Dunno if perhaps the "borderline" they refer to is the divide between the "art" that he mentions in the first verse and the popular acceptance that he alludes to in the rest of the song. It sounds like he suggests that the cost of reaching your dreams of getting your message/music/art out there in the public domain is that you are "condemned" by the very dream you desired.
Deprived of the fire that drove you, your motivation wanes ("we used to be gifted / and persistent").
It sounds like the essay I've been reading on "The Culture Industry" (Adorno & Horkheimer 1947)*, where they critique the processing of artistic talent into mass commodity, that makes everything essentially the same: "We'll all be damned if this machine turns life into routine."
Dunno if perhaps the "borderline" they refer to is the divide between the "art" that he mentions in the first verse and the popular acceptance that he alludes to in the rest of the song. It sounds like he suggests that the cost of reaching your dreams of getting your message/music/art out there in the public domain is that you are "condemned" by the very dream you desired.
Deprived of the fire that drove you, your motivation wanes ("we used to be gifted / and persistent").
It sounds like the essay I've been reading on "The Culture Industry" (Adorno & Horkheimer 1947)*, where they critique the processing of artistic talent into mass commodity, that makes everything essentially the same: "We'll all be damned if this machine turns life into routine."
*Link: http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Adorno-Horkheimer-Culture-Industry.pdf