As I scramble to finish my book manuscript on postwar popular music in Japan, I’ve been reading my way through some of the basic texts of music criticism and theory, works that provide frameworks for understanding rock and other recent forms of pop. The past week, it was Simon Frith’s classic 1981 study, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Writing at the tail end of the punk rock era, Frith combined his talents as a music critic and as an academic sociologist to analyze what rock meant in contemporary Britain. In the book, Frith examines how different social actors use rock: record companies, musicians, and fans (the latter group is subdivided into sub-categories of gender, class, age, etc.). The answers Frith provides are complex and persuasive, although some sections of the book (e.g., his descriptions of what separates black from white music) feel a bit dated now. He pays special attentions to the sociology of youth, subcultures, and leisure, the latter defined as “a particular, complex organization of free time, related to the organization of work itself” and hence a crucial component of a capitalist society (249). Frith relies on some fieldwork (his survey results taken up more in qualitative than quantitative terms), but mostly on archival research.

“Rock, in contrast to pop, carries intimations of sincerity, authenticity, art—noncommercial concerns,” he argues (p. 11). In other words, the aesthetic of rock is also an ideology, one fraught with contradictions and ambiguities. Rock is a mass culture form that is grounded in a critique of mass culture. Rock can’t be opposed to commerce, because rock is commerce. Yet rock is never passively received by consumer-dupes; rather, it is actively used in ways that both reflect and alter given social structures. Rock does live up to its ideological promise of being countercultural—but only for fleeting moments, when used by a certain group of actors in a countercultural mode. Even then it always sits on the cusp of being recaptured by the music industry, a process that Frith sees as being as much “professionalization” as it is “commoditization.” Rock is born out of the contradictions of capitalism, and it embodies them, both musically and ideologically.

Frith concludes that we should take rock as a “popular” rather than “mass” culture.” “Rock is a capitalist industry and not a folk form, but its most successful products do, somehow, express and reflect its audience’s concerns” (62). The meaning of a given rock song is never predetermined, but always produced through the active process of its being consumed. The music industry keeps developing elaborate and expensive strategies to shape public taste precisely because it is unable to do so.

One keyword distinguishes Frith’s sociological approach from that of other rock critics: “risk.” For record companies and media conglomerates, this is a matter of managing the ever-present danger of overproduction, but for bands and youth culture in general it represents a potential for pleasure. Frith writes, for example, about how the venues that featured black music prior to rock “had an atmosphere of risk and excitement and possibility” (19), while independent labels and promoters prowling for new, unconventional acts are understood conventionally as “the only real risk-takers” in the business (90). The industry becomes bureaucratic precisely as a strategy of risk-avoidance (101), just as music radio Top 40 formats represent a risk management strategy (117-126). Yet a pop musician is also a “risk-taker” (123), as are rock fans: “Nineteen-sixties rock politicized leisure—gave public, collective expression to usually private issues of risk and pleasure and sex.” (195). This is because “rock offers the fantasy of a community of risk” (217): the appeal of street culture to middle-class suburban kids.