Response to Simon Frith article - Amelia Lorenzo

Simon Frith’s article entitled Music and Identity aims to define what identity is and how it is connected to music, or more specifically, how music creates the experiences in which people are identified. He breaks his argument into five areas: the mobile self; postmodernism and performance; space, time and stories; from aesthetics to ethics; and the imagined self. In each area, he presents a different way of approaching the ever-evolving debate as to how identity is defined and how it relates to music. He begins his argument with the belief that “identity is mobile” and that “our experience of music…is best understood as an en experience of this self-in-process.” He argues that regardless of the type of music, the way the music works to define a person is the same all around. For him, the identity that comes from music does not necessarily lie in the lyrics, but in the way they are presented or performed.
Frith goes on to compare the fine arts, such as painting or sculpture, to the performing arts, such as music or dance, on the basis of time and space. He believes that the fine arts are “organized around the use of space” whereas the performing arts are “organized around the use of time.” He believes the structure of both types of art comes from the narratives they present – the way they tell a story. In the aesthetics to ethics portion of his argument, he poses the question as to what makes music good and what this reveals about the culture behind the music. In the last section of his argument, he makes his final point that “an identity is always already an ideal, what we would like to be, not what we are.” He argues that music fits into the concept of identity in that it “gives us a real experience of what the ideal could be.”
I found the last section to be the most interesting, yet confusing, in his article. Throughout the article, it seemed like he was approaching some sort of final thought of what identity really was, but it all actuality, he believes it’s just an ideal. I found this to be confusing because he presents all these different ways that identity appears in music or is connected to music and then he just says it’s an ideal. I found this to be a bit of a cop-out, as far as a conclusion goes, which could also be why I find it confusing. I don’t feel like he truly concluded anything he was arguing.