Same Old Song
eBook - ePub

Same Old Song

The Enduring Past in Popular Music

  1. 256 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Same Old Song

The Enduring Past in Popular Music

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Same Old Song by John Paul Meyers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Music. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1. Twenty Years Ago Today: Tribute Bands and Historical Consciousness in Popular Music
  8. Chapter 2. Yesterdays: Performing the Past Through the Great American Songbook from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan
  9. Chapter 3. Memories and Standards: Miles Davis and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” 1963–1970
  10. Chapter 4. Old School: Sampling, Re-Playing, and Re-Hearing the 1970s in Hip-Hop
  11. Chapter 5. “I Just Wanna Go Back, Baby, Back to the Way It Was”: The Past, Activism, and Recent Black Popular Music
  12. Conclusion
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index
  16. About the Author