✨ Featured Offer
Brand New
$107.63
List Price: $27.95
🚚
See all 4 offers from $35.99 FREE standard delivery by: 03 Apr 2026
Overview
Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives. Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.
| ISBN-13 | 9780674661950 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0674661958 |
| Weight | 1.45 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.75 x 1.25 x 6.50 In |
| List Price | $27.95 |
| Format | Hardcover |
|---|---|
| Pages | 360 pages |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
| Published On | 1996-09-15 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
Used, Good
Seller details
Ground Zero Books, Ltd.
Silver Spring, MD, USA
viii, 352 pages. Notes. Index. Price clipped. Name of previous owner present. DJ has slight wear a...
Free delivery by: 03 Apr 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Bonita
Santa Clarita, CA, USA
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
Free delivery by: 03 Apr 2026
✨ Brand New
Seller details
GridFreed
San Diego, CA, USA
Size: 156x20x104; New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title!
Free delivery by: 03 Apr 2026
Brand New
Seller details
Bonita
Santa Clarita, CA, USA
Free delivery by: 03 Apr 2026