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It seems like 70% of all bands have a song about the music business. Either about songs, or touring, or being in a band.

And there are plenty of novels about writing novels, or about being an author. Murder mysteries about someone killing the writers of murder mysteries, even!

There are poems about poems. There are probably even poems that are about poems about poems, but I can't be arsed to go looking.

Is there a term for this, either in general or more specifically? That is, do we have a term for "reflexive art"? Or is there a specific term for Limericks about Limericks or books about writing or songs about music?

Note that I'm not focused solely on "arts." There are certainly computers used for designing computers, and "AI" is supposed to put all the programmers out of work any day now. There is even architecture about architecture! (All the buildings are insulated with foam, ignore the real-world properties of materials, and take an extra year to build.) But I'm inclined to believe that if such a word exists, it probably exists in one of the word-oriented fields, first.

Laurel
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aghast
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A search for "thesaurus self-referential" brought up this link:

powerthesaurus "self-referential"

Some of the words offered are meta, self-reflexive, ouroboric.

wiktionary "meta"
self-referential

wiktionary "ouroboric"
Self-referring, self-reflexive, self-consuming; recursive

Here is another link:
Wikipedia self-reference

(That even has a drawing of an ouroboros.)

Not exactly what you asked for, but maybe in the area.

Jack O'Flaherty
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    I think I'm going to go with "meta" on this one. While "self-referential" has some descriptive value, I don't feel that "self-referential music" really encompasses the breadth of "The Band Played on", "Turn the Page", and "No Sleep 'til Brooklyn". And, since the question was closed with a pretty-clearly-inappropriate "duplicate", I guess we'll not see any other answers, so have a checkmark! – aghast Mar 27 '24 at 16:16
  • Maybe you remember this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r44Ach4mXE4 – Jack O'Flaherty Mar 27 '24 at 18:44