Art into Pop

by Simon Frith

This book, first published in 1987, tells the intriguing and culturally complex story of the art school influence on postwar British popular music. Following Romantic attitudes from life class to recording studio, it focuses on two key moments - the early 1960s, when art students like John Lennon and Eric Clapton begin to play their own versions of American rock and blues and inflected youth music with Bohemian dreams, and the late 1970s, when punk musicians emerged from design courses and fashion departments to disrupt what were, by then, art-rock routines.Sixties rock Bohemians and seventies pop Situationists were, in their different ways, trying to solve the art students' perennial problem - how to make a living from their art. Art Into Pop shows how this problem has been shaped by the history of British art education, from its nineteenth-century origins to current arguments about 'pure' and 'applied' training. In their simultaneous pursuit of authenticity and artifice, art school musicians exemplify the postmodern condition, the collapse of any distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture, the confusions of personal and commercial creativity. And so high pop theorists rub shoulders here with low pop practitioners, experimental musicians debate avant-garde ideas with corporate packagers, and artistic integrity becomes a matter of making oneself up.

Genres: Music

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Jared Colley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes use of an interesting approach for understanding the innovative, progressive qualities of 1960s-1970s British rock music. Frith does a better job explaining 1960s mod & art rock than he does 1970s punk situationism. His theory is shakey, but his practical take on the origins of 1960s British rock remains insightful. I like the fact that he focuses so much on the art school factor. So many musicians (from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Who, Cream, etc.) of the era were art school graduates, freshly educated in the latest art theories. And it seems obvious that their education plays out in their innovative approaches to popular music. It is another case study example of how postmodern frameworks of discourse operate by way of breaking down (or at least re-ordering) barriers between high & low art. The book captivates its reader through such analysis. The treatment of punk rock, however, is lacking. Dick Hebdige (see my comments on his book) is the place to look for a promising, academic analysis of punk rock.