Same Old Song

The Enduring Past in Popular Music

John Paul Meyers

$364.95 $291.80

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

University Press of Mississippi
15 April 2024

Music reviews & criticism; Soul & R 'n' B; Rap & Hip-Hop; Popular culture; Ethnic studies

Series: American Made Music Series

"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."

By: John Paul Meyers
Imprint: University Press of Mississippi
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 272g
ISBN: 9781496850867
ISBN 10: 1496850866
Series: American Made Music Series
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 15 April 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music

"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"