Simon Frith's "Performing Rites : On the Value of Popular Music "

I know nothing about Simon Frith; what's wrong with him, Marcello?

Well, he's primarily interested in music trends and its relationship to class structure and business priorities as related to that. So yes, I think that it should cover that. It had no problem getting all the stuff from the 40's up through 1975. And it was written well after punk stepped in. The omission, given that context, is inexcusable.

I think the real reason he stops before that, just lightly touching upon it, is because the punk section would've totally thrown off all the precious "cultural criticism and theory" that he so awkwardly applies.

Therefore, I must say: don't bother reading this.

"But does it really deliver on that subtitle?" asked a colleague wearily.

Well, I hadn’t finished reading it then, and still felt a more suitable subtitle would be 'on the values in Popular Music' (or to be even more 18th-century, perhaps, 'of the valuing of Popular Music'). But it turns out that Frith’s deceptively bland style – unjargonised, unflamboyant, rarely pithy or overtly provocative — actually has secreted in it a far more ambitious rubric than he lets himself broadcast. His earlier Sound Effects (first titled The Sociology of Rock) was in truth a compendium-critique of the failure of orthodox social studies and media theory to ‘explain’ rock – which made its secret name Against Sociology: A Rock Fan Speaks Out. Disguising its deep intention every bit as carefully, Performing Rites aims to explore the social value of all and any music: not by adopting some bogus abstract or objective or ‘scientific’ stance, but rather by exploring value as it might be adduced by an unapologetic Pet Shop Boys fan – which is what Frith is, ultimately – and then exporting it back out of fandom into the world of acceptably ‘serious’ or grown-up music. In other words, it attempts to detail how we should – how we already do – hear and otherwise use Wagner or Milton Babbitt, once we’ve learned to love and live by the demands (ordinary and strange) of girl-groups or punk or Eurodisco; to use the highly circumscribed intensity of some specific crypto-teen obsession to unearth the shared pleasures, principles and utopian purpose of all music anywhere. After all, ever since modernism positioned itself, at the turn of the century, as an ultra-serious art rhetoric cuddling up to the misunderstood avant gardist contra the disapproving or uncomprehending audience, it’s had to affect to ignore, despise or suppress all manner of continuities and compromises with the content of popular musics, not to mention its own dependence on a notion it remains fanatically (and increasingly incoherently) resistant to: proximate audiences (and wider audiences) as co-performers, contributing partners or — perhaps most accurately — as sparring partners.

Frith has always been hopeless with booktitles (take the above, then factor in Art Into Pop, On Record, Facing The Music, and so uninvitingly on). And his rather pedantic book-structures tend entirely to muffle the intellectual dramas he’s so alert to (his now-defunct Village Voice column — lucid, gentleheartedly provocative, monthly — suited such analysis far better). Mired in the tiresome professional courtesies of academic citation, he lets himself fall back in among the many unreadable PopStud drudges (Dick Hebdige et al), until the lazy and the ill-willed among his detractors find it easy to overlook distinctions. (Of course this is exactly the crime — fact-free generalisation — that they claim to loathe in academic commentary.)

Years ago, academic discussion of the Popular meant only a one-size-fits-all HighCult dismissiveness. This enraged fans, who are (by definition) particularists committed to minute distinctions, to the discovery of qualities in one music they know isn’t in others (or in non-musical, ‘ordinary’ life), to tracing a map of the entire multiverse on the head of just one pin (their pin). When the object of specific fascination is thrown in with everything it isn’t (as the fan fervently believes), when it’s casually, ignorantly, imprecisely sideswiped, nothing maddens more. Though today the trendy-vicar enthusiasm of the half-informed may almost be worse: Frith comments on the recent rash of Madonna-dons — whose (un)critical theory might as well be devoted to Paula Abdul as Ms Ciccone — but once again, his professional courtesy means his attack is oblique at best: "I couldn’t tell… whether I’d actually want to play her records and videos as well as read about them".

Particularity has always mattered to Frith: he’s a working rock critic (and a good one). By leading off the first section, ‘Music Talk’, with a generous tribute to Frank Kogan of Why Music Sucks, he looks to make it his core topic — and expounds at intelligent length on a basic social fact that Cultural Studies and Sociology (mimicking scientific explanation’s abstract true-in-all-times-and-places generalisations) make so dubious a virtue of ignoring: that music (all music) is always about judgment – what’s good, what’s bad, what’s boring, what’s stupid.

