Springfield, IL  (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – An Illinois author is diving into the history of popular music.

To John Paul Meyers, there’s more nuance here than you might think. “I’m trying to complicate the idea that popular music is always supposed to be associated with youth and novelty and newness,” Meyers said. “That’s a big part of what I call ‘the ideology of newness,’ or the dominant way of thinking about popular music; that popular music is always associated with the young, it’s always associated with new technology, maybe even revolutionary political change.”

Meyers, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has written Same Old Song – the Enduring Past in Popular Music. And he wants you to think about the next line in that Four Tops hit: “with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.”

“Now we have all the memories of that time,” Meyers said, “but we are also dealing with it in this contemporary moment and thinking about, what is our relationship to the 1960’s or the 1970’s? What are the aspects of that time period we want to bring back or recreate, and what are the things that we want to move on from? That’s what I think the title is getting at.”