intertextuality within the postmodern world is what Kaplan would characterise as a
“schizophrenic posthumanist address” 18
The question that I wish to pose regarding the trilogy, is whether Bowie’s work employs a sense
of irony or rather, the post-ironic idea of ‘blank parody’ in the intertextual composition of the
music he made in Berlin. Bowie, Eno and Visconti had experimented with various sonic
combinations, dominated by the sound of the synthesizers. They attempted to fuse new
experimental forms with a more traditional (in terms of rock music) forms. Bowie’s fragmented
sense of self, or rather, his image of the postmodern man spills over into his work when in
Berlin. This is evident in the wide variety of musical influences and styles that influenced his
creative process across the trilogy.
However, Andrew Goodwin argues in his essay on Popular Music and Postmodern Theory,
that: “postmodernists have often confused intertextuality with the mere blurring of generic
categories, and then gone on to read the collapse of aesthetic distinctions into these processes,
as if they necessarily imply the latter, which they do not” 19 . However, I would argue that popular
music gains its “postmodern” name as a heterogeneous art form due to the fact that the roots of
its multicultural influence and intertextual form can be found in its very infrastructure. The
Berlin Trilogy is a perfect example of the fragmentation of 20 th -century culture. Bowie
embodies the anxious feelings of the post-war period and juxtaposes them with his own
18
19
Wheale, Nigel. The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, London, 1995.
Wheale, Nigel. The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader. Routledge, London, 1995.