Same Old Song
Same Old Song
The Enduring Past in Popular Music
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 Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists’ homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.
In this compelling, multigenre study, John Paul Meyers teaches us time travel. Or, better, he tells us how much our listening habits comprise it. From tribute bands and the idea of versioning in jazz performances to the aural muscle memory involved in hip-hop sampling and more, Meyers shows how the cult of the new in American popular music is, in truth, the same old song. You’ll never hear your playlists the same way after reading this fresh take!
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.
Same Old Song is a fascinating book. Wide-ranging and at the same time deep, Meyers uses case studies from across popular music to help us understand why something that seems to be ‘of the moment’ is also deeply imbued with historical consciousness. Highly recommended!
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.
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.
