Interesting, I feel like in most art forms outside pop music there are at least some works where the hyper-referentiality is part of what makes them revolutionary (Ulysses, Eliot, Second Viennese School using incredibly archaic forms in modern compositions, French New Wave, even Mingus arguably). Modernism usually had an obsession with both the past and the future, it was a point where art's self-consciousness made it both forward looking (the need to make something that created its own rules) and backward looking (partly as a means to (ground-breakingly) comment on the medium being worked in).
But this never happened in pop, to my knowledge. It went straight to a much emptier form of referentiality, wherein the entire aesthetic is built on copying. The only example I can think of of an artist whose referentiality feels part of the modernism is Dylan, which I know you'll disagree with. Even there, it's almost entirely at the level of lyrics (e.g. before Dylan people hadn't made references to poetry and song lyrics in the way he did).
I feel this is a lost avenue for pop futurism. I see no reason why music shouldn't make you think about music. To musicians and the people who appreciate it most, music is a central part of life, as rich, important, and complicated as interpersonal relationships or existential questions (the things I assume Donohue wants music to make him think about).
Apologies if this is territory you've already covered in Retromania.
Yes you are right about that with modernist literature - and also with modernist music. in the 20th Century you have composers very deliberately quoting I don't know Beethoven. Berio did a whole symphony that was like a mangled quote-riddled tribute to the classical canon. Goes to look up on in the internet - ah yes, Sinfonia, specifically the third movement quotes "Claude Debussy's La mer, Maurice Ravel's La valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage".
I think maybe all art forms reach a Self-Reflexive Turn, where the previous history of the genre or form becomes a subject of the music, and also parts of its raw material. Jazz in its later years teems with ghosts of previous canonical giants.
One of my big interests is songs about songs, music about music, meta-rock and meta-pop - I just recently wrote a piece about this https://tidal.com/magazine/article/songs-about-songs/1-86322
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Interesting, I feel like in most art forms outside pop music there are at least some works where the hyper-referentiality is part of what makes them revolutionary (Ulysses, Eliot, Second Viennese School using incredibly archaic forms in modern compositions, French New Wave, even Mingus arguably). Modernism usually had an obsession with both the past and the future, it was a point where art's self-consciousness made it both forward looking (the need to make something that created its own rules) and backward looking (partly as a means to (ground-breakingly) comment on the medium being worked in).
But this never happened in pop, to my knowledge. It went straight to a much emptier form of referentiality, wherein the entire aesthetic is built on copying. The only example I can think of of an artist whose referentiality feels part of the modernism is Dylan, which I know you'll disagree with. Even there, it's almost entirely at the level of lyrics (e.g. before Dylan people hadn't made references to poetry and song lyrics in the way he did).
I feel this is a lost avenue for pop futurism. I see no reason why music shouldn't make you think about music. To musicians and the people who appreciate it most, music is a central part of life, as rich, important, and complicated as interpersonal relationships or existential questions (the things I assume Donohue wants music to make him think about).
Apologies if this is territory you've already covered in Retromania.
Yes you are right about that with modernist literature - and also with modernist music. in the 20th Century you have composers very deliberately quoting I don't know Beethoven. Berio did a whole symphony that was like a mangled quote-riddled tribute to the classical canon. Goes to look up on in the internet - ah yes, Sinfonia, specifically the third movement quotes "Claude Debussy's La mer, Maurice Ravel's La valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage".
I think maybe all art forms reach a Self-Reflexive Turn, where the previous history of the genre or form becomes a subject of the music, and also parts of its raw material. Jazz in its later years teems with ghosts of previous canonical giants.
One of my big interests is songs about songs, music about music, meta-rock and meta-pop - I just recently wrote a piece about this https://tidal.com/magazine/article/songs-about-songs/1-86322
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