[Performing Rites is] quite simply one of the best books I've ever read about music. Any music.
BBC Music - Nicholas Till
[Frith 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.
Performing Rites is...destined to become another classic.
Times Higher Education Supplement - Rupa Huq
Performing Rites is the most ambitious book I have ever read by a rock critic, and one of the best. A long-time rock record reviewer, trained as a sociologist, and now professor of English, Frith draws on autobiography, practical criticism, sociology, literary theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, music history, and philosophy to describe the social and aural dimensions that many kinds of music share. The result is a broadly synthetic way of describing music in context, one that sociologists, cultural theorists, and practical critics might all use.
Transition - Stephen Burt
This work is a tour de force on the aesthetics of popular music, marked by an encyclopedic breadth of data and discussion...It is astonishing in its breadth, its clarity, and its implications…In short, to read this book will forever change the way one listens to music.
Bibliotheca Sacra - Timothy J. Ralston
Frith makes it safe to wade back into the critical pool; in fact, he reaffirms the necessity of lucid, enthusiastic criticism. He's an academic (professor of English at Strathclyde University) and a working critic, so his taste for annoying academician's lingo (bloody 'discourse' everywhere you look) is tempered by a sense of how this stuff plays in the real world. He's also an unapologetic music fan, and Performing Rites functions in all three capacities...Frith's refreshing exploration...gives every reason in the world why music can be called 'good,' and agrees that the best reason is because you like it.
Washington City Paper - Arion Berger
A learned, wide-ranging, often brilliant investigation of pop music aesthetics from a sociological perspective, and of pop music sociology from an aesthetic perspective...Performing Rites stages a dialectical encounter between the two professional and philosophical positions Frith has occupied, trying to arrive at a theory of pop music's value that will do justice to both identities...The 13 chapters of Performing Rites develop a steady stream of provocative ideas, explicating them in the widest context of scholarly and journalistic explorations of popular culture...[T]his is an impressive and entertaining book, one that deserves crossover success among critics and listeners. Resoundingly discrediting the old saw that about tastes there is no disputing, [Frith] demonstrates how deeply the manner in which we dispute our tastes is bound up with our identities and our communities.
Boston Review - Ivan Kreilkamp
[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.
Journal of Musicological Research - William Echard
[Frith] 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...[A] very necessary book.
Financial Times - Peter Aspden
This is Simon Frith's long-awaited book about value and popular aesthetics. He starts off from a sociologist's assumptions about musical taste—that taste is socially formed—and moves toward a theory of popular aesthetics where value judgments carry enough ethical weight to serve as shapers of community and individual identity. Aside from the book's valuable and controversial arguments with cultural studies, it is a courageous model of what to do with sociology itself. In making social observation the basis for aesthetic inquiry, it takes the kind of risks that are rarely found in the field of sociology of culture. To say that Frith's approach is interdisciplinary is prosaic. His command of musicology, discography, cultural theory, journalistic savoir-faire, and political pragmatism provides a blend of the scholarly and idiosyncratic that is quite unique, even in a field as eclectic as cultural studies.
New York University - Andrew Ross
This is a good, and arguably a great book. I've long been a bit of a Frith groupie, but with Performing Rites he suddenly becomes the object of that one genuine academic emotion: envy. For more than 25 years, Simon Frith has held three very different commitments in balance. As a journalist he has commented on pop for the quality papers with accuracy and wit...He is also an academic, trained in classical sociology...[and he] is a soixante-huitard , fundamentally affected by the explosion of sex, drugs and rock and roll that at the cusp of the 1960s turned into the grim whinings of political correctness...In Performing Rites , Frith...[brings these commitments] together into a magisterial work...This is a deeply learned book.
New Statesman & Society - Colin MacCabe
Frith's book is bound to make a splash not least because it summarizes enormous amounts of related research, and pushes hard against the boundaries of popular music study's dominant paradigms. In essence, Frith outlines a discourse network through which a popular musical aesthetic acts as a mediating force in music's production, performance, and consumption. He investigates culturally loaded critical language and its effects—the discourses surrounding ‘authenticity,' ‘originality,' ‘creativity,' ‘good and bad.
[This 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.
San Francisco Weekly - Sarah Vowell
The rock critic egghead volume of the year is British journalist-academic Simon Frith's Performing Rites ...[Frith's] inquiries into the essential question of why we like what we like are almost always worth the trouble. And Frith is no high-culture snob. Any book that gives equal weight to Ned Rorem's musings on the relative merits of Kierkegaard, Edith Piaf and Lana Turner, and impassioned letter writers to Metal Mania magazine is all right by me.
Frith grounds his sociology with a sound understanding of the way music works. It isn't just that he knows and likes the Pet Shop Boys; he's also learned enough to understand how modern performance practice reflects and refracts the aesthetic arguments of the last two centuries.
Baltimore Sun - J. D. Considine
An engaging exploration of the meanings, overt and hidden, of popular music.
[Frith 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.
American Music - Arthur Knight
An engaging exploration of the meanings, overt and hidden, of popular music.
