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

TLDR

Rock is portrayed as a mass‑produced, mass‑consumed commodity that functions as folk music, articulating communal values and reflecting shared social problems. The author develops these arguments further in Frith 1978 and 1980, with particular reference to punk rock.

Abstract

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.)