Taking Popular Music Seriously

Selected Essays

Simon Frith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754626794
• eBook ISBN: 9781351547178
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER 1

Youth and music

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A lively, regular and varied social programme is vital to the building of Young Socialist branches. Every branch should aim to hold a to attract hundreds of in the area . . . (Young Socialist, 3 April 1976.)

Young people’s interest in music is taken for granted by everyone these days, and although post-war sociologists were initially surprised that teenagers should ‘frequently and spontaneously’ express a love of music, they already knew that young people had their own leisure pursuits and that one of the most popular was dancing. A 1951 survey of British leisure, commenting on ‘the importance of dancing as a means of spending leisure’, added that

a large majority of dancers are young people, mostly between the ages of 16 and 24 . . . drawn from the working and lower middle classes.

These authors went on to voice familiar fears of teenage hedonism:

Modern ballroom dancing may easily degenerate into a sensuous form of entertainment, and if self-control is weakened with alcohol it is more than likely that it will do so, which might easily lead at least to unruly behaviour and not infrequently to sexual immorality.¹

Concern for the young at play can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when a variety of institutions appeared to regulate the leisure of proletarian youth. By the 1930s remarks on the ‘independence’ and even ‘affluence’ of young workers were commonplace, but although jazz, particularly as a form of dance music, was seen to have a special appeal to the young, neither it nor any other form of popular music was seen as an expression of a youth culture.²

The full integration of pop music and youth culture was a development of the 1950s and was symbolised by a new form of music, rock ’n’roll, and a new form of youth, teddy boys. If the young had always had idols – film stars, sportsmen, singers such as Frank Sinatra and Johnnie Ray – the novelty of rock’n’roll was that its performers were ‘one of themselves’, were the teenagers’ own age, came from similar backgrounds, had similar interests. The rise of rock’n’roll was accompanied by the development of a generation gap in dancing, as dance halls advertised rock’n’roll nights or became exclusively rock’n’roll venues. In 1954 it was estimated that nine-tenths of London’s teenagers spent some of their leisure time listening to records, and among the more visible features of the new world of teenage consumption were the self-service record ‘Browseries’ and ‘Melody Bars’. When Abrams’ teenage consumer report came out in 1959 its statistics on music reflected findings that were being made by sociologists.³

Abrams showed that music and activities involving music absorbed a significant part of young expenditure, and in 1961 Coleman’s mammoth survey of American adolescents confirmed that music was their most popular form of entertainment and that rock’n’roll was their most popular form of music. The importance of rock in young people’s lives became an axiom of British youth research. In her 1964–5 survey of 15- to 19-year-olds in Glasgow, Jephcott noted that ‘pop in any form was an almost universal interest ... the word “pop” brought a sigh of relief – “Here’s something we want to talk about”.’ The young’s interest in pop determined the television programmes they watched, the magazines they read, the cafés they went to, the ‘necessary tools’ – transistor, record player, tape recorder, guitar – they sought to own.⁴

Jephcott did her research at the time of the beat boom (Lulu and the Luvvers were a local community group!) but there is no evidence to suggest that her findings should be confined to the mid-sixties. Researchers in the 1970s have replicated Coleman’s findings that pop is central to the teenage social system, and a recent survey of the British literature on adolescent leisure concluded that ‘music is in many ways the central activity of the British youth culture, from which many subsidiary activities flow’. White’s account of young workers in Wembley is a good illustration of this point. He shows that it is the presence of ‘their music’ that attracts young people to pubs and discos and youth clubs, and that:

Home-made entertainment means only one thing – music. Front rooms are occasionally leased from parents for planned parties, but generally this home music-making involves an impromptu visit, a couple of young people going round to a friend’s house. Baby-sitting provides a good opportunity for listening to new LPs. And the young workers do listen. This is quite different from the overpowering musical wallpaper of the Village Inn [a pub], almost an act of worship.⁵

Abrams’ 1959 study has never been repeated in so clear a form, but the importance of youth’s consumption of musical products has continued to be emphasised in market research. A national teenage survey in 1974 confirmed that the majority of 15- to 24-year-olds go dancing and buy records regularly, own their own record players and radios, and have an overwhelming musical preference for rock music and Top Thirty pop. This pattern of music use is not confined to British youth or even to capitalist youth, although if in America and Britain it was the advent of rock’n’roll that signalled the arrival of musical youth culture, for most European countries it did not emerge clearly until the success of the Beatles in the 1960s.⁶

While there can be no doubting the importance of music for the young, these surveys, sociological or not, are descriptive: music’s presence in youth culture is established, but not its purpose. Jephcott suggests that if music is a universal teenage interest, it is also a superficial one – the impression left by her research is of a culture in which music is always heard but rarely listened to.⁷ This impression is given statistical support by this finding in the Schools Council’s 1968 survey of young school-leavers:

Table 4:
Percentage saying that pop music was important to themselves/to their children/to their pupils

		boys	girls
	Children	20	35
	Parents	41	64
	Teachers	38	71

Source: Schools Council (1968), pp. 167–90.

These figures suggest that young people assess the music in their lives as much less significant than its constant noise makes it sound to outsiders, and it is time now to examine youth’s use of music in more detail.

