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Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith. Ed. by Lee Marshall and Dave Laing

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gcw068

1477-4631

Ross Cole,

Music History and Culture

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).