Has Anyone Seen the Bridge?
"Sara" is playing in a Starbucks. Six minutes of Stevie Nicks twirling, 1979 piped into 2026, background music for laptops and lattes. The song has become wallpaper—not because it stopped being good, but because that's what survival looks like now. The elongating tail of pop's songbook stretches back far enough that music from the Carter administration sits comfortably alongside whatever came out last Friday. Growing up in the 1980s, hearing something from 1966 in a public space would have been like hearing scratchy Victrola jazz from the 1920s mixed in with Duran Duran. Now the Beatles are just... there. Part of the ambient hum.
This is what Scott Miller was writing against, even if he didn't frame it that way. His book Music: What Happened?, published in 2010 and now out of print at collector's prices, is structured as 54 years of annual mixtapes, each constrained to fit on a single CD, each entry explaining not just what he loved but why—the specific passage, the chord change, the moment where the bridge lifts and something happens that couldn't have been predicted. It's a book that insists on attention in an era that rewards its absence.
The title is a trapdoor. "Music: What Happened?" carries the syntax of authority, of a historian delivering verdicts. But the book can't be that—no book can. What it actually delivers is one man's listening, shaped by Sacramento radio in 1972, by playing in bands the market ignored, by staying up after his daughters went to bed to transfer vinyl to CD and think about why a particular piano run mattered. The honest title would have been unpublishable: "Some Music I Loved and Why, Organized by Year, With All My Limitations on Full Display."
Miller knew this. In the introduction, he writes that he's not selling his authority; he's selling his ability to honestly disclose his perspective. He describes wanting critics to acknowledge being moved as "a result of honest work," to report "how they unexpectedly turned into a love-struck adolescent over a vocal harmony or a piano run." The goal isn't to map the territory. It's to transmit the experience of having been there, ears open, nervous system receiving.
This creates problems, of course. Miller's inflection points are his inflection points. He identifies 1972 as a peak of musical racial integration—which is 1972 as experienced by an eleven-year-old white kid in Sacramento listening to Top 40 radio. A real experience, genuinely observed, but not the only vantage point available. His dismissal of the 1980s as "a horrifying decline in every kind of musical competency" makes sense if your reference points are arena rock bombast and DX7 presets; it makes less sense if you were in Chicago discovering house music, or in the Bronx watching hip-hop emerge, or in Manchester at the Haçienda.
The generational parallax is visible throughout. The pre-Beatles years he approaches as a scholar, respectful but at a distance. The 60s and 70s he writes from inside—not assessing the Beatles but constituted by them. The 80s and 90s he experienced as a working musician swimming against the current, which colors everything. By the 2000s he's a tourist in his own field, still curious but no longer of the moment.
A reviewer at the time noted that Miller's "eloquent enthusiasm starts to wane" after the 70s, that he issues "half-hearted apologies" for including tracks like Tears for Fears. This is framed as a flaw, an unevenness. But the unevenness is the honesty. Miller couldn't fake enthusiasm for music that didn't move him. When his energy flags, he's showing you where his ears struggled, where his generational position creates limits. The apology is data.
What redeems the project—what transforms it from a flawed survey into something worth treasuring—is the specificity of attention. Miller writes as a practitioner. He knows what it costs to get a bridge right because he's been in rooms trying to make those decisions. When he mentions "the A-minor in the second measure of the chorus," he's not showing off; he's reaching for the only language precise enough to describe why something works.
And here's the gift: when you've been carrying around a private conviction about a particular song for years—say, the bridge in Nazz's "Forget All About It"—and you read Miller's entry and he goes straight to the bridge, suddenly you're not alone in the room anymore. That's what Robert Christgau missed when he complained that Miller needed a "worldview" to spin around his observations. The worldview is the shared noticing. The book isn't an argument; it's a series of handshakes. You heard that too?
This is a different mode of criticism than Christgau's system-building, his grades and capsule reviews and Consumer Guide infrastructure. Miller is closer to someone like Harvey Williams, a Sarah Records alumnus who self-published a collection of single reviews, writing about Janek Schaefer's sound-activated dictaphone mailed through the postal system with the same care he'd bring to a jangle-pop seven-inch. Williams's book was handed to my wife by the author himself in a Shoreditch record shop. The scale is intimate. The authority is: I noticed this, maybe you will too.
