John Paul Meyers

Bio

John Paul Meyers is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar whose work examines how popular music cultures engage with the past. His book Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music examines topics such as the sampling of soul and funk recordings from the 1970s in hip-hop, the live performance of “standards” among jazz musicians, and the recording of songs from the “Great American Songbook” by pop and rock musicians. His articles on Miles Davis in the mid-1960s, tribute bands, rock music in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, and cultural politics in African American music have been published in Jazz Perspectives, Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Another recent essay in CLA Journal analyzes autobiographies of hip-hop musicians and examines them in context of the larger Black autobiographical tradition and hip-hop culture’s own obsession with reality and authenticity. His study of Adrian Younge’s Jazz is Dead record label and the possibilities of incorporating Black music with multimedia formats to express a political message appears in the journal American Music.

In 2016, he won the Richard Waterman Prize from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology for best article by a junior scholar. For 2021-2023, he was a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors scholar through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Illinois. He was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies in 2025.