Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays

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Contents: Introduction
Bibliography
Youth and music
'The magic that can set you free': the ideology of folk and the myth of the rock community
Rock and sexuality (with Angela McRobbie)
Afterthoughts
Formalism, realism and leisure: the case of the punk
Art vs. technology: the strange case of popular music
The industrialisation of popular music
Playing with real feeling: making sense of jazz in Britain
The suburban sensibility in British rock and pop
The discourse of world music
Pop music
Look! hear! the uneasy relationship of music and television
Music and everyday life
Why do songs have words?
Hearing secret harmonies
Towards an aesthetic of popular music
Adam Smith and music
Music and identity
What is bad music?
Index.

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As a sociologist Simon Frith takes the starting point that music is the result of the play of social forces, whether as an idea, an experience or an activity. The essays in this important collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous process of negotiation, dispute and agreement between the individual actors who make up a music world. The emphasis is always on discourse, on the way in which people talk and write about music, and the part this plays in the social construction of musical meaning and value. The collection includes nineteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field, along with an autobiographical introduction.

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The Journal of Popular Music

these essays deserve to be re-read...they merit such attention because, most of all, in their distinctive blend of critical journalism and academic scholarship, they show what it means to take popular music seriously

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