Direct quotation of past genres can feel contemporary rather than retro

Evidence

Homage, pastiche, inspiration, and borrowing have always been at the core of creativity. The future of culture always builds upon the past: Fashion trends cycle through revived looks, films glamorize bygone eras, and cover songs launch new careers. As music critic Agnès Gayraud writes, “Recorded popular music borrows from all musics: it is a tissue of hybridisations and appropriations.” Hip-hop itself was born from rapping over looped samples of older records. Yet borrowing exists on a spectrum—from inspiration to outright plagiarism. Whether or not “Blurred Lines” violated copyright law, the song unequivocally captured the essence of Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” And in its massive popularity, “Blurred Lines” heralded a shift in pop music in which the direct quotation of past genres felt distinctly contemporary. The song was not beloved as kitschy retro or as tongue-in-cheek parody. For listeners in 2013, it was 2013—in mirroring a song from thirty-six years earlier. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes homage-pastiche-inspiration from plagiarism, and shows quotation can be contemporary rather than nostalgic.
• XREF: This mechanism — quotation-as-contemporaneity — connects to the omnivore monoculture thesis where the past is fully absorbed into the present’s flattened palette. — connects to: Being present-date does not mean being new in a citational culture — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1021
• ADDENDUM: Blurred Lines quotation-as-contemporary directly parallels the grafting metaphor — cultural material transplanted into new contexts reads as native.