#simon frith

[unexpectedsounds]

[materialpractices]

Upcoming Cambridge History of Music Criticism

Upcoming Cambridge History of Music Criticism

    I was just notified that my article (co-authored with Jessica Armstrong) “Dispatches from the Front: The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason” has been cited in the upcoming Cambridge History of Music Criticism. The citation is in the chapter “Writing About Popular Music,” by leading pop music scholar Simon Frith, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Frith…

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[ihavenothingtosayandimsayingit]

The organization of high culture in terms of bourgeois respectability has meant, inevitably, the identification of low culture with the unrespectable (and obviously, in institutional terms, while high art took its nineteenth-century place of the secular temples of gallery, museum, and concert hall, low music continued to be associated with the bodily pleasures of the bar and brothel).

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Simon Frith (p.126)

[hexhamtv]

Today I interviewed (in 3 parts) Hexham resident Prof Simon Frith, who is a British sociomusicologist, and former rock critic, who specialises in popular music culture.He is Tovey Chair of Music at Edinburgh University. He tells me what popular music is, how to become popular, his experiences as Chair of the Panel of Judges of the Mercury Music Prize over the past 25 years and the importance of local music hubs in developing tomorrow's music performers. The interview was filmed at one such music hub, Core Music in Hexham, Northumberland. www.coremusic.co.uk

[ourdiaryinpictures-blog]

The conventions of female pop singing have both reflected and shaped the idea of femininity as something decorative and wistful, secret and available, addressed, by its very nature, at men. The voice is so intimately connected with the person that sound and image cannot be separated in this respect. As a man, I've always taken it for granted that rock performances address male desires, reflect male fantasies in their connections of music and dance and sexuality. The first time I saw a women's band perform for women I was made physically uneasy by the sense of exclusion, became suddenly aware how popular music works as a social event. Its cultural (and commercial) purpose is to put together an audience, to construct a sense of 'us' and 'them'. Such pop consciousness depends primarily on the use of voices to express the identity at issue.

Simon Frith, 1987, Why do songs have words?

[cureforbedbugs]

The Village Voice, where the arts-covering back of the book was more radical than the politics-covering front of the book and the culture hounds made such a principle of hedonism that few up front gave them much respect. Forget music for pleasure--the Voice's arts coverage, with its pop music criticism in the vanguard, was all about, you know, "the struggle for fun."

A small excerpt from a meaty keynote by Robert Christgau on the occasion of Simon Frith's retirement. This little bit describing the Voice of the Christgau era (as both editor and regular) spoke to me outside of his general assessment of Frith's work and influence (which I need to digest before commenting on, not to mention read more Frith, including the quarter-cracked-open Music for Pleasure I have sitting in my basement).

The "struggle for fun" -- Frith's phrase, Christgau's favorite, and indeed a phrase so good that I can't believe I've never come across it before -- is definitely a succinct phrase for what I got out of the Voice in the early-to-mid 00's as I read its backpages looking to develop my, er, voice.

[philhebblethwaite]

Investigation: The Mercury Prize

Vice

Busting the myths around the annual music prize

Keep reading

[uncried]

The significance of Janis wasn't really what she did (how she sang); what mattered was who she was, and where. A plain and awkward Texan girl, blossoming on San Francisco dope and indulgence - she was a symbol for every kid loser in '60s America: the dumpy dropout who'd made it, become beautiful and happy and free.

Simon Frith, Let It Rock, April 1975