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Evaluative judgements were precisely what our conversation two decades ago was about, and much of Simon's work deals with discourses on musical value in popular music. Popular Music Matters is therefore a well-chosen book title, in that it underlines the intense engagement in music that has always characterised Simon's work, as well as that of many others in PMS, compared to other fields of study where people can be more disengaged in relation to the object of study. This has partly to do with the link to pop fandom that many share. David Hesmondhalgh's Why Music Matters (Reference Hesmondhalgh2013) uses similar title wordplay to express the importance of music, and for Simon and his Festschrift contributors, it is the ‘low’ genres of popular music that matter very much.

Simon Frith was for a long time a vital reference point for my own work on popular music and youth culture. This is true for many PMS scholars – including obviously the contributors to this new book. Ever since the path-breaking The Sociology of Rock (Reference Frith1978), he has combined academic study of music – interdisciplinary but firmly based in sociology – with public music criticism outside academia, as reviewer and as chair of the Mercury Music Prize jury. He has been at several universities (Oxford, Berkeley, Warwick, Stirling and Edinburgh) and has been a key figure in the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM, founded in 1981). Compared to many other academic fields, PMS in general tends to escape and cross borders between university domains: between music genres and between disciplines, between research and music making, between theory and fandom, between the serious and the fun. Simon is exemplary in this sense, and this book gives a rich impression of this remarkable accomplishment. I will not compete with its dense information, and those who want a wider picture of Simon should read the book itself.

Anthologies are always difficult to review, as the limited format prevents doing justice to all chapters. A Festschrift that deals with the work of another author makes it even harder to choose between discussing the chapters and their raison d'être – here either Simon or PMS. Unlike many collections of this kind, these ‘essays in honour of Simon Frith’ are much more than just a set of general essays gathered to honour its target. Most of them focus tightly on his work and all have explicit references to him. Less than one-fifth of the authors are women, reflecting the prevailing gender bias in much PMS. All are ‘white’ and from ‘Anglophonia’ (14 Brits, two US, one Irish, one Australian) or Western Europe (four Nordic, one French). The lack of diversity hints that Simon's sociology of rock and pop has had more relevance for male white Anglo-Americans and Western Europeans than for others in the wider field of glocal PMS. This pattern of selection calls for reflection, but the book has much to offer anyway, by clearly presenting central themes in the work of perhaps the most influential PMS figure of all.

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Editors Lee Marshall and Dave Laing represent two branches of PMS that Frith so elegantly fuses: Marshall is a sociologist in Bristol and Laing is an Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool's Institute of Popular Music. The organisation of the volume also says a lot about Frith's work. He is placed firmly in the centre, just as in his writing he always has a strong authorial voice, posing original questions, exploring fascinating ideas and making clear and strong statements. Formulating fascinating ideas on ordinary, everyday phenomena is one of the many wonders Simon can perform. He is in that sense a typical proponent of cultural studies, in spite of his reluctance towards identifying with that field. He prefers to position himself as a musical sociologist, and the balance he so skilfully manages between social and musical issues is perfectly mirrored by the two sections surrounding the central section ‘Frith and his career’ in this book: on one side ‘Sociology and industry’, on the other ‘Aesthetics and value’.

Part I ranges from Barbara Bradby's questioning of widespread assumptions of class distinctions in popular music to Lee Marshall's discussion of the fate of collecting in the current music media age. Part III ranges from Antoine Hennion's chapter on ‘performation’ to Jason Toynbee's diagnosis of the decline and fall of rock, pop and soul.

The book presents a set of productive polarities and tensions inherent in Simon's work. These are not just his own, but symptomatic and constitutive of central parts of contemporary PMS at large. Like all fields, it is defined by what it includes, but also by what it excludes. This is true for Simon's work too, and for this volume – but these three are not quite the same. Simon represents a specific (although very central) position in PMS, and the book authors jointly cover most but not quite all of his dimensions, while their own positions do sometimes diverge notably from his, something the reader should bear in mind.

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The book sections imply a double tension. In regard to popular music, one may focus either on the materiality of institutions, markets and technologies that constitute the music industry, or on the signifying practices through which musical value and meaning are made. In terms of academic branches, this links to the tension between sociology, on the one hand, and musicology and other aesthetic approaches, on the other. These in turn relate to general polarities between objective materialities and subjective meanings or experiences, but also between serious politics and emotive fun, which further reminds one of Simon's combinatory identity as scholar–critic, and his critical struggling with the rock–pop spectrum.

