Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.
lyrics
Banality 5
Let’s dance the night away
The same thing we do everyday
The same thing everyone else does, it’s the latest attraction
Like those people on TV
Look how happy we can be
Dancing the night away in the latest fashions
As the loudspeakers play our favorite songs
To cover up the sound of foreign cities getting carpet bombed
But somebody must pay the price for this high-tech paradise
As we dance the night away
And the man in the spotlight
Takes a step to the left or to the right
But it doesn’t matter
He’ll make sure things stay the same
And those charming thing he’ll say
The same things he said yesterday
The same tomorrow and today
The same lies that brought him fame
As the loudspeakers play our favorite songs
To cover up the sound of foreign cities getting carpet bombed
But somebody must pay the price for this high-tech paradise
As we dance the night away
How does it feel
Repeating the same old steps
Now that the novelty’s worn old
Bourgeois fantasy
Suburban misery
It’s either being bought or being sold
As the loudspeakers play our favorite songs
We wrap ourselves in picket fences and burglar alarms
Cause somebody must pay the price for this postmodern paradise
As we dance the night away
Repeating the same words, repeating the same old steps
A vicious circle going round and round
How many years have passed, the dancefloor’s filled with poison gas
And no exit can be found
Silent majorities, Silenced minorities
We go through the motions without a sound
And how does it taste?
An infinity of time to waste
As we dance 6 feet underground
Simlucra simulcra…
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