Coldplay’s allure continues to elude me. I even sat through about 40 minutes or so of a concert that MuchMusic shot sometime during the winter and recently broadcast to see if I was missing anything. You know, had I dismissed them too early or something? (Also, I was ironing and there was nothing else on, which meant I had no alternatives.) Prolonged exposure to Coldplay only deepens the mystery of Coldplay’s continuing success and their embrace by apparently just about everybody on the planet except for me, you, John Pareles of the New York Times and Hua Hsu of Slate, both of whom wrote cogent analyses of what Coldplay seems to be doing . . . or what it isn’t doing, which, in both of their estimations, is anything worth getting excited about.
I have my own notions about what Coldplay might actually be (as distinct from the grandiose claims made on its behalf by its millions-strong legions of mopey fans who are still young and adolescent enough to equate moping with depth, seriousness and intelligence . . . or sensitivity, or something). Is Coldplay a second-rate Tears For Fears tribute band, the neutered Oasis, a melody-free Supertramp for people who don’t like hooks or riffs, a slow-motion U2 that cribbed all its lyrics from 70s Christian youth-group inