Intertextuality: Mashups and Digital Remix Culture
One way I’ve come to understand intertextuality is through music mashups, especially during the rise of EDM and remix culture in the mid-2010s. Around that time, mashups became extremely popular online by blending familiar songs into something new. A clear example of this appears in Pitch Perfect, where songs like “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars and “Just a Dream” by Nelly are combined into a single song. The scene works because the audience already recognizes both tracks.
This is where intertextuality comes to play. The mashup doesn’t exist in isolation, it relies on the listener’s prior knowledge of the original songs. The emotional response comes from hearing something familiar reshaped in a new context. Lyrics overlap, melodies shift, and meanings change slightly, but they are still grounded in the original texts. Without that shared cultural understanding, the mashup would lose much of its impact.
Doug Eyman’s discussion of Intertextuality in “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric” helps explain why mashups thrive online. Digital platforms encourage remixing, sharing, and reworking existing content rather than creating something entirely separate. Mashups circulate through YouTube, streaming services, and social media, where audiences engage with them by commenting, reposting, and sometimes creating their own versions.
In this way, mashups highlight how digital texts are collaborative and networked. They show that meaning is often created between texts, not within a single one. What adds to the appeal of mashups is not just the music itself, but the conversation they create with the songs that came before them.
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