Simon Frith

How many different playlists do you have? One for studying, another for the workout session, don’t forget the bus ride too. Those songs, for you, just take up space in your phone, but for Simon Frith, the music that we call ours and that we listen to everyday define who we are. This essay will analyze in detail the meaning behind the quote written above.

To start analyzing this quote by Frith, a rephrase of it is necessary: “Music is the reflection of both the individual and the social persona”. This clear reformulation of Simon Frith’s, a sociomusicologist (a musical sociologist), quote from his essay Music and Identity, can help us understand to get the meaning behind this thoughtful quote. By linking music and identity, Frith describes a way of perceiving identity and the social context

For example, we can take the most common form of emotional creation, a love poem, “This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and / then is done” (Johnson 24-25). This verse by Johnson is a direct reflection of her emotions while and through the poem, we can feel that love melancholy that she feels at the thought of her lost lover. This type of analysis can be made for any musical composition and you will find, even in the blandest piece, an emotion linked to it; and like the compositor for his composition, a listener will be bound to pieces that reflect his emotional state. To link with Frith, we can go deeper and say that the listener will also be bound to his social state. For example : even though social discrepancies are less and less present, it is obvious that a young African-American boy from Brooklyn and a young Caucasian girl from Seattle don’t have the same idea of what a love song is. The former might be thinking of J Cole’s Work Out, while the latter is more into Taylor Swift You Belong with