In his 33 1/3 book about Céline Dion, Carl Wilson briefly mentions mashups as he writes about "ironic cover versions" of songs. If you've heard Sonic Youth's version of the Carpenters' "Superstar," you get the idea of an ironic cover. "Likewise," says Wilson, "the punk cover's more high-tech successor, the mashup, often showcases the 'good parts' of a hit, digitally spliced into a cooler song: when Christina Aguilera's 'Genie in a Bottle' was mashed with the Strokes' 'Can't Explain,' it won her a lot of converts." Is that what a mashup is - a high-tech version of a punk cover? I would argue that while some mashups might function in a way similar to a punk cover, that most - including "A Stroke of Genie-us" - do not. Journalist Sasha Frere-Jones describes the seminal track this way:
"Aguilera’s vocal is an unabashedly expressive ode to her sexuality and her control over it… The Strokes’ track is compressed and jittery, as if made by hipster robots… Each song targets a demographic that wants nothing to do with the other … but Hellraiser [the mashup artist] brokers an amazing musical détente between the two styles. Stripped of 'Genie in a Bottle'’s electronic beats, Aguilera’s sex-kitten pose dissipates, and she becomes vulnerable, even desperate..."
These are two very different readings of the same song. I tend to feel that Frere-Jones's reading is more reflective of my own hearing, but if anything, I think the two readings highlight the fact that mashups are more nuanced and complex than simply "uncool + cool = uncool is now cooler." (To be clear, the rest of Wilson's book is extremely nuanced and I highly recommend it.)
In the new volume, The Pop Palimpsest, Serge Lacasse contributes a chapter entitled "Toward a Model of Transphonography." He uses literary critic Gérard Genette’s five types of intertextuality in literature an adopts them for popular music, then comes up with three additional types of his own. Each of the categories is a way of linking texts, and they can exist in tandem with each other. The problem with these categories is that none of them accurately reflects the location of the mashup. I reproduce his diagram here:
Types in a circle are related to each other in the same subgroup, and types with arrows pointing at each other can/will easily overlap and interact. “In addition to those conceptual areas, the figure distributes the transphonographic categories vertically…based on their degree of complexity.” (14) He doesn’t go into detail about what complexity means, and interphonography, or quotation, is at the “simplest” level – why? “…the higher-level practices arranged in the middle layer of the figure are the result of more complex processes: the creation of an entirely new phonogram following the transformation of preexisting material (in the case of hyperphonography); the design of an encompassing fictional world (in the case of transfictionality); or the interaction between phonograms and other media to create complementary meanings (in the case of cophonography)." (15) But mashups fit somewhere in between all of these areas. They (usually) transform like hyperphonography, interact like cophonography, and sample like interphonography. He does give mashups a cursort mention: “It is possible to consider some intramodal popular music practices from a cophonographic perspective, such as the now widespread practice of mash-ups, which basically consists of the superimposition of two or more recordings.” (36) Unfortunately, there is no nuance in this definition. "The superimposition of two or more recordings" implies that two recordings are being played at the same time with no regard as to how they interact with one another. Lacasse confirms, "apart from sharing a common space, these texts are relatively independent from each other.” (36) This is not what mashups are. The light at the end of the tunnel is the recognition that “Cophonographic practices have the potential to develop meanings at a level that a single phonographic text could not convey.” (37)