Intertextuality-True Story!

Datarock, a lovably geeky Norwegian electro duo, have an album out later this year. And apparently, they really, really, REALLY have musician crushes on the Talking Heads. Evidence for this? Their new song "True Stories".

Background (in case you somehow managed to never hear of the Talking Heads):

The Talking Heads' cannon of work has influenced pretty much any band calling themselves Alternative or Indie since the early '90s. For instance, we can blame the band Radiohead on the Talking Heads, as that band got their name from a Talking Heads song. In 1986 the Talking Heads did a movie, True Stories, which still has a devoted following over 20 years later. And apparently Datarock are amongst its fans, and fans of the band. Listen to this new Datarock track:

(Thanks to Nashville Nights) Datarock-True Stories

Yes, you heard right. The lyrics to the song are literally pieced together titles of Talking Heads songs. The following Talking Heads songs are introduced, in this order:

Born Under Punches
Crosseyed and Painless
Slippery People
I'm Not in Love
Houses in Motion
Road to Nowhere
Once in a Lifetime
Psychokiller
Radiohead
Television
Seen and Not Seen
This Must Be the Place
Don't Worry 'Bout the Government
The Democratic Circus

What we have here is hilarious and, depending on your views about appropriation of other artists' materials, either plagiarism or a sincerely flattering tribute. When things straddle the gray area between plagiarism and tribute, they can be described in literary/linguistic terms as a case of intertextuality. The basic definition for intertextuality, as Wikipedia notes, is "the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another."

This term hearkens back to Ferdinand de Saussure's idea of semiotics and how symbols gain meaning as well as to Bakhtin, who in discoirse analysis was important for his work on interdiscursivity. Bakhtin coined the term "dialogism" to refer to the multiple meanings within a text. Song lyrics are the perfect medium for Bakhtinian analysis, as they are typically rife with such layered meanings.

The Bottom Line: As incredibly cheesy and trite as this Datarock song may seem on the surface, it is quite deep in terms of intertextuality.