Simon Frith > Quotes

“Rock, for all the power of its individual dreams, is still confined by its mass cultural form. Its history, like the history of America itself, is a history of class struggle--the struggle for fun.”
― Simon Frith, Sound Effects

“Cultural judgments, in other words, aren’t just subjective, they are self-revealing, and to become another person, to fake ourselves for whatever reason, means having to pretend to like things in which we find nothing valuable at all”
― Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

“For fans, whose musical values don’t matter so much, or, rather, matter in different ways, with different consequences, trading pop judgments is a way to “flirt and fight.”
― Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

“Rock is a commercially made mass music and this must be the starting point for its celebration as well as for its dismissal.”
― Simon Frith, Sound Effects