Different instruments measuring different things. Christgau asks what music means in a cultural framework. Miller asks what it feels like to hear the bridge land. Harvey asks whether this specific forgotten single might matter to the specific person he's handing it to. None of them wrong. All of them partial. The signal needs all of them, or it degrades faster.
Miller died in April 2013, shortly after the book reached its final form. He was fifty-three. By accounts from people close to him, the last years were difficult in ways that had nothing to do with music. Whatever lists he would have made for 2012 onward—whatever he would have noticed about streaming, about the collapse of the album as economic unit, about hip-hop becoming the dominant grammar of pop, about all the things that have happened to music since—died with him in that apartment in Sacramento.
There's a particular loss when a critic dies, distinct from when a musician dies. Musicians leave recordings; the work exists, finished and playable. But a critic's work is relational, ongoing, responsive. It requires the world to keep happening so they can keep making sense of it. Miller's ears were the instrument. The instrument is gone.
And yet the book persists. Not through the market—the paperback that sold for fifteen dollars in 2011 now goes for nearly $150 used, an object for collectors rather than readers. But through other channels. A PDF on the Internet Archive. A friend pointing you toward it. A photographer who knew Miller passing the link along because he thought you'd care. The gift circulating hand to hand, the way it was always meant to.
Miller wrote in the introduction about his dream of a mechanism where he could influence thousands of people to assemble the collections he loved, funneling income to artists he cared about. "If I can convert a thousand new people to Chris Stamey," he wrote, "there is absolutely no chance my life will have been in vain." The book was always a delivery system for that—not a monument to his taste, but a machine for making converts. Every reader who tracks down the dB's or Nazz or some obscure Roy Harper track because Miller's enthusiasm was contagious is the project working as intended.
Back at the Starbucks, "Sara" has ended, replaced by something else I'm not tracking. The music continues, an endless stream of songs that meant something once and now mean "retail atmosphere." Some of them can survive that flattening. Some can't. Miller spent a lot of the book trying to articulate the difference—which songs persist because they were "designed to circulate comfortably," which remain "tethered to their original conditions" in ways that make their context non-negotiable.
Black Flag, he might have argued, belongs in the second category. The songs were never separable from the Reagan-era alienation, the DIY scarcity, the specific friction of that moment. You can perform the repertoire, but you can't reconstitute the voltage. When the current version of Black Flag tours—one original member and three people young enough to be his children—they're trading on brand recognition, not continuity. The Ship of Theseus has lost enough planks that it's essentially a replica.
Mark E. Smith understood this differently. "If it's me and your granny on bongos," he said, "then it's a Fall gig." He could say that because he was the irreducible element—the voice, the words, the confrontational presence. The Fall was a delivery mechanism for Mark E. Smith. Black Flag was a collision of specific people at a specific moment. Greg Ginn can't make the equivalent claim, not because he lacks the legal right, but because the ontology is different.
A more honest move would have been to call it something else. Ginn & Tonic, playing the Black Flag songbook. An acknowledgment that the songs survived but the moment didn't. That's how Damon and Naomi handled it when they played a few Galaxie 500 songs at the end of a residency at London's Cafe OTO—not billed as a reunion, not trading on the brand, just musicians playing songs they wrote thirty-five years ago, with friends, in a room where the audience understood what was being offered.
The question underneath all of this—underneath the legacy tours and the Starbucks playlists and the $148 used paperbacks—is what music is for. Is it content to be monetized, context to be stripped, signal to be degraded in the name of commerce? Or is it something that requires attention, that gives back in proportion to what you bring, that dies a little every time it's treated as wallpaper?
Miller's book argues for the second position, not through polemic but through practice. Every entry that lingers on a specific vocal harmony, a specific drum fill, a specific moment where the bridge does something unexpected—that's a small act of resistance against the flattening. It says: this mattered. It mattered because a particular person made a particular decision at a particular moment, and if you listen closely you can still hear it.
The gift keeps giving because people keep giving it. Toren to me. Harvey to Nancy. Miller to his daughters, to his blog readers, to anyone who found their way to the book. The signal persists because people choose to carry it forward, not because the market sustains it.
Somewhere, Scott Miller is staying up late, headphones on, trying to figure out how to explain why that bridge works. That's not literally true—he's been dead for thirteen years—but it's true in the way that matters. The listening continues. The attention continues. The gift continues.
All you have to do is notice the bridge.