Postmodern intertextuality in contemporary popular music: mashups
December 9, 2010 1 Comment
Within current popular music culture, we witness the interesting phenomenon of “mashups” – a composition created by blending two or more songs that often involves an overlay of the vocals of one song over the instrumental of another.
Mashups are an obvious and beautiful example of what postmodern theorists mean with intertextuality. Thanks to a clever technology, you can now hear, see and feel intertextuality in your web browser. Listen, look and party here! Enjoy!
Postmodern intertextuality in contemporary music: mashup
Keen on C 
Musical mash-ups have nothing to do with post-modernism. Post-modern mash-ups are ironic, mocking, meta, and self-referential. They contrast two artistic styles for shock or humor value, or they throw together a bunch of different styles to strip everything out of its cultural context, to show that the resulting art sucks, which is supposed to prove that art inheres in cultural context rather than in content.
Musical mash-ups, by contrast, are done by people who love the things they are mashing up, and who are trying to make music, not deconstruct it.