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(Un)originality, hypertextuality and identity in Tiga's ‘Sunglasses at Night’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2011

Stéphane Girard
Stéphane Girard
Affiliation:
Department of French, University of Hearst, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: stephane_girard@uhearst.ca
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Abstract

In 2001, Montreal disc jockey Tiga, with the help of Finnish producer Jori ‘Zyntherius’ Hulkkonen, recorded and released a techno cover version of ‘Sunglasses at Night’, a song popularised in 1983 by fellow Canadian Corey Hart. This paper examines how a so-called ‘unoriginal’ musical practice such as the cover version, when re-contextualised into a brand new musical genre (a process called ‘trans-stylisation’), can engender new meaning, especially when it comes to the generic identity purveyed by the song's enunciator. The analysis of this new ‘original’ utterance relies on the theory of hypertextuality and describes, on the musical, lyrical and visual levels, the transformative processes from the hypotext (Hart's version) to the hypertext (Tiga's), thereby shedding new light on the poetics of the cover version and on the representational modalities of the postmodern subject.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 105 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Discography

Hart, Corey, ‘Sunglasses at Night’, First Offender. Aquarius Records, AQR537. 1983Google Scholar
Tiga and Zyntherius, ‘Sunglasses at Night’. International Deejay Gigolo Records, GIG80. 2001Google Scholar
Tiga and Zyntherius, ‘Sunglasses at Night’. Turbo Recordings, TURBO050.1. 2008Google Scholar