Coldplay came and went and I didn't pay much attention. Didn't hear anything worth listening to. It was boring. But in a video rental place last week, a Coldplay concert DVD or something happened to be playing on the monitors and through the store's sound system, so why not?
Coldplay are the “dogfood-and-downers” equivalent to the “meant-to-be-stimulating” self-righteousness assault perpetrated by U2. There are a lot of similarities: every song seems to consist of not very interesting lyrics formed around a refrain which is the title or a related phrase repeated ad nauseam, two chords which, if they were put into a sequence with three or four more might be enough for a decent three-minute pop song, but which are not. Add some mopey attitude and trudge through the lyrics as though they’re being exhaled by dint of massive effort by a 19th-century consumptive self-styled romantic, and you’ve got a worldwide smash.
This reads as though I’m some kind of cranky old guy. But the problem is not the novelty or unfamiliarity of this material and my inability to understand its relevance to the average concerned young person today. It’s the godawful derivative familiarity of it. Each new U2 record sounds like every other old U2 record. A lot of other things sound stale and familiar the first time you encounter them. It’s not a good situation to hear something for the first time and think, “Hmph . . .this again.” Coldplay are exactly like just about other one of those self-consciously low-key, quiet outfits that seemed to proliferate about 20 years ago, after punk had flamed out and collapsed into this weird hothouse thing that a comparatively tiny group of obsessives kept going like some leather-clad cargo cult.
It was right about the time Ian Curtis killed himself. Half the people you knew were listening to just plain bad, deliberately bad out-of tune noise like The Fall, Nick Cave and Einsturzende Neubauten, the other half were listening to pointedly polite people like Sade and Durutti Column. I should be able to think of other examples of that kind of thing, but I can’t. Hell, I think I probably spelled “Einsturznede Neubauten” wrong (I know there's supposed to be an ulmaut over the "u" in "einsturzende," for one thing). But you know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Was that the same time the pejorative term “rockist” started turning up in reviews in publications like The Face and the NME?
It seems like that was just before people noticed this “rap” or “hip-hop” stuff coming out of New York, which knocked all that overly intellectualized parsing of tinier and tinier slices of musical sub-genres and capillary hybrids off the table . . . for a while at least . . . until people started playing this Irish band called U2 and asking eagerly for your assent that in fact U2 were just so great . . . weren’t they?
