The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music is the latest in University of Michigan Press's rich and expanding Tracking Pop series. Edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, the 12 essays and foreword comprise the first ‘collection dedicated to a range of intertextual relationships in the tradition of recorded popular song’ (p. 2). Lest these latter adjectives be misconstrued, the focus of the book is songs that exist primarily as recordings, but the writers address intertextuality in relation to notated (or notatable), sonic and performance features of songs, as well as highlighting how other media (e.g. videos, album covers, reviews) facilitate new networks of meaning in conjunction with a recorded text.

There are aspects of chapters that readers may pick at, but any minor criticisms must be qualified by the observation that the individual essays, written by first-rate scholars, are accessible, meticulously researched and grounded in strong theoretical frameworks. This makes the text as a whole suitable for undergraduates who require introductions to concepts, and postgraduates who are looking for robust methodologies and theories. For instance, Stan Hawkins employs the notion of an idiolect rather loosely (and somewhat needlessly, it must be said) in his chapter on Annie Lennox, but he illuminates neatly how artistic identity can be constructed and layered from multiple visual and musical sources, each replete with distinct cultural meanings. Roger Castonguay's chapter on motivic transformation and recycling in Genesis does not fully explicate why Genettean theories of hypertextuality are necessary for understanding the music, but remains a strong demonstration of thematic analysis. J. Peter Burkholder's foreword which compares popular and classical modes of intertextuality may be a little pedestrian in style, but would also sit perfectly in a class where popular musicians are being introduced to the wonderful world of classical music (a situation I often find myself in) – maybe along the lines of, ‘See, Beethoven used to name-drop Haydn, just like Kendrick and Dr. Dre!’ (loosely paraphrasing pp. xiv–xv). In short, buy the book, enjoy the insightful and informative analyses of a range of music, and have students engage with the ideas.

Rather than skim through the content of each chapter (which readers can glean from online previews of the introduction and/or foreword), I wish to point out a few highlights. The three chapters by Hawkins, Burns and Woods, and Williams were the strongest primarily because of their intermedia approach to intertexuality, demonstrating that meaning exists not only in the dialogue between one text and another (e.g. an Eminem track and a Hot Stylz track, p. 223), but concurrently in the dialogue between a recorded text and its extra-musical elements, and those associated meanings (e.g. The Game's album cover imagery that visually places him within a gangsta rap tradition, p. 294). The upshot of this approach is that these chapters present the most compelling and nuanced arguments from intertextual readings. Williams clearly demonstrates how the West Coast gangsta rap tradition is articulated and developed in different ways by two protégés of Dr Dre – The Game and Kendrick Lamar. Burns and Woods reveal how the mythologies of the ‘rap god’ and ideals of power are forcefully propagated through the music, imagery and media representations of Eminem, Jay-Z and Kanye West. Hawkins's essay differs slightly insofar as he reaches less of a central reading of his text – the Eurythmics’ ‘I Need a Man’. Instead, he skilfully weaves a web of ambivalence around and through the song, highlighting that Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart's myriad musical, performative and visual references (for example, to Lennox's own style, the tradition of songs with similar titles, cock rock, drag, Marilyn Monroe and so forth) contribute to both a fundamental ambiguity around the lyric's meaning, as well as to a challenge of gender norms in popular music.

The second strength of the book is Lacasse's extensive ‘model of transphonography’, an adaptation of Genette's influential model of transtextuality, which categorises the different relationships between and among recorded texts and their constituent elements, including at the level of style and genre (archiphonography), and quotation (interphonography), through to album review (metaphonography). It is easy to imagine such a model being highly suitable for artists such as Queen or the Beatles, where one may wish to distinguish between the multiple types of intertextual references through their output. To this end, it was slightly disappointing that there were not opportunities for more extensive applications of this method in the book. Lacasse's case study is an analysis of a single review of two versions of ‘Could It Be Magic’ by Barry Manilow – while the terminology and concepts are well applied to the review, it does feel like an application of vocabulary to material that is already explained sufficiently in the review itself, as opposed to showing how the model illuminates new understandings of familiar music. It is at the end of Woodside's fascinating account of 19th-century French vaudeville that the potential for such a model is made clearer. Although Woodside utilises Genette's original terminology (pp. 207–9), such an application provides nuance to the identification of references that might otherwise be considered simply ‘intertextual’, and this is where, I think, the real value of Lacasse's model will lie. Bennett and Lacasse's closing chapter on mixtapes flirts with this terminology (p. 316), but they subsequently turn their focus to the often-idiosyncratic decisions that underpin mixtape creativity.

The remaining chapters present convincing readings of songs and artists from the perspective of style analysis (Spicer, Echard), ecological perception and timbre (Zagorski-Thomas) and ‘versions’ of songs (Castonguay, Moore, Everett). Each will offer methodological and interpretative ideas to those studying popular music, particularly in the more analytical areas of the field. My one surprise was Everett's chapter on intratextual mixes of songs (i.e. different-length recordings of the same track). While his survey is unsurprisingly magisterial, the inclusion of this essay seems odd given its recent publication in Popular Music (2010).

I will conclude by briefly noting several pertinent ideas that are less explored in the book. Firstly, despite the name, and its convincing application by Spicer to the relationship between Jeff Lynne and the Beatles, Bloom's theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ is fundamentally historiographical. What we still lack is a model for understanding the musical nature of stylistic influence – how can we account for the different modes by which later artists borrow from, adapt and disguise the characteristics of their predecessors? And how might these relationships relate to the historiographical concerns identified by Bloom and Spicer (i.e. around originality)? Related to this, there is a blurry distinction at times between understanding intertextuality as an explicit creative concern (e.g. quotation), a subconscious creative concern (e.g. influence) and a listening strategy (e.g. interpretation). There is potential for further exploration on the former front, particularly as to why artists might choose to make specific intertextual references to convey specific meanings (cf. the interpretative ambiguity of Lennox). The idiom of contemporary musical theatre may provide fertile ground for such investigations given the prevalence of ‘standardised’ themes and style tropes among the songwriters (e.g. Alan Menken). Finally, what is also missing in the book are the ramifications of intertextuality beyond interpretation. There are hints at how intertextual references might impact on audience and historical reception (Lacasse, Spicer, Moore, Echard, Woodside, Williams), but what of the potential for legal and financial implications, namely by way of copyright laws? Excuse the pun, but where do the lines start to get blurred in understanding intertexuality? And how might legal matters impact on both our and artists’ conceptualisation of intertextuality? Perhaps answers to these questions might form the basis of future enquiry in this area, which, in turn, will enter into its own intertextual relationship with The Pop Palimpsest.