Scott Miller Music: What Happened? (125 Books)
Unlike the blog, which hopped around in time as it unfolded, the book is chronological. This makes it easier to access and more fun to flip through. (Here’s my blurb: “Great for planes.”) That bittiness suits the project—Miller’s writing, as smart as it can be, often feels like an unfiltered and unedited collection of notes. His insights tend to come not in sustained blazes of analysis but in flashes and flickers—in his blurb for the Dismemberment Plan’s “You Are Invited” (1999), for instance, he observes that Pitchfork helped build a bridge from the indie audience to “a world of dance music that a world of musicians don’t get.”
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Here, Miller offers a lot of information in a small space, without relinquishing the guy-telling-you-some-stuff voice he’s after. With the phrase “a new, cooler musical vocabulary” he’s referring to jazz: Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue came out in 1959. But he’s also hinting at the increasing sophistication and subtlety of the year’s R&B, such as Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say?” and the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” both of which the book includes, and the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” which it doesn’t. That’s a good, broad view. And rather than state flatly that rock ‘n’ roll was endangered, a la McLean’s “American Pie” and any number of rock histories, Miller’s “must have seemed” shifts the perspective slightly in a way that reanimates it. Today we take it for granted that Frank and Elvis shared a time if not an audience (not in 1959, anyway), but Miller gets at the taking-sides aspect of Sinatra’s antirock sneers, capturing something of how they would’ve felt to the era’s rock fans. It’s only in retrospect that rock ‘n’ roll has been reimagined as an unstoppable force—at the time there was no way to know that it wouldn’t vindicate such hostility by turning out to be a flash in the pan.
“I think of Moby and Eminem as being the last two significant groundswell American artists,” he writes in his entry on the former’s “We Are All Made of Stars.” “They had pretty different personalities and demographics: Moby was a humble, idealistic humanist, and Eminem was an egotistical, pragmatic populist.” On the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” which he calls “drill-team crisp,” he writes: “Past generations grew out of being a teen music audience and into being an adult music audience. This generation grew out of being a teen music audience and into being teen music impresarios—witness ‘American Idol.’” I’ll likely never let Miller’s canon displace mine, but he’s got interesting things to say about both, even if he does think “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” is Bruce Springsteen’s best song. v