This is a good, and arguably a great book. I've long been a bit of a Frith groupie, but with Performing Rites he suddenly becomes the object of that one genuine academic emotion: envy. For more than 25 years, Simon Frith has held three very different commitments in balance. As a journalist he has commented on pop for the quality papers with accuracy and wit...He is also an academic, trained in classical sociology...[and he] is a soixante-huitard , fundamentally affected by the explosion of sex, drugs and rock and roll that at the cusp of the 1960s turned into the grim whinings of political correctness...In Performing Rites , Frith...[brings these commitments] together into a magisterial work...This is a deeply learned book.
New Statesman & Society - Colin Maccabe
[Performing Rites is] quite simply one of the best books I've ever read about music. Any music.
This work is a tour de force on the aesthetics of popular music, marked by an encyclopedic breadth of data and discussion...It is astonishing in its breadth, its clarity, and its implications…In short, to read this book will forever change the way one listens to music.
[Frith 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.
[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.
Journal of Musicological Research
Performing Rites is the most ambitious book I have ever read by a rock critic, and one of the best. A long-time rock record reviewer, trained as a sociologist, and now professor of English, Frith draws on autobiography, practical criticism, sociology, literary theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, music history, and philosophy to describe the social and aural dimensions that many kinds of music share. The result is a broadly synthetic way of describing music in context, one that sociologists, cultural theorists, and practical critics might all use.
Frith grounds his sociology with a sound understanding of the way music works. It isn't just that he knows and likes the Pet Shop Boys; he's also learned enough to understand how modern performance practice reflects and refracts the aesthetic arguments of the last two centuries.
Frith makes it safe to wade back into the critical pool; in fact, he reaffirms the necessity of lucid, enthusiastic criticism. He's an academic (professor of English at Strathclyde University) and a working critic, so his taste for annoying academician's lingo (bloody 'discourse' everywhere you look) is tempered by a sense of how this stuff plays in the real world. He's also an unapologetic music fan, and Performing Rites functions in all three capacities...Frith's refreshing exploration...gives every reason in the world why music can be called 'good,' and agrees that the best reason is because you like it.
[An] assumption-storming book about how and why we listen to popular music...[and 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.
[Frith] 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...[A] very necessary book.
Performing Rites is...destined to become another classic.
Times Higher Education Supplement
A learned, wide-ranging, often brilliant investigation of pop music aesthetics from a sociological perspective, and of pop music sociology from an aesthetic perspective...Performing Rites stages a dialectical encounter between the two professional and philosophical positions Frith has occupied, trying to arrive at a theory of pop music's value that will do justice to both identities...The 13 chapters of Performing Rites develop a steady stream of provocative ideas, explicating them in the widest context of scholarly and journalistic explorations of popular culture...[T]his is an impressive and entertaining book, one that deserves crossover success among critics and listeners. Resoundingly discrediting the old saw that about tastes there is no disputing, [Frith] demonstrates how deeply the manner in which we dispute our tastes is bound up with our identities and our communities.
[This 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.
This is a good, and arguably a great book. I've long been a bit of a Frith groupie, but with Performing Rites he suddenly becomes the object of that one genuine academic emotion: envy. For more than 25 years, Simon Frith has held three very different commitments in balance. As a journalist he has commented on pop for the quality papers with accuracy and wit...He is also an academic, trained in classical sociology...[and he] is a soixante-huitard , fundamentally affected by the explosion of sex, drugs and rock and roll that at the cusp of the 1960s turned into the grim whinings of political correctness...In Performing Rites , Frith...[brings these commitments] together into a magisterial work...This is a deeply learned book.
Frith (English, Univ. of Strathclyde) here tries to uncover the nature of popular music. In introductory chapters, he explodes the oft-attacked distinction between high and low art, defines pop music as a marketable commodity rather than a type of music, and argues that genres represent markets rather than musical styles. In the second section, Frith contends that popular lyrics only have meaning as part of the musical experience and cannot be considered poetic texts. He also convincingly attributes the perceived difference between a cerebral classical music and a visceral pop to European racism and demonstrates how technological advances in recording have blurred the distinction between artist, producer, and listener. Frith concludes that popular music affects both the social climate and individual identities. Like Theodore Gracyk in his recent Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (LJ 3/15/96), the author buries his sometimes compelling insights in a barrage of academic verbiage that may be difficult for any audience other than academics.David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
A strained and frequently patronizing evaluation of ideological, rhetorical, and sociological elements in popular music.
In this study of the relationship of individuals to their favorite performers and music, Frith (Sound Effects, 1982, etc.) takes a relatively simple subject and smothers it with facts and theory. Viewing the act of listening to popular music as a performance in its own right ("we express ourselves through our deployment of other people's music"), Frith identifies how music is categorized for consumption and, in turn, associated—by artists, producers, and, ultimately, by listeners—with larger social and cultural distinctions. But his tone, by turns pedantic and flip (questioning taste, he asks, "Is the music right for this situation—the Trammps' `Disco Inferno' for a gay funeral? Whitney Houston's `I Will Always Love You' for everyone else's?") is bound to turn off those readers who manage to keep up with the withering pace of his study. Frith veers off course somewhat in presuming to establish qualitatively and generically the "aptness of different sorts of judgment." He observes: "We can only begin to make sense of popular music when we understand, first, the language in which value judgments are articulated and expressed and, second, the social situations in which they are appropriate."
While germane to the dispassionate study of the phenomenon of popular music, this suggestion, and this study as a whole, tells us little about what makes a young fan declare, "Led Zep rules!"—and why that is in itself a valid judgment.
