#simon frith

Upcoming Cambridge History of Music Criticism

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).

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.

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."

Investigation: The Mercury Prize

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.