Why in the hell is everybody and their ex-girlfriend so entranced by Chris Martin?
Is it his average good looks? His vanilla-flavored voice and songwriting? His flagrant narcissism? Why has our culture power-lifted the man and his borderline crappy band to Lou Reed of Soft Rock Piano Ballads-status?
And why does it prove that our culture is steadily slushing shallower and shallower?
Since breaking onto the international music scene with the release of the average song “Yellow” at the turn of the century, Coldplay have proven an incredible talent for producing songs which feature leading man Martin singing a drab falsetto, and videos which feature him walking, mostly. NME magazine compared his band to such famously average bands as Travis, Oasis, and The Verve, and even Radiohead (mistakenly, of course, as Radiohead is an awesome band), mostly because of their ability to couch sappy lyrics about everything being beautiful within boring piano melodies. If Thom Yorke is the squirmy, ugly dropout with ADD blinking frenetically in the front of the classroom, then Martin is the daydreaming goofball weighing every possible rhyme for the word, ‘you’ for his girlfriend in the back.
Most critics consider A Rush of Blood to the Head to be Coldplay’s greatest album thus far. They are correct — the songs border on listenable — though it’s really just the defining mix-tape for an entire generation seeking emotional highs to replace the lonely void in their hearts left by cheap substitutive media. A lyrical highlight from “The Scientist” reveals Martin’s impotent description of a break-up: "Nobody said it was easy / Oh it's such a shame for us to part / Nobody said it was easy / No one ever said it would be so hard."
Such a crime that the twenty thousand or so people at the Ford Center in Oklahoma City November 16th will probably never hear of Conor Oberst.
Article comments
1 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
I can totally agree with you about Coldplay(I call'em U3) but you lost your credibility when you dropped names like Wilco & Bright Eyes. All this sh!te sounds the same to me... Artsy Fartsy Bullsh!t!
2 - ,,,yaya
Coldplay makes bland music? What a fucking ignorant statement just because this ignorant bastard denies their fame. Their music is universally enjoyable and they have created their own type of sound. Go listen to some Punk-Emo-Power-Pop-Rock, that's the BLAND music!
3 - ,,,yaya
BTW, I'm from Dallas and we are more appealed to music like Coldplay and we ain't country two-stepper fools. Don't be an idiot!
4 - kapwho
This is a horrible post.
Radiohead? Their music sounds like animals dying. there's no rhythm, meaning, anything. Thom Yorke is a pretentious bitch.
5 - zingzing
"Radiohead? Their music sounds like animals dying."
mmm. that's the stuff.
6 - dick
I agree with you. People like coldplay because people are afraid of change and coldplay sound like a million other dull and predictable bands.
Radiohead to me make very powerful music and they are interesting because they don't do things the way the majority of mainstream artists do. Saying radiohead have no rythm is like saying 11 is not a number because you can only count to ten. It's just silly.
I get why people maybe like coldplay because some of the piano melodies are quite nice, even some of the other instruments occasionally, but the music is on the whole pretty bland, very predictable and very average.
Try sigur ros, maybe? Almost, almost, like a slower, better, more emotive, better layered, more interesting version of coldplay.