The Pop Palimpsest

Book excerpt: Within popular music there are entire genres (jazz “standards”), styles (hip hop), techniques (sampling), and practices (covers) that rely heavily on references between music of different styles and genres. This interdisciplinary collection of essays covers a wide range of musical styles and artists to investigate intertextuality—the shaping of one text by another—in popular music. The Pop Palimpsest offers new methodologies and frameworks for the analysis of intertextuality in popular music, and provides new lenses for examining relationships between a variety of texts both musical and nonmusical. Enriched by perspectives from multiple subdisciplines, The Pop Palimpsest considers a broad range of intertextual relationships in popular music to explore creative practices and processes and the networks that intertextual practices create between artists and listeners.