ABSTRACT
In my copy of Simon Frith’s Performing Rites, there is a marvellous typo (at least I think it’s unintentional): on page 211 Bruce Springsteen is described as ‘a skilled rock and role player’ (Frith, 1996, p.211). An alert proofreader should have corrected this – assuming that it really is a spelling error – but its appearance in the final text at least provides me with an appropriate peg on which to hang the following consideration of some ways in which Frith’s work has been influenced by his sociological commitments. In the Introduction to his 2007 collection of essays Taking Popular Music Seriously, Simon Frith makes it clear that his approach to the analysis of music has always been guided by his initial training as a sociologist. More specifically, he recalls his early interest in the theoretical perspectives offered by Marxism and Symbolic Interactionism (Frith, 2007, p.ix). These two approaches to understanding social life, though very different, seemed the most coherent sociological paradigms available following the dissolution of the structural-functionalism which had dominated American sociology in the 1950s and early 1960s and, for this reason, attracted the interest of many of us who, like Frith, were beginning academic careers in the early 1970s.
