John Paul Meyers

I'm a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I research and teach classes about American popular music, especially jazz, hip-hop, rock 'n' roll, and funk. My first book, Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, looks at how popular music scenes and genres reference the past, despite the common idea that popular music is only interested in newness and only for young people.