Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City is a 2005 book charting the history of popular music, by the acclaimed music journalist and cultural commentator Paul Morley. Its style is highly idiosyncratic, and it takes the form of a robotic Kylie Minogue traveling, with Morley, in a cyber-car towards a city of "sound and ideas."
The starting point for this highly unusual, yet scholarly history of popular music are Morley's favourite pieces at the time of writing: Minogue's electro-pop song "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" and Alvin Lucier's experimental "I am sitting in a room". From these seemingly unrelated musical compositions Morley reflects on the meanings of music in its many contradictory forms: the avant-garde and pop, the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical and the digital, the commercial and the creative, the human and the robotic.
Along the way a host of musical greats rear their heads (and sounds), followed by digressions into the point of writing about music, as well as the writer's own place in the canon of music writing. Ultimately the book is a set of lists of the great and the good in music.
The list in the book are really interesting as is Morely's take on the non linear history of music and the way his shifts away from the "canon" of rock music places other acts - Brian Eno and Kraftwerk at the center.