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

of an individual through music taste (and consequently, music production). In fact, Frith describes in the same paper that “music is a metaphor for identity” (109), stating that like identity, music is progressive; that music and identity are so strongly linked because both can describe a sense of belonging to yourself (self-identity) and to a social group (group-identity).
Frith achieved, with the sole use of written words, something politicians have been running around the country to achieve: he reached and connected deeply with any of us. This realisation describes perfectly the root of sociology: studying the behavior of a group and finding psychological bonds between its members. Frith, a former rock critic, found this bond in music.
Reading this quote, I must say that I find myself uncertain about whether or not to accept Frith’s point of view on music and identity. The more I think of it, the less I see clear in this sociological enigma. I keep asking myself the same question: How can someone, through my (or anyone else’s) music tastes, recreate the complex and unique person that I am? The thing is that I know that it is physically impossible, but in this case, Frith is talking theoretically, and theoretically, one could examine the whole spectrum of songs I listened to and my verdict of them. Of course, this would take an unreasonable amount of time, and maybe that was what Frith meant; that through the constant appreciation and judgment of the music we hear, we progressively etch our identity in our musical taste and creations so that ultimately, the music taste and the identity are so intertwined that they are both indistinguishable from one another.
It goes without saying that emotion and identity are both tightly locked together and the usual musical creation conveys the composer’s mood through his creation.

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

Me.
Frith, with a mere 31 words, described accurately and precisely the behavior linked with a major actor in the development of the culture of the human race. He elucidated the feeling of belonging everyone feels when they put on their favorite song. With only 31 words, he made us realize that something we brush off as simple entertainment is in fact a complete portrayal of our identity.