I think the "post-modernist references on today's pop culture in media" arguments stand up well.
I'll start in left field and work my way to home...
At my part-time job, we must keep satellite radio tuned to the pops Christmas songs station on all the time. I'm a geezer, growing up throughout the 1950's/married by 1969. It seems to me that around 1959 (the time of Stan Freeberg's "Green Christmas" and the Chipmunk Song), it became impossible to perform a straight Christmas pop song. Everything after then has been weak emulations of '30's, '40's, & '50's (especially early 1950's) pop songs, or hip (rock/rap/etc.) parodies of those songs. Now the most "serious" pop Christmas songs are hillbilly humor ("Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer") or mock patriotic country stuff ("Christmas in America"). The worst being cloying country horrors like Newsong's "Christmas Shoes" where the retail clerk is so proud that the poverty-stricken kid wants to spend the last money the family has on fancy shoes for his mom to wear when she meets Jesus that night. (Yeah, don't buy gas for the truck so dad can drive to work, or a few vegetables so the rest of the family might live...)
Back to the subject at hand, but I wanted to start there...
And, starting with the George Burns & Gracie Allen Show, where George would talk directly to the camera (continuing heavily in the Garry Shandling Show, where even the theme song was self-referential), TV & film have become intensely filled with both self-references and pop culture concept dropping. The prime examples are the later seasons of "Moonlighting" and every word in "Family Guy" scripts. In jokes are beyond in, they seem mandatory.
Ozzie Nelson just put the "Ricky sings his latest hit" as an add-on at the end of each episode. But "Full House" seemed to want to make the Beach Boys semi-regulars.
I need to rewatch "Two-Lane Blacktop" with the accomplished acting skills of Dennis Wilson and James Taylor...
