Same Old Song

Popular music in the United States is made and listened to by people from a variety of racial groups, ages, genders, sexualities, and regions, but it is often dominated by an ideology of newness. The Grammys recognize the "Best New Artist" every year. Unknown artists compete on music television shows for a chance at stardom. And the most vibrant forms of popular music culture seem to be produced by and for the young: those with the facility for creating and consuming music using the latest technology, the free time to follow the latest trends, and the energy to stay out at night dancing to the latest hits. Yet despite this ideology of newness, this shared understanding that newness is a key defining trait of popular music, this book presents a challenge to this idea in a variety of popular music scenes. This book examines "historical consciousness in popular music," a fundamental shift in the understanding of popular music that treats the events and artifacts of the popular music past as properly historical phenomena, not as trivial minutiae, obsolete, or irrelevant, as the ideology of newness would seem to dictate. This book illuminates this important but little-understood aspect of jazz, rock, hip-hop, and R&B: a sense that the past in popular music is worth knowing about, remembering, celebrating, and, in various ways, re-playing

American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Music History and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History · History and criticism · Music · Music, history and criticism

• Sinatras in Blackface

  Open Access•Francesca Inglese•Journal of the Society for…•2025

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