158 BOOK REVIEWS This work is notably devoid of tables and correlations and other statistical phenomena which are meant to be provided to legitimize the study as serious economic theory blessed by econometrics. A few tables of raw data (especially revenues and costs) might have been helpful and sweetened the intuition. But otherwise it is refreshing to encounter a book, to some extent written in the style of good institutional economics, where the author is able to convey some of the excitement engendered in understanding the complex social pattern of a high imperfect market where price, valuation and social process are heavily intertwined. MARTIN SHUBIK Yale University, New Haven, CT, U.S.A. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, viii + 352 pp., ISBN 0-674-66195-8. Deirdre McCloskey has lamented the fact that graduate students in economics com- posing a thesis on the history of British steelmaking feel no need to actually learn anything about steelmaking, the most recent advances in econometrics being suffi- cient background. In the spirit of McCloskey, I recommend to cultural economists Simon Frith’s insights into the nature of popular music. Frith begins by asking what we mean by “good” or “bad” popular music. He notes that for the most part academics in cultural studies avoid the question; for all of the published essays about the cultural significance of Madonna, none indicate whether or not her music is any good. But “[t]his book is about taking popular discrimination seriously.” (p. 16). His thesis is that judging and conversing about our judgments is the essence of popular music culture: “[t]o grasp the meaning of a piece of music is to hear something not simply present to the ear. It is to understand a musical culture, to have a ‘scheme of interpretation.’ ” (p. 249). In common with modern literary theory (and those with an aversion to theory should be warned that the book has more index entries for Barthes than Beethoven or the Beatles), “reading” (or, listening) is given the key role in analysing what is going on; we notice that popular music criticism is mostly written from the perspective of the listener, rather than the composer or performer. He rejects the Frankfurt school view of popular culture as one-sided: “in examin- ing the aesthetics of popular music we need to reverse the usual academic argument: the question is not how a piece of music, a text, ‘reflects’ popular values, but how – in performance – it produces them” (p. 270). As the title indicates, “performance” is at the heart of how we listen to popular music, and the core of Frith’s argument “is not just that in listening to popular music we are listening to a performance, but, further, that ‘listening’ itself is a performance ” (p. 203).