Music: What Happened?
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| Author | Scott Miller |
|---|---|
| Genre | Music history and criticism |
| Published | December 2010 |
| Publisher | 125 Records |
| Media type | Print (trade paperback) |
| Pages | 270 pp. (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 724510113 |
| Text | Music: What Happened? online |
Music: What Happened? is a book of music criticism by Scott Miller, leader of the bands Game Theory and The Loud Family. Published in 2010, the book was described by Billboard as "a well-received critical overview of 53 years of rock history."
In 2006, Scott Miller, a songwriter and guitarist who had founded the power pop bands Game Theory and The Loud Family, turned his efforts to cataloging his thoughts about the music that had inspired him. The writing process began after his decision to take a hiatus from his recording career, following the 2006 release of what turned out to be his final album, What If It Works?, with The Loud Family and Anton Barbeau.
Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Scott Miller's "encyclopedic knowledge of pop," upon which his music drew, made the book a "shining example of the auteur ideal ... a year-by-year, song-by-song journey from 1957 to this decade, connecting the dots for a macro-perspective on pop." For each year, Miller wrote about ten or more of his favorite songs, providing analytical insights and placing the songs in context in the musical world of their era.
Miller had kept annual countdown lists of his favorite records throughout his life, and his personal project of compiling those lists onto CDs evolved into a formal endeavor to explain what made those songs noteworthy, for what was then the last 50 years of recorded music. Portions of the book were serially published in draft form on Miller's official web site, where Miller responded to fan requests by writing about one year at a time, in random order.
The book was first published in 2010 by an imprint of 125 Records, the recording label to which Miller was signed. In second and third editions of the book, Miller's 2010 chapter and 2011 chapter were added.
The cover art, designed by Betsy Lescosky, established a knowledgeable but humorous tone by featuring photographs of Miller in poses that recreated noteworthy album covers such as that of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. The book's title is a comical appropriation from the sensationalist Elvis Presley exposé, Elvis: What Happened? (1977)
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