Word: trite
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...often accompanies success in the arts. And Wilson has produced, in only nine pages, the gem of the collection: a bittersweet portrait of Fats Waller, an obliging soul who sacrificed his love and talent for serious (jazz and classical) music to appease the pop taste for stylized treatments of trite show tunes...
...nearly every page. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary anthology of jazz personalities without Davis, Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane but the only modernists in The Jazz Makers are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whose innovations were widespread by 1950. Equally dated are the trite explications of black American "customs." Charles Edward Smith's profile of Billie Holiday contains a lenghty footnote that explains the properties of a mysterious substance called marijuana and then gives a sophomoric ("no escape solves problesm") exhortation against its use. You don't see this kind of writing much anymore...
College Knowledge suckers well-meaning parents easily parted from their money. Its vast store of information, most valuable to students with little access to files on fellowships or aid, make parts of it useful. Edelhart's deliberately traditional attitude makes much of the book too trite to be helpful. It is contrived and vacuous instead. A market for this type of book still exists. But until something better than College Knowledge is published, the Unofficial Guide will have to suffice...
WITH THEIR MORE commercial style, today's Kinks are undoubtedly reaching more people, but what they're bringing is not the wonderful old tongue-in-cheek satire Davies specialized in. Instead, these songs are filled with trite statements of no great import--things like...
...Marley gives substance to the detractors of B.F. Skinner, who say that there would be no art, no beauty in his perfectly conditioned world. Marley does indeed fit the trite metaphor describing how the beautiful marigold grows out of a heap of cow dung. Marley is one of the finest songwriters-singers-musicians alive today, even if he believes that deceased Ethiopian head-of-state Haile Selassie...