Television

Album: American Stonehenge (1998)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Television" is the opening track on the second Lucid Nation album, American Stonehenge. In her interview with Songfacts, Lucid Nation frontwoman Tamra Lucid explained:

    "On our first tour, we stopped at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco where Ronnie [Pontiac] bought a copy of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Riot grrrl zines criticized and satirized mainstream corporate culture because of the way it creates unrealistic expectations about how a person should be. About 30 years earlier, Debord and the Situationist movement he inspired talked about how celebrity worship, with its mirage of fame as an endless holiday, is at the core of alienation in our culture. Ronnie and I were talking about that a lot.

    A guitarist friend named Yves challenged Ronnie to write a song with three chords, a la Oasis. At the time, Ronnie told me this was his Situationist love song to me.

    Also, this is one of my favorite songs, so I'm so happy you noticed it. This was video-taped at Fortress Studio in Hollywood during a rehearsal."
  • City Lights is a San Francisco landmark that has been operating since 1953. It was an important location in the story of the Beat Generation cultural phenomenon/movement of the '50s.

    The Society of the Spectacle by was written in 1967, providing a Marxist critique of modern culture and bringing to the public the notion of the "Spectacle." The book was the foundation for the Situationist movement that played heavily into the 1968 French workers' uprising known in France as "May 68."

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