Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Side two is as banal, both lyrically and musically, as side one. More grating guitars, more monotonous synth-pop, and more droning dub. "This is England" tries to incite some national spirit; "Three Card Trick" advocates teen rebellion: "You won't fall for that just like your mummy and your daddy did." "Play to Win," "Fingerpoppin," "North and South," and "Life is Wild" offer more of the same pathetic drivel that permeates the entire disk...
...Langs' study assured their patients that their husbands or wives were the really crazy people. After a terrifying nightmare, one patient was told by his therapist that his dream was creative and rich and that he need not worry much about it. Bucking up a patient with such banal cheeriness, Langs believes, is a way of denying turmoil and ignoring real problems...
...fact, Reagan's popularity is so easily explainable as to be utterly banal. As top campaign adviser Richard Darman noted at a post-election Kennedy School of Government roundtable, when the economy is prospering and you're at peace, you're 80 percent of the way there...
...deaths of young infantries in World War I: "The Children of England would never be slaves/ They're trapped on the wire and dying in waves/ The flower of England face down in the mud/ And stained in the blood of a whole generation." The song would be harmlessly banal had he not tacked on the final stanza: "Mid-night in Soho Nineteen Eighty-Four/ Fixing in doorways, opium slaves/ Poppies for young men, such bitter trade/ All of those young lives betrayed/ All for a children's crusade...
...good-natured movie is that its script, by Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, does not play a steady light on any of its several stories, but bounces erratically from one to another like -- well, like St. Elmo's fire. The shifting prevents the movie from getting bogged in the banal, but it also prevents it from achieving much emotional resonance...