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I'd recommend Steven Mithen's book 'The Singing Neanderthals', which outlines his theory of the origins of music and language. His idea is that both music and language share a common predecessor, and kind of er... 'musical language' used by early hominids. He uses the slightly awkward acronym "Hmmmmm" for this form of expression, standing for: Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic.

The relevant bit here is "holistic". This basically means that expressions are unitary statements, which aren't built up from linguistic units (i.e. words) using syntax, but are each "of a piece". Obviously this limits the complexity of what can be expressed.

Mithen and a number of linguists and archaeologists think one of the key leaps that Homo sapiens made was to break this stuff down into words - "compositional" language that's based on small, re-arrangeable units that can be strung together in any number of ways with syntax to form an infinity of expressions.

Doesn't seem too fanciful to draw at least broad parallels to what's happening to the "language" of popular culture here...

nice piece ulb. i didnt know "mash up". what names would you recommend?

one comment to when you say:
"The most threatening aspect of the mashup alchemist's work is the logical conclusion of the end of the star system and its relation to production and distribution."

i think the star system will always exist, as long as there is some form of music "industry". people like stars, they're eazy to market and create, its good business.

sounds worth while checking gyrus.