The song made a slow crawl to No. 1 earlier this year, resonating with listeners on two levels: both as a dig at the social pressure to party and as a meta-commentary on pop music itself, which, in an era of synthetic E.D.M. beats, has made a banal fetish of the epic night out.
I want to make it a banal conversation.
This time he comes up the passenger elevator, and makes a few banal remarks to his customer about the apartment, etc. and leaves quickly.
Judging his background too banal to make a great story (he was one of three children raised in an academic family in Connecticut), the man born in 1940 in Boston and christened Samuel McGee Green would later re-jigger his ancestry and style himself Samuel Adams Green, claiming descent from a founding father and two American presidents.
Instead, he told the court, the defendants made a series of "banal and self-contradictory" statements during their 2009 meeting, many of which were "at best scientifically useless" or, worse, "misleading".
If a grad student makes a sculpture of a banal object like a Bic, but no one's around to critique it, does it even exist?
(Pamuk also has the ability to make the banal compelling – a description of the intricacies of electricity-meter reading, for example, keeps the reader entertained for far longer than it has any right to).
"Some banal administrator makes a decision on the basis of his own needs and feeble desires.
By transforming an art gallery into a supermarket or a warehouse, Warhol was making a point that now seems banal, but that, at a time when the border between fine art and commercial culture was still earnestly policed, was a provocation: fine art is a commodity, too.
