Word: banally
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...that was long ago, before the '60s -- from which all ominous changes can be dated -- rewrote the rules of American gesture. Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts, comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness. Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically correct comedy to the smoking debate. "Mind if I smoke?" he imagined someone asking him, then replied, "No. Mind if I fart?" In the '80s, even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated -- antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher -- and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean...
Ironic distance is no longer an excuse for anything anymore, Have you noticed how many ads these days ask you to laugh with them at the images they present? Or all the shows which make the most of their banal material by offering hosts who find the stuff as stupid as you do? Videos are sexist and dumb, but we can sit with Beavis and Butthead and laugh at them instead of suffering the indignity of actually just watching them. Old b-movies are silly, but on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" we can sit with some robots and have...
...send-up" of [adjective] thing = [same adjective]. So a cool jokey advertisement that makes fun of stupid manipulative ads is, surprised, stupid and mainpulative. A TV show that tires to give us some distance from the mind-numbing banality of music videos is, you guessed it, mind-numbingly banal. A movie which attempts cleverly to poke fun at the genre of bomb chase movies will be hard-pressed not to end up as a dumb chase movie. The same with "The Player:" for all its inside jokes and self-affacement, it ended up seeming too much like the kind...
...like Pete, and breathes the lyrics with the same sense of urgency Many of the chord progressions and vocal shouts also sound like something from Gabriel's So. But add in some folksy guitar strums molded into a synth line, and the intensity loses out to a studio-induced banal sheen. This recurs on almost all of the tunes, for Peck's voice cannot seem to outsing the acoustic guitar and keyboard arrangements backing him. His voice tends to be too flat, lacking the depth that characterizes peter Gabriel. In fact, on the minute-and-a half a cappella "Wake...
...surest sign that Peck has little to say is evident in his tendency to repeat boring phrases over and over again in his tunes. On the banal folk-rock tune "Any Way I Can," he actually sings the words "Any Way I Can" 15 times in a row. Peck then sings, "Yes I pay my dues/get drunk and sing the blues/have nothing left to lose." It is obvious that Peck has not fully paid his dues yet, nor has he really played the blues. If he truly has nothing left to lose, then all of his talent has disappeared with...