Such polarities call for mediations. The smart move to place Simon's own career in the middle underlines how his work balances different camps. The four chapters and four ‘short takes’ that constitute Part II demonstrate Simon's expertise in the noble art of connecting and discriminating. Dave Laing sums up his career, Martin Cloonan discusses his politics, Peter J. Martin his sociology and Ulf Lindberg et al. his criticism. In combination, this says much about what emerges as his core platform: some kind of critical and political cultural sociology. Martin suggests symbolic interactionism as his most important sociological cornerstone, and this is a rather unglamorous underlying theoretical perspective that (perhaps just therefore) indeed serves as lingua franca in much PMS, offering useful tools to bridge institutions, practices, texts and identities.

Which alternative intellectual perspectives could alternatively do that linking job? The other sociological cornerstone Martin and others mention is Marxism, which could in principle also well serve as an axis linking industry to values. However, it is insufficiently developed here to do the job properly. I find the British divide between cultural studies and ‘political economy’ highly problematic, both because it prevents the fertile interaction between perspectives that flourishes elsewhere, and because UK ‘political economy’ actually has little to do with Marx. What Marx accomplished was not ‘political economy’ but a critique of political economy (as practice in the form of capitalism and as bourgeois economic theory), or ‘economy critique’. Popular music or the music industry cannot be defined as a ‘mode of production’ (Michael L. Jones on pp. 50 and 59) in the same general sense as Marx intends when defining feudalism and capitalism thus: it simply is not that totally different from other cultural industries. Also, Marx was no technological determinist for whom innovations in production technologies in any linear and direct way determined industries or social relations (Peter J. Martin on pp. 117–19), but in his mature works (including Grundrisse and Capital) he described the interplay between technology, economy and social relations as complex and indeed dialectical. Furthermore, Marx did not regard value as an inherent substance in commodities, deriving from human labour (Martin, on p. 126). This is instead precisely what commodity fetishism makes believe: objects are ascribed value through social relations of exchange that create the illusion that value is inherent in material things. Such deficit readings do not help understand how popular music acquires value in late capitalism. They stick to an understanding of Marx limited to slogans from his early programme of historical materialism, with the base-superstructure metaphor (Jason Toynbee, on p. 210) used to express a vague materialist impulse, rather than any more sophisticated analysis of commodity production and capitalism, which can nowadays be found in new Marx readings from Germany and elsewhere (see, for instance, various works by Michael Heinrich and David Harvey, or my own Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique).

A mediating focus could also combine cultural studies and critical hermeneutics, mixing three interrelated constituents. First, Frankfurt critical theory links culture and society in original ways, based on much more complex Marx readings, but the obligatory Adorno-bashing has blocked that path for generations of British scholars, including Simon, although Lee Marshall's wonderful chapter on ‘Music collecting in the age of the cloud’ is a welcome exception that makes excellent use of ideas from Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel. Secondly, Marshall's analysis of how collections order time and space by linking objective materialities to subjective experience could have been further developed by introducing Paul Ricoeur, who sees narratives and other signifying practices of culture precisely as means of mediating the external with the internal. Ricoeur's critical hermeneutics is sadly absent in PMS, even where it would be obviously relevant: in theorising musical meaning, interpretation and signifying practice as interaction between subjects, texts and contexts, where meanings are produced not ‘behind’ the text in front of the text (in the music maker's intentions) but rather in front of the text (between listener and musical sounds in the context of listening), leaving room for conflicts of interpretation evolving over time. Such hermeneutic theory could have helped authors to qualify their understanding of making music matter, for instance, Martin's ideas on the role of contexts (pp. 123f), Tagg's take on reception history and Hennion's fascinating discussion of music performance and digital interactivity. The latter chapter suffers from translation problems with the word ‘work’, which in English can mean both product (oeuvre) and production or labour (travail) – the distinction between these are crucial here, and Ricoeur's emphasis that cultural works are precisely products of living work could further have helped in dissolving the false dichotomy of text/work in which, for instance, Barthes tended to get stuck.

Thirdly, cultural studies seems well suited to keep extremes together, despite Simon's stubborn refusal to identify himself in such a way, and some of these authors share his scepticism, preferring to be either sociologists or musicologists. It is mentioned several times that Simon has published just two monographic books and instead often worked closely with others, co-authoring or co-editing texts that make him a profoundly dialogical scholar. Precisely the same can be said of cultural studies' recently deceased central figure Stuart Hall, but he (and Raymond Williams too) are mentioned only once in this book.

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In 1999, I organised a workshop on cultural studies in Sweden, to which Simon was invited, together with Janice Radway and some 20 other, mainly Swedish, scholars. In his contribution, ‘Advancing cultural studies (or keeping the fly in the ointment)’, Simon referred to British critical debates around cultural studies' problems of interdisciplinarity and the accusation of ‘populism’. He explained his own position thus: ‘For a time disciplinary labels lost their meaning – I was one of a generation of academics who could equally well be placed in sociology, media studies or cultural studies […] – and I still believe that social studies are by their nature cultural studies’ (Frith Reference Frith and Fornäs1999, p. 22). At that time he was himself much engaged in media studies: ‘To study contemporary media is to study contemporary culture; to do cultural studies is to do media studies.’ Still, the two seemed to diverge in the UK, which he thought had to do with ‘ideology and style’: ‘“Media studies” describes a group of academics who see themselves as professional, responsible, in pursuit of research funds and policy influence; “cultural studies” describes a group of academics who still see themselves as academically eccentric, marginal, more interested in ideas than data, more interested in defining social patterns than determining social policy. […] As for me, I now regard myself as a media sociologist and look on cultural studies as an irritant’ (Frith Reference Frith and Fornäs1999, p. 22).

Simon has remained sceptical towards cultural studies, though always sharing its interest in the vernacular, mundane practices of everyday life. ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ was Marx's motto (stemming from Terence in the 2nd century bc), and it might also suit Simon – as well as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and cultural studies at large. For me Simon is in practice very much a cultural studies scholar – at least as it is understood and used outside the UK, for instance in the Nordic countries, Latin America or East Asia. When refusing that term, he avoids the bridging function he could have had between two camps that deserve better than eternal separation.

This kind of publication is mostly strongly positive towards the celebrated target's work, but there are also minor problematisations. For instance. Lindberg et al. take a more distanced look at his position in the field of music criticism, and Pete Astor and Keith Negus argue that lyrics and songwriting matter more than Simon has acknowledged, as he tends to disregard lyrical form and content in favour of performance, voice and rhetoric.

5

All identities and all arguments are based on differences and distinctions. PMS as well as Simon's work can be described in terms of what is included and what is excluded. In this general sense, judgements and differentiations are essential to any critical practice and indeed any theoretical work. But I think that Simon went further when on page 16 of Performing Rites he formulated as his first basic assumption ‘that the essence of popular cultural practice is making judgements and assessing differences’. My critique was and remains that this assumption should not be reduced to any quantitative measuring of values on the scale of good or bad. Simon's tendency to do so reflects his combination of Bourdieu-inspired sociologist and music critic. This combination has obvious advantages but also some limitations – and becoming reflexively aware of one's own limits belongs to the capacities that ageing (and receiving a Festschrift!) enables. Sociologists tend to focus on social and institutional relations, including status ladders, while the job of critics also makes them attentive precisely to issues of quality judgement. This is true of many others as well – not least popular music fans who love ranking lists of best and worst – but I still doubt if ‘popular cultural practice’ has one singular ‘essence’ at all, and firmly believe that aesthetics should not be reduced to any quantitative measuring of good and bad. Aesthetics certainly always opens the door to the kinds of discriminating value judgements that are reinforced by the quantifying commercial logic of capitalist commodity production and canon formation. But not least this book proves it to be a false reduction to forget what else is also at stake, including issues of content and form, emotions and meanings that cannot just be ranked according to taste scales. Deciding which music is ‘best’ is omnipresent but yet just a limited part of the popular culture discourse, and cannot prevent anyone from also discussing what is expressed in music and how it is done, in qualitative (what? how? why?) rather than quantitative (how good?) terms.

I am grateful for having had this chance to make my own contribution to honouring Simon and to take up this debate where we left it hanging back then, 20 years ago in Stockholm. This new book's generous chapters make me yearn for Simon's own texts, partly because they whet my appetite, partly because they make me aware how rare is his unique combination of relaxed openness, lucid elegance and brave sharpness. At last, however, in honour of Simon's position, I respectfully bow my head to the demand for evaluations and conclude that as a comprehensive guide to the universe of Frithology, Popular Music Matters passes as excellent with distinction!