Politics & Power Quote by Fred Frith

Frith’s line lands with the dry ache of someone watching a scene curdle under its own moral certainty. He isn’t renouncing politics; he’s diagnosing how politics gets heard. The key phrase is “a certain perception” - not just what the group believed, but how those beliefs read in public, especially when filtered through the social theater of subculture. In music communities, politics isn’t a policy platform; it’s an ethos, a badge, a vibe. Once it tips into “zealous, self-righteous,” the message becomes inseparable from the posture, and the posture becomes the story.

The intent feels corrective rather than apologetic: a reminder that radical aesthetics can’t outrun radical social dynamics. “It didn’t exactly win us any friends” is classic British understatement doing real work. It softens the critique while sharpening it, implying the damage was obvious, avoidable, and maybe even predictable. Friendship here is code for alliances: audiences, collaborators, venues, the fragile trust that lets experimental art circulate at all.

Context matters because Frith comes out of avant-garde and politically alert milieus where sincerity is currency and purity tests are contagious. The subtext is weary: movements often confuse being right with being effective, then act shocked when righteousness reads as contempt. He’s pointing to a recurring cultural failure mode - when moral clarity becomes moral performance, it stops persuading and starts sorting people into the worthy and the damned. That may feel satisfying inside the room; it empties the room over time.