The use of music

In 1972 I conducted a survey of 14- to 18-year-olds at a comprehensive school in Keighley, Yorkshire, and I want to begin this section with a brief summary of the results.⁸

In general terms, the pupils in my sample were all in much the same situation: as school children, they were not affluent – pocket money averaged from 50p for the 14-year-olds to £1.50 for the sixth-formers, supplemented by varying part-time earnings – but most had their own rooms, and most owned the basic tools for music playing – radios, record players and/or recorders. The children were similar, too, in their general attitudes to music: they were ‘quite’ rather than ‘very’ interested in it; devoted ‘some’ time, but not ‘a lot’, to talking about it; spent a proportion of their income on it, but not an overwhelming one. On the whole, though, they all listened to music as a normal part of their daily lives, and the shared knowledge involved was reflected in the ease with which all my sample could comment on all genres of rock – a question on T. Rex, for example, was answerable by everyone, fan or not, and even the two classical-music devotees knew what T. Rex records sounded like. A basic experience of rock was common to all these young people, whatever their class or academic background, and the findings that most interested me were the different patterns of music use and taste within this framework.

Firstly, there was a distinct sixth-form culture, a pattern of rock use shared by all the sixth-formers to whom I spoke (mostly but not necessarily middle-class in background) which merged into student culture and was already being adopted by the academic pupils below them. These pupils bought albums rather than singles, had ‘progressive’ rather than ‘commercial’ tastes, were not involved in the trappings of rock (if they did, in a desultory way, watch Top of the Pops and listen to Radio 1, The Old Grey Whistle Test was the only show they made a special effort to see), and went to performance-based gigs – folk clubs, rock concerts – more than to discos or dances. The ideological essence of this culture was its individualism. Typical replies to questions about influences on taste were:

I like what I like, no one changes my opinions on music . . .

I like what I like, not what I’m told or influenced to like . . .

Choosing records was an individual decision of some importance: albums were never bought spontaneously or on spec and sixth-formers rejected the idea that records were chosen to fit an image or group identity; they didn’t accept that they had an image (‘I am myself’) or else accepted it only reluctantly CI suppose I have, although I don’t readily admit it’; ‘I hope not’; ‘I do not want an image’). The role of the musically knowledgeable in informing and stimulating rock interest was acknowledged – boys were more likely than girls to play the role of opinion leader – but, in the end, musical taste was individual. Records were listened to, appreciated and criticised in terms of their meaning – lyrics were an important but not the only source of such meaning – and music was praised in terms of its originality, sincerity and beauty, or condemned for its triviality, banality, repetition. ‘Rubbish’ was the favourite pejorative word for ‘commercial trash which gets in your head and you can’t escape and it does nothing for you except make you puke’.

Such sixth-formers experienced youth culture as a culture with an articulated set of values different from those of an older generation; they saw themselves as ‘rebelling against unreasonable ideas and conventional ways of doing things’. Their fear was that even youth culture was not a true or meaningful expression of individuality:

Rock music is unfortunately fashionable and its followers are exploited. It is very hard to separate true opinion from ‘conditioned response’.

In sharp contrast to this was the lower-fifth culture of the pupils who bought singles and watched Top of the Pops, were regulars at youth clubs and discos but rarely went to concerts, who emphasised beat and sound in their tastes rather than meaning, who identified with a specific youth style and its music, and whose standard mode of criticism of other tastes was abuse:

T. Rex are shit. I’ve heard kids whistle better than that group. Music, it’s all the same, no difference in rhythm or sound. They’re all a set of puftas, Bolan with all his make-up and god knows what his wife thinks about wearing glitter under his eyes. Other groups wear it but don’t go round talking like a puff. T. Rex ARE CRAP.

But having established that there were distinct rock cultures, I must be careful not to misinterpret the differences. What was involved was ideology, the way people talked about music, more than activity, the way they actually used it. The apparent lyric vs beat difference, for example, conceals the fact that the sixth-formers did dance! They danced the same sort of self-taught ‘freak’ and ‘mod’ and ‘bop’ styles as the other pupils and shared their appreciation of the standard dance music like Motown.⁹

If sixth-formers used music for dancing and background as often as for concentrated listening, so the lower fifth-formers were aware of lyrics, could remember and appreciate them, had some notion of songs’ meanings – ‘love is much better to sing about than a football team’ – and responded to the messages and stories of rock and soul singles.

Similarly, I don’t want to exaggerate the difference between the individualism of the sixth-formers and the group identities of the lower fifth. The latter were aware of the playfulness of their groups ‘the image changes – it’s just for laughs’ – and conscious of their individuality within them. Group styles were a matter of convenience and all the pupils could make an instant equation of group and music even when they did not fit themselves into such groups:

I have assorted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Complete Bibliography
• 1 Youth and Music (1978)
• 2 ‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community (1981)
• 3 Rock and Sexuality (with Angela McRobbie) (1978/79)
• 4 Afterthoughts (1985)
• 5 Formalism, Realism and Leisure: the Case of the Punk (1980)
• 6 Art vs Technology: the Strange Case of Popular Music (1986)
• 7 The Industrialization of Popular Music (1987)
• 8 Playing With Real Feeling: Making Sense of Jazz in Britain (1988)
• 9 The Suburban Sensibility in British Rock and Pop (1997)
• 10 The Discourse of World Music (2000)
• 11 Pop Music (2001)
• 12 Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television (2002)
• 13 Music and Everyday Life (2003)
• 14 Why do Songs have Words? (1987)
• 15 Hearing Secret Harmonies (1986)
• 16 Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music (1987)
• 17 Adam Smith and Music (1992)
• 18 Music and Identity (1996)
• 19 What is Bad Music? (2004)
• Index