The Pop Palimpsest

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.

“What these essays demonstrate again and again is how fascinating it is to trace what one song draws from another and how each person—artist or producer, musician or consumer—uses old threads to weave new meanings. Such interrelationships between pieces are a fundamental part of what makes a musical tradition a tradition.”
—from the Foreword by J. Peter Burkholder, Indiana University, Bloomington 

Lori Burns is Professor of Music and Director of the School of Music at the University of Ottawa. Serge Lacasse is Professor of Musicology at Université Laval.