Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls "historical consciousness in popular music." These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the "Great American Songbook." Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D'Angelo, and Janelle Monae, Meyers argues that contemporary artists' homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.
John Paul Meyers is assistant professor of African American studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar whose research on jazz, hip-hop, and rock music has been published in such journals as Jazz Perspectives and Ethnomusicology, among others.
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Twenty Years Ago Today: Tribute Bands and Historical Consciousness in Popular Music Chapter 2: Yesterdays: Performing the Past Through the Great American Songbook from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan Chapter 3: Memories and Standards: Miles Davis and "I Fall in Love Too Easily," 1963-1970 Chapter 4: Old School: Sampling, Re-Playing, and Re-Hearing the 1970s in Hip-Hop Chapter 5: "I Just Wanna Go Back, Baby, Back to the Way It Was": The Past, Activism, and Recent Black Popular Music Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
John Paul Meyers does an excellent job of formulating perceptive analyses of rock, soul, funk, and hip-hop. Same Old Song gives us a new way to understand popular music and the various strands of concepts connected to it." - Tony Bolden, author of Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk "Lending a much-needed ethnomusicological perspective to a field largely dominated by theory and outsider analysis, Same Old Song is a valuable book in the study of the relationship between music and its past." - Caitlin Vaughn Carlos, lecturer in musicology at the University of California Los Angeles's Herb Alpert School of Music