Unfortunately, the book’s central section, On The Music Itself, intended as a first step towards establishing more detailed common value-ground between all mankind’s scattered musics, comes across more as a jumbled grab-bag of isolated insights, on a variety of topics unified only by Frith’s own longstanding interest: the degrees of freedoms we have when interpreting sounds; the meaning of rhythm; how words work in songs; who the singer ‘is’; what constitutes performance; the effects on music of technological development. The two interconnected essays on rhythm — Rhythm: Race, Sex and the Body and Rhythm: Time, Sex and the Mind — are especially subtle, as counters to ordinary sociology’s reactionary assumptions (which it shares with ordinary rock criticism and ordinary tabloid moral-panicmongering), about the cultural meaning of timekeeping. You know how it goes: black drumwork equals the frenzied fuckbeat of humankind in glorious, or else horrible, uncivilised freedom…

But the subtlety of these essays keeps them smothered within a broader argument that has by this point pretty much lost the unstated thread of itself. It’s the fate of most the book’s many diversions, observations and smart critical revisions — of all that makes the book not suck, if you like. It’s hard to envision any other outcome, though. To generalise from all extant particularities to the truths that every music everywhere shares would be to deliver a deliriously irresistable glimpse of the end to all social division: if successful, a project so explosively radical as to institute, instantly, full-on revolution. Certainly one anti-sociological sub-theme of the closing section, ‘Why Music Matters’, reasonably clearly made, is that music not only fails to reflect social or racial or relationship-to-production category in its expressive outreach, but attracts and inspires — and wounds or heals — precisely because of the utopian vision it seems to offer of community fashioned athwart such divisions, however specific, local or cranky: that any given audience evolves the ways it use the music that define it; out of the arguments it’s prepared to have with itself, it chooses the manner of its being influenced, in other words. But "deliriously irresistable" is not the phrase that come to mind, to describe its presentation here. "Mild and offhand" might be more exact: so that out of a vast and baggy sack of invaluable apercus [APPALLED PRESENT-DAY INTRUSION: YUK!!!] very much resisting summary, almost none are so stated as to remain in the mind, either in themselves or even as mnemonics for the larger arguments.

I’ve skewed this review to stress how Frith the fan-critic has always had more to say in brief than Frith the scholar ever quite delivers at book-length. But this is way too easy an argument (not to mention one he half-makes himself several times). I know why I believe he keeps his links with his discipline, even if he quietly treats it as no more than series of failed strategies: no other intellectual framework grants the audience — narrow or wide — anything like appropriate respect for its potential for agency. But this attachment is a fan-particularity, too, deep-etched in this particular fan’s mind’s heart. Yet he never quite steps back and anatomises it from this perspective. Why sociology, Simon? What drew you to it? What keeps you there? What (besides employment) d’you get from it now? What could we? The Sociology of the Sociology of Rock: a Eurodisco Fan Writes. Now there’s a happening booktitle.

Mark Sinker (from 1996, for the Wire) (i can't be bothered to put the italics in, there's way too many of em)

*drafts angry letter to ken livingstone*

To be honest, I know almost nothing about New Criticism. Is the following an example of New Criticism?

"I know Delmore Schwarz especially needs to do something or he ain't gonna be makin no $ after that ballerina shit at summerjam... No one needs to die but something bigger than 'Fuck you!' 'no fuck you!' 'oh yeah well you a bitch!' needs to go down for anyone involved in this to have any more cred. For example Kenneth Koch fucked Allen Tate up in a fight in QB a few years ago and that jus shut down Tate's cred and took another wannabe out of the business. No one needs to lose their life, that's awful."

If that's New Criticism, then New Criticism is a good angle on Frith. Otherwise, not.

http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/RCenter/Theory/Explaind/ncritexp.htm

New Criticism Explained
New Criticism was a highly influential school of Formalist criticism that flourished from the 40s to late 60s.

New Criticism Occurred Partially in Response To:

Biographical Criticism that understood art primarily as a reflection of the author's life (sometimes to the point that the texts themselves weren't even read!).

Competition for dollars and students from sciences in academia.
New forms of mass literature and literacy, an increasingly consumerist society and the increasingly visible role of commerce, mass media, and advertising in people's lives.

