ABSTRACT
Surveying the state of pop music at the end of 1987, postmodernists and devotees of Walter Benjamin’s cultural analysis could be forgiven for patting themselves on their theoretical backs and ruminating on the strange prescience of these two bodies of theory. Writing in Critical Quarterly two years ago, Peter Wollen established the link between Benjamin and the postmodernists thus:
As Benjamin’s “age of reproduction” is replaced by our “age of electronic reproduction,” the trends which he discerned are further extended. Reproduction, pastiche and quotation, instead of being forms of textual parasitism, become constitutive of textuality.1
