Beyond quotation: Intertextuality in popular music since 1990

Although philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality in the late 1960s, scholars have only recently begun to apply the term to music. Used primarily in musicological discourse as a synonym for borrowing, quotation, or other specific references, intertextuality as term and theory risks becoming meaningless jargon. Yet unlike these more concrete forms of allusion, intertextuality admits the impossibility of recognizing and identifying all references contained within a text. Barthes' writings further illustrate the post-structuralist skepticism towards modes of referential mapping, i.e. signification practices, as he does not believe in the existence of any stable meaning in the signifying process. Consequently, no singular interpretation can exist for a given text; rather, intertextuality encourages a democracy of readings and meanings. In so doing, Barthes' theory of intertextuality decenters the author and grants primacy to the reader.; The understanding that all music is intertextual by nature, a state I term irreducible intertextuality, underpins this dissertation. As I demonstrate, an understanding of irreducible intertextuality necessarily collapses the ubiquitous but artificial boundaries between music that overtly alludes to or borrows from other texts and that which seemingly does not. The reconstitution of these oppositions as that between the thematization (acknowledgement) of intertextuality and the disguising (effacement) of intertextuality permits a certain degree of analysis as intertextuality itself loses some of its transparency.; This dissertation returns to the theories of intertextuality proposed by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and applies them to four popular music subgenres: electronica, hip hop, mainstream rock, and Riot Grrrl. Each chapter focuses on one of the above subgenres and provides both a musical and hermeneutic analysis of two songs within that subgenre. These case studies provide a spectrum of music that thematizes intertextuality, as they consider references ranging from the particular, in the form of a digital sample, to the general, the invocation of a genre, style, or vocabulary. The final chapter briefly examines the relationship between these subgenres and how they inform musical intertextuality at large.