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Is Coldplay The New Jesus?
Martin & Co. make moms smile and girls swoon and offend no one in their quest to love all puppies
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 17, 2005
Coldplay is the new U2. Coldplay is the new taupe.
Coldplay is the new creamy soothing balm you rub all over your chafed and itchy thighs after a long day working in the hot sun hauling scrub brush to the weed pile in the backyard while the goddamn kids think it's funny to throw mudballs at the windows and the creepy meth-lab neighbors peek at you through their dark stained Levolor blinds as you imagine them storing up jars of pickled squirrel brains for the winter.
Coldplay is to the pop-music universe what cheddar cheese is to bologna sandwiches. Which is to say, tepid nirvana in a teacup. Coldplay is mandatory. A must-have. Tasty and good and easy to digest on a warm summer day.
Coldplay is everywhere. Coldplay is the new air. Unless you live under a rock or are a devout member of the Christian Right and therefore only listen to flaccid Christian rock that somehow makes you think it's OK to rock out without any of the sex or deviance or rebellion or narcotics, you know full well that Coldplay just released a new CD called X&Y, and it instantly topped the pop charts all over the world and when they released the very nice first single called "Speed of Sound" a month before X&Y came out, it shot to No. 1 on the iTunes Music Store in 14 countries on the first day and didn't budge for two weeks.
It is to be a Coldplay onslaught. Martin & Co. are everywhere, and will be for many, many months to come. The new CD, which is earning generally favorable shrugs from critics, is one of just a handful that the still punch-drunk lawsuit-happy record biz is counting on to save CD sales for the year (next to Gorillaz and the White Stripes and a precious handful of others), so you can expect this to be the year of the soaring aching mid-tempo Coldplay ballad, with lots of heavy rotation and marketing salivation and speculation as to how much influence new-mom Gwyneth Paltrow has on Martin's mild offstage antics.
Coldplay, the quiet and unassuming little Brit band that's now sold upward of 20 million records, now has legions of fans, millions and millions and all crying out for their uncomplicated, achingly tender, heartfelt, cliché-addled songs that don't really say all that much and don't really do all that much musically and don't really make you react much except to maybe say oh, that's a nice song, pretty, easy on the ears, inoffensive, polished and clean and I think even my mom would like this and I could do the laundry or check my e-mail or take a nap or even procreate while this is on and it wouldn't get in the way one single little bit.
Is this the appeal? Coldplay's easy, generalized utility? Is this why the group is so astoundingly successful? Because the must-confess bottom line is, Coldplay just really isn't all that great of a band. Just not all that brilliantly talented, diverse, interesting. Which is a weird thing to admit, given how much I loved their first CD, Parachutes, perhaps one of the most tender and beautiful pop albums ever. But epic? Explosive? Coldplay bigger than U2? Than the Stones? Able to play any style of music and challenge your perceptions and dip into new musical approaches the way Robert Downey Jr. dips into substance abuse? Not even.
Yes, I know, singer Chris Martin is all hunky and sweet and very much like that adorable artsy guy who sat in the corner of Café Claude all day and wrote dreamy poetry about sunshine and willow trees and how many tears fit into a coffee cup. This makes him impossibly adorable to millions of women.
And Martin is a fine enough singer, handsome and charming, and he whirls like a dervish on stage and is unafraid to act a bit like the goofy English geek he sort of is, and he married some pretty and famous lass named Gwynny and they named their baby Apple, which is, like, the cutest baby name ever, so of course that makes his star shine about 10,000 times brighter. But Bono he ain't. Hell, he's not even Eddie Vedder.
Is it because Coldplay is safe for both blue staters and red staters alike? Easy for liberals to love and conservatives to misunderstand? Because sure, Martin takes up progressive causes and has been a champion of clean water and gun control and fair trade and he has openly criticized BushCo and the insane Iraq war, and his band plays benefit concerts for AIDS and other charity events -- but, you know, none of this is really evident in the music, or in the lyrics.
Which is to say, you don't listen to Coldplay to get even moderately informed or inspired or riled up about, well, anything at all. Except yearning. Lots and lots of yearning. For what, exactly, no one can quite be sure. But oh, the yearning.
Martin's lyrics are a vaguely lovely Hallmark-like hodgepodge of remixed clichés about life and love and finding your path in an icky sticky world, nothing all that concrete and nothing all that political and hence maybe Coldplay is the great reuniter of America, the great unifier, the bridger of ideological gaps. After all, who can argue with completely obtuse sentiments like "When I was a young boy I tried to listen / Don't you want to feel like that / You're part of the human race / All of the stars in the outer space / Part of a system, a plan"? I mean, it's enough to make you forget your woes and contemplate your fingernails and want to eat bologna sandwiches in the sunshine and smile at a born-again Republican. Almost.
Cheesy? Sure. A little saccharine and uninspired and safe? Absolutely.
But no matter. Let us love Coldplay anyway. Let us not criticize just because they choose not to gorge on polemics and choose to craft carefully wrought songs that make millions of people happy even if they don't exactly know why and even if bands like Radiohead and Elbow and even Muse are more adventurous and energizing and musically rewarding.
Because it is a weird and sad world indeed when we can't celebrate the genius of mass appeal, the ability of a very decent, modest band to craft intimate and honest and nonwhorish yet arena-size songs that offend no one while still making a genuine appeal for love and hope and the end of loneliness, all couched in a feeling of well being and solemn introspection and a general sense of oh-just-shut-up-and-give-me-a-hug.
Would that more popular music, movies, books, et al. were as carefully wrought and inspiring and would that more of it aspired to lift the heart and quell the demons and make you want to get mildly drunk on really good white wine and then go run through a field of wildflowers and have really above-average sex and do a little better at your job and drive less aggressively and kiss your lover a few seconds longer than normal.
Like this is such a bad thing. Like this is something we should rail against in the days of BushCo's political jackals and outright warmongering and homophobia and religious self-righteousness and government-sanctioned hate. Hell no.
You go, Coldplay. You go.
©2005 SF Gate