New Criticism Tends to Emphasize:

The text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else.

The formal and technical properties of work of art.

New Critical Assumptions:

The critic's job is to help us appreciate the technique and form of art and the mastery of the artist.

That the "Western tradition" is an unbroken, internally consistent set of artistic conventions and traditions going back to ancient Greece and continuing up to this day, and that good art participates in and extends these traditions. Similarly, criticism's job is to uphold these traditions and protect them from encroachments from commercialism, political posturing, and vulgarity.

That there are a finite number of good texts (a notion now often tied to "the canon" of texts traditionally taught). The closer that a text comes to achieving an ideal unity, where each element contributes to an overall effect, the more worthy it is of discussion.

Studying literature is an intrinsically edifying process. It hones the sensibilities and discrimination of students and sets them apart from the unreflective masses.

That "cream rises," and works of genius will eventually be "vindicated by posterity."

That there is a firm and fast distinction between "high" art and popular art.

That good art reflects unchanging, universal human issues, experiences, and values.

Technical definitions and analyses are vital to understanding literature. The text's relationship to a world that extends beyond it is of little interest.

Critics Associated With It:

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. New Critics also frequently looked to the work and criticism of T.S. Eliot and the essays of Matthew Arnold for inspiration.

Criticisms Sometimes Made of New Criticism:

That it's emphases on technique, unity of effect, and the autotelic status of art works best on the lyric poem, but has problems with larger, more historically recent forms like the novel.

That it makes the Western tradition out to be more unified than it is by ignoring diversity and contradictory forces within it, and more monadic than it is by ignoring the exchange between non-western and western cultures (Aristotle, for instance, central to new critical concepts, was introduced to medieval Europe via the Islamic world).
That artistic standards of value are variable and posterity is fickle. Particular pieces of art are viewed as important because they do important cultural work, represent values that segments of the culture (say editors and English professors) believe are of vital import, or help us understand our history.

That the values New Critics celebrated were neither unchanging nor universal, but instead reflected their own, historically and experientially specific concerns, values and ambitions.

That context is just as important as form to understanding a work of art.

Possibly. I was on an academic music criticism binge about a year ago while researching my honors thesis - it all gets a bit mixed up.

Bohemians articulate a leisure critique of the work ethic. They are cultural radicals not just as the source of the formalist avant-garde, but also in institutional terms - they don't work (and thus outraged bourgeois moralists have always denounced successful bohemians who, it seems, make their money out of play).

This is the reason I have been stressing the importance of punk for an understanding of rock 'n' roll.

So presumably he thinks he talks about punk.

From my experience,

bohemian /= don't work
bohemian = don't get paid

How is it a gripe? It's the laying down of evaluative criteria that are somewhat different from Brooks' and Warren's.

To try to answer Sterling's question about applying New Crit: I sure hope the sketch of New Crits above doesn't do justice to their ideas, because as theory it's garbage and not worth discussing. But then, English profs tend to be lousy theorists, and the badness of their theories doesn't negate the actual criticism that they pretend to base on those theories. To see the value in New Crit I'd have to look at what the New Crits actually said about actual novels and poems. As for music, there are plenty of good reasons to engage in close reading and to examine rhythm and rhyme and harmony and chord patterns and such and try to hear how the thing works.

Even if (as I once claimed) what I'm trying to do most is use music as source material for my writing, I'll do a better job if I'm real familiar with the music. I'm more interested in a song's social life than in its supposedly internal (and eternal) characteristics, but if I pay close attention to those characteristics I have a better chance of taking in the fact that the song is different from what I'd expected, hence I'm more likely to be surprised by it and to allow it to change me and to allow myself to do something new with it.

That's where it's at!

For fans... trading pop judgments is a way to "flirt and fight." As Frank Kogan suggests, this means that for the pop listener (if not for the pop player) [Simon, why not for the pop player? - FK] the stability of our judgments matters less than their constant deployment: as pop fans we continually change our minds about what is good or bad, relevant or irrelevant, "awesome" or "trivial" (our judgment in part determined by what happens to a sound in the marketplace, how successful it becomes, what other listeners it involves), but we never cease to believe that such distinctions are necessary "social pressure points, gathering spots for a brawl over how we use our terms. If our comparisons stood still, how could we have our brawl?"

...

In universities, then, just as in high schools (and however many pop icons are now pinned up on classroom walls), there is still a split between what Frank Kogan describes as the discourse of the classroom (with its focus on a subject matter) and the discourse of the hallway (with its focus on oneself and one's opinions about a subject matter and one's opinions about other people's opinions about a subject matter and one's opinions about other people).

One consequence is what Joke Hermes calls "the fallacy of meaningfulness," the academic assumption that popular cultural goods must signify something (her research on women's magazines suggested that many of their readers actually valued them for their insignificance, because they were "easy to put down"). Popular culture, to put this point another way, has as much to do with sociability, and how we talk about texts, as with interpretation, and how we read them. In Kogan's terms, in the hallway the question is not what does it mean but what can I do with it; and what I can do with it is what it means - interpretation is a matter of argument, of understanding wrought from social activity.

General comment: Kogan refuses to honor the boundary between hallway and classroom, which means he has trouble earning a living.

Comment on paragraph one: It applies as much to fans of nonpop as to fans of pop, and it applies to nonfans.

Comment on paragraph two: Right, it applies to universities. It also applies to rock criticism: commercial mags are the classroom, while fanzines and chatrooms are the hallway, though occasional mags, zines, and chatrooms are better than that (i.e., don't buy into the split).

Comment on paragraph three: This paragraph is gobbledygook. (It's possible that I wrote Simon the "not what it means but what I can do with it" phrase, in which case I share the blame for said gobblegobblehay.) A problem is that the words "mean" and "signify" become vacuous when used in the abstract. In most everyday usage "mean" is unproblematic, a request for more information or an attempt to remove confusion. E.g., you want to know the consequences or implications of something ("Get out of here, you blithering idiot, you're fired." "Does this mean I don't get a letter of recommendation?"), you want clarification ("When you say 'He killed her,' do you mean that he caused the end of her life by shooting her, stabbing her, poisoning her, or something of the sort, or do you mean he made her double over with laughter?"), you want the definition of an unknown word ("What do you mean when you say 'We glocked them'?"), you want to know what distinction is being made ("It's hot in Denver." "You mean in comparison to how it normally is in Denver? Or do you mean in Denver as opposed to San Francisco? Or in comparison to what you were expecting this morning, when you dressed and, as it turns out, overdressed, which is why you feel hot now? Or what?").

But look at the use of "mean" in this exchange:

"Could you direct me to the Church of Christ?"

"Which denomination do you mean?"

"Young man, there's only ONE Church of Christ. I don't go for that Unitarian or Quaker or Congregationalist hocus pocus. Those people aren't real Christians."

So in this instance, the question "What do you mean?" - which was possibly a request for definition, clarity, knowledge - reveals a battle instead (one that in various times and places has caused bloodshed, murder, executions).

But if you separate the word "mean" from inquiry or battle, from its social life, it's just vapor. Frith's first two paragraphs do better because words like "flirt" and "fight" are better able to carry their social life with them when they go into abstract usage. If someone tells you "the two of them flirted all afternoon," you may not know whether they kissed or just batted eyes, just as "the two of them fought all afternoon" doesn't tell you whether they exchanged words or blows, but nonetheless you've got some general idea what went on. But if someone tells you "The two of them meant things all day" or "The two of them engaged in meaning all day," what in the hell does that tell you?

And what's the "fallacy" that Hermes thinks she's identifying? Sure, the words, "Big pimpin', spendin' G's" won't have the same import coming out of a song on the radio that you're barely listening to while doing the dishes as those words would have coming from the president's mouth in a state-of-the union address, but does that mean that in the radio version there'd have been no difference if the words had instead been "Pink biscuits, Swanson peas"? Seems to me that the disposability and apparent insignificance of pop allows it to say things that aren't allowed in the world of capital C Culture and big I Social Importance, hence pop can act as a sort of cultural unconscious, a working out of ideas in the land of play and dreams, hence can be far more potent than the bullshit that comes from presidents and lit theorists. Where's the fallacy, lady? "Popular culture, to put this point another way, has as much to do with sociability, and how we talk about texts, as with interpretation, and how we read them." How is this putting the point another way? Seems to be an altogether different point. And I'm not grasping the big difference between talking about texts and interpreting them. We are allowed to talk to each other about how we interpret texts, after all, and write about it. The big point I was making was that in the hallway when people talk about/interpret things they're also allowed to let on that they're talking to and about each other, are flirting or fighting or gossiping or joking around, while in the classroom they're required to lie and pretend that the text is all that matters, is the justification for the discussion, and it's the text that's supposed to justify what we say about it, so we're required to exclude or disguise our desire to bond with or differentiate from one another. Not relevant to the text = not relevant to the discussion. "In Kogan's terms, in the hallway the question is not what does it mean but what can I do with it; and what I can do with it is what it means - interpretation is a matter of argument, of understanding wrought from social activity." Ah, now I see: Simon's pulling a switch mid-sentence, so that interpreting is conversing, and meaning is doing, which collapses the distinctions that he - sneaky guy - was pretending to set up earlier in the paragraph. Notice how Mr. Non-Showoff Frith works in some subtle wordplay. But the paragraph still drifts into the clouds, and this is because of his and Hermes's use of that hot-air-balloon of a concept "meaning." Sure, right now I'm talking about Simon's text and in doing so I'm also engaging in social relations with Mark and Sterling and whomever. (Hi whomever! We should do lunch one of these days.) (Actually, I'm also engaging in social relations with various editors and publishers and readers - most of whom have never heard of me or ILx - whose behavior I'm trying to change.) But I'm not adding anything if I then say, "And so the meaning of my text isn't just the meaning of the text but also the meaning of the social relations within which it occurs." Well, I am adding something, obfuscatory gobbledygook centered around a pseudointellectual buzz word "meaning" that sounds impressive without telling you anything. And even without the gobbledygook I'm not saying much anyway if I don't go on to talk about those social relations (which I'm not going to; you'll have to figure 'em out for yourself).

One of Frith's concerns here is this: cultural-studies nerds try to figure out what audiences are like by analyzing the texts and songs that the audiences consume without taking into account how the audiences actually use those texts and songs. So the answer to Mark's question, "Why sociology?" might be, "To take the audience into account" or "to take life into account." Another concern of his is that academics and critics are in effect forbidden to act like the audience ourselves, in our prose. But I chafe at this restriction far more than he does.

I tend to think rockwrite could use more new-crit in the limited sense of close-reading, attention to structure. Generally I see sweeping cultcrit comments which pay no close attention to the actual music involved, or conversely blowbyblows of the music which just describe it rather than understand it. My fav. thing about Kogan, for example, isn't any of this hallway/classroom metatheorizing etc. but just that he can actually write in a thoughtful way about how a particular human voice sounds and how that fits with other aspects of the music. This is something incredibly rare.

But mainly my new crit comment was a throwaway joke responding to "New Rock Criticism" because the idea of rockwrite adopting that posture to the music seems mildly absurd. Which is also what makes it a good idea.

The means question is an interesting one. I think the "fallacy of meaning" is rilly a criticism of direct point-to-point correspondances which attempt to neatly map music onto culture via some hegelio-freudian mishmosh. AKA "punk signifies rebellion" "loud guitar riffs signify masculinity" etc. (some of the stuff which irritated me about Sex Revolts on the Feminized Noise thread).

But I dislike the end of the third paragraph too. Because what "No Panties" means is that Trina doesn't give away love for free. But "Trina doesn't give away love for free" isn't what I can do with "No Panties" -- dance, sing, sing as a joke to a girl I'm dating if she buys me an expensive gift, relate, judge, nod my head, etc.

Otherwise yr. imagining listeners who are no more complex than apple-jacks girls "It just IS, OKAY!?"

But also if you're asking "what does apple-jacks mean" you can get different answers "A cereal", "frosted, sort of apple flavored, but jacked up, you know!", "I guess the ad execs want us to think 'frosted, sort of apple flavored, but jacked up, you know!'","Nothing, it just IS, okay", "It signifies the free associative play of late capitalism".

So the point is for the crit-theorist asking what it means is getting into an argument about what type of meaning you want, i.e. what your job is supposed to investigate. For the consumer, asking what it means is context driven and in part asking them which context they want to bring to bear on it -- not identical with what they do with it, but tied to it.

I think Mark's real point then is why does Firth want to bother with academia at all? Sure sociology might enliven cult-stud, but why bother with EITHER when yr. talents are at a different level of granularity?

Well now......never realised until today, despite being familiar with the work of both for years and years, that Simon and Fred Frith were brothers. Not sure why this seems so significant but it does.