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‘The magic that can set you free’: the ideology of folk and the myth of the rock community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2008

Simon Frith
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Rock, the saying goes, is ‘the folk music of our time’. Not from a sociological point of view. If ‘folk’ describes pre-capitalist modes of music production, rock is, without a doubt, a mass-produced, mass-consumed, commodity. The rock-folk argument, indeed, is not about how music is made, but about how it works: rock is taken to express (or reflect) a way of life; rock is used by its listeners as a folk music — it articulates communal values, comments on shared social problems. The argument, in other words, is about subcultures rather than musicmaking; the question of how music comes to represent its listeners is begged. (I develop these arguments further in Frith 1978, pp. 191–202, and, with particular reference to punk rock, in Frith 1980.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Popular Music , Volume 1 , January 1981 , pp. 159 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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