Frithy Milkshake

In his essay “Music and Identity,” Simon Frith discusses the intersection of music and one’s sense of identity. He acknowledges that the production of music has roots in certain cultures and ideologies, but his main point is that the way in which one interacts with music says a great deal about his or her identity.
When he talks about pop music, he says that it “becomes the more valuable aesthetically the more independent it is of the social forces that organize it.” He argues that the music people choose says a lot more about them than the music they passively accept. He says that music presents listeners with an infinite landscape. From this landscape, listeners are able to choose cultures and values with which they can identify.
I like what Frith has to say about the way that music acts as a nucleus for the identities of some people. To me, a song presents a place to find something that you can relate to. If Mos Def sees hip hop as a complicated art form with which he has a complicated relationship with it, lyrics he writes about it will form a common point of our identities. Such lyrics will summarize a particular aspect of both our worldviews and establish a part of our identities.
I especially liked Frith’s examples involving both the English working-class children and the Trinidadians. They highlight the way that certain people interact positively with music that isn’t a copy-and-paste of their own culture. The working-class kids identified with the emotion from jazz. The Trinidadians identify more with Hindi music instead of the Westernized music imposed upon them.
Although I would love to think that I know why I like all the media I consume, the examples did help me realize why suburbanites love Lil Wayne so much or why an Afrika Bambaataa might sample a Kraftwerk. The kinds of music people are drawn to says a lot about the values they uphold and, to a greater extent, their general sense of aesthetics.