest or artificial, rock was sexually open and honest. This, too, seems a long time ago, but the memory of how such fatuities were widely embraced should not be allowed to slip easily away into the historical shadows.
The first essay in this collection, on youth and music, is a reprint of a chapter from The Sociology of Rock, and not the chapter in Sound Effects dealing with the same issue. Here we encounter a certain frustration with the book. This is that the criteria for the selection and arrangement of the pieces being brought together are not made sufficiently clear. The book has only a three-and-a-half-page introduction, which hardly seems ample enough in view of the temporal span covered by the essays, and what I have claimed for their significance in the shaping of musical sociology. Frith gives a summary of his intellectual formation and a sketch of the ideas and intentions behind some of the writing, and while these are interesting, these few short pages at the start of the book seem too light and, in view of the intellectual achievement represented by the volume as a whole, rather throwaway. Why certain articles are included here and others omitted – and every reader is likely to think of other writing by Frith that could have gone into this assembly of his work – is only partly made clear, with many gaps in the explanation remaining. That is a shame, because it would have been good, among other things, to hear more about his critical interest in the cultural sensibilities of suburbia and how this developed. It would also have been valuable to hear more on why he thinks suburbia is such a fertile breeding ground for popular musical innovation. This is not a complaint about the inclusion of any of the articles or reprinted chapters in the anthology; indeed, I was glad to read again, in that first chapter, about his research in the 1970s on music and young people in Keighley, a small town in Yorkshire, for I have always liked this and wished more of this kind of sociological fieldwork had been done in studies of popular music over the years. It might have helped shape what we do rather differently, giving it rather more empirical weight and ballast. But the point about this opening chapter is a different one, and it is simply that I would have been grateful for some rationale of its welcome reprise.
Reading through these articles again is to be reminded of one of Frith's major strengths. He is excellent in mapping a particular area and distilling key elements of thought about it, such as the relationship between music and technology, or pop music as a category (in part a residual one into which music is placed when it has not been, or cannot be, included in other genres). He has always had a sure ability in spotting an analytical weakness or muddle, a theoretical problem or contradiction, and developing a sound critique that helps us move beyond the flaw or weakness and develop a more coherent intellectual framework for what we do. Indeed, as a sociologist Frith has always had a sharp eye for sociological fallacy and misjudgement in the analysis of popular music, whether this involves crude realist readings of songs as if they are sociological data or determinist accounts that see forms of popular music as homologies of social structures and people's locations within them. At times, though, the virtue in what he says and the clear line he takes leads to a failure to push hard enough through to where he might be able to get to. For example, he writes against reading ‘back from lyrics to the social forces that produced them’ (p. 210), yet on the opening page of the book he claims that it is ‘the play of social forces (rather than musical notes) that these essays address’ (p. ix), so in what ways does it seem legitimate to conceptualise and analyse the relations between popular music and social forces? Frith has never resolved this issue satisfactorily because he has always been so aware of the dangers involved, and erred too far in the other direction.
He has important things to say about the aesthetic values of popular music, about how for example it may provide us with a way beyond the mundane, offering some spell of freedom from everyday pressures and encumbrances. He notes that in pop ‘transcendence marks not music's freedom from social forces but its patterning by them’ (p. 144), which seems exactly right, but he seems so determined to hold on to the aesthetic specialness of music that we do not find out, or find out fully enough, how musical transcendence can be so patterned, how this is brought about and what it involves. It would perhaps have be valuable to see him develop his thoughts on why and how it is possible to listen to popular music historically for a sense of the texture and ‘feel’ of the social experience of its period, or of what it meant to be culturally caught up in the currents of that time, for there we can encounter similar analytical pitfalls and negotiating these may provide other ways into the troublesome relationships between artistic expression and social experience, musical allegiance and social identity, or whatever other variant of the defining couplets of the sociology of art and culture may be on the table at any one time. These are difficult issues. What is not in doubt is that ‘patterns of music use provide a better map of social life than viewing or reading habits’ (p. 205). The crunch question is how to understand those patterns, and there we are all involved in a collective endeavour to find the most pliable and subtle means of exploring them.
There is such a wealth of fruitful comment and discussion in these essays, and in a short review it is impossible to deal with more than the few examples I have raised. This is an important collection, and it should be widely read, or re-read. It is a shame that many type-setting or other errors which appeared in the original publications have not been corrected, that now irrelevant cross-references from these originals have not been removed, and that deictic indicators such as ‘now’ and ‘recent’ have not been amended to suit the time of republication. We may excuse the failure to reset each chapter in the same font style and size, but these other irritants in the reading are slipshod and represent a failure to honour in the book's production the undoubted merit of its contents. Such minor grumbles aside, it is only fitting to end by emphasising what a pleasure it has been to go through these essays once more, and in one or two cases for the first time. The experience has provided many reminders of what I learned from them when I initially encountered them, and thrown up other points which I had overlooked or not recognised for the significance they seem to have now. This is simply to say that these essays deserve to be re-read or, if you are coming to them afresh, to be read carefully for the first time. They merit such attention because, most of all, in their distinctive blend of critical journalism and academic scholarship, they show what it means to take popular music seriously, and that is important not only because nothing quite matters like music, but also because without making popular music an area of serious enquiry we run the risk of seeing a return of the facile derogation of it that prevailed for most of the past century.
