Friday, December 31, 2004

Coldplay: dull and three chords short of a melody

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?

How to disgruntle an anemic bum.

How about dismantling U2 and leaving them dismantled for 2005 and beyond? Can we do that? Their one-chord-per-song bombast was overbearing crap when it was post-punk adolescent posturing. The solemnity of the marketing that attended the release of The Joshua Tree was worse. Then came the self-serious crapulence of Rattle and Hum (and why wasn’t there a sequel, Hum and Hummer?) wherein Paul Hewson and David Evans hoped to introduce a generation of people to musical titans and genres that fell outside the confines of, well, overbearing, adolescent hectoring with a single chord per song. But they just keep grinding onward. Cancuklehead video channel MuchMusic has been running promos nonstop for a special “exclusive” interview with Hewson and drummer Larry Mullen, Junior about this latest record, which will sound exactly like every other record before it and exactly like the hundreds still to come, each of which will sound like every other U2 record.

U2 in general — and Bono, Holy Bono in particular — try so hard to be good, to be with it, to be groovy and politically correct and on the side of good. But their work is to music what McDonald’s is to food. They make the same thing over and over and over again, which is probably why a lot of people like it: it will never surprise or shock or take an unexpected turn. Maybe musical theorists who appreciate the work of people like Philip Glass and Steve Reich get a kick out of U2. Their career has been like Reich or Glass pieces that go on for twenty or thirty minutes and in which single notes in a chord sequence are changed one by one. By the time you get to the end of the piece, the “deedle-a, deedle-a-deedle-a” in, say, A flat major has mutated into “doodle-a-weedle-a” in D minor or something. Maybe that’s what U2’s doing: releasing the same record with the same songs on it, but changed so imperceptibly that at the end of their 30-year project, the record will be different from their first.

But don’t bet on much difference. That U2 will be releasing another record identical to the dozens that preceded it thirty years after they started, I expect.