Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith ed. by Lee Marshall, Dave Laing (review)

Given his role chairing the judges of the Mercury Prize (recognizing albums including Pulp’s Different Class, Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner, and PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake) and his transatlantic music criticism (published in Rolling Stone, Melody Maker, The Observer, CREEM, Let It Rock, The Scotsman, the Village Voice, and numerous fanzines) together with his seminal academic publications that began in the late 1970s and continue to this day, Simon Frith is arguably the defining popular musicologist of our era. Drawing together over twenty contributors, from sociology and politics to film and television studies, this Festschrift is thus richly deserved.

Frith is, moreover, one of those rare thinkers within the academy whose writing fluently transcends its disciplinary basis, harbouring the capacity to permeate and affect everyday life. Personally speaking, one sentence from his 1987 essay ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Popular Music’ has continued to resonate with me since I stumbled upon it as an undergraduate: ‘youth is experienced … as an intense presence, through an impatience for time to pass and a regret that it is doing so, in a series of speeding, physically insistent moments that have nostalgia coded into them’ (in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds.), Music and Society (Cambridge, 1987), 143). The prose, typically, is casual and yet ferociously incisive, more literary than academic. As US rock critic Robert Christagu stresses in the Preface to the volume under review, Frith ‘sticks to an obdurately English plainstyle’ (p. xiv) rooted in unobtrusive first-person reflection that sustains a unique rapprochement of journalistic panache and scholarly expertise: ‘his writing is quiet and unshowy, attracting attention with dry wit and the subtle crackle of ideas that come faster than his tone and syntax prepare you for’ (p. xv).

From Marshall and Laing’s Introduction we learn that Frith read PPE at Oxford in 1964–7––a period, coincidentally, bounded by the release of the Rolling Stones’ self-titled debut album and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. After earning a doctorate in Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, Frith subsequently pursued a career in which he held posts in Sociology, Literature, Media, and Music, finally retiring from the Tovey Chair at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. Laing’s own chapter ‘A Double Life with Low Theory’ elaborates on Frith’s career as both scholar and critic. Particularly revealing in this regard is Peter J. Martin’s chapter ‘Rock and Role Playing’ (a phrase he declares to be a typo from Performing Rites, but is surely one of Frith’s most elegant puns, given his interest in issues of theatricality). Martin traces the dual influence of Marxism and ‘symbolic interactionism’ on Frith, uncovering a confluence that underpins his entire output: first, the notion that changes in technology dialectically affect society and market forces; and second, ‘the idea that cultural objects––like all objects––are not inherently meaningful but, instead, acquire meanings through the dense network of social relationships in which they are inevitably nested’ (p. 117). A salient outcome of this theoretical orientation is Frith’s long-standing assertion that processes of aesthetic discrimination occur in the vernacular domain just as they do among other more rarefied milieux.

Involved in the early days of both the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the journal Popular Music, Frith is nevertheless adamant that popular-music studies has never been a discipline in its own right, but rather an interdisciplinary conversation involving a necessary and illuminating intellectual promiscuity. Indeed, as Marshall and Laing note, Frith’s career (coterminous with the expansion of the field itself) demonstrates that ‘while “popular music studies” has certainly consolidated over the last decade or so, it remains a fairly fragmented area of study’––a meeting ground underpinned by its ‘magpie nature’ (p. 2). Perhaps unsurprisingly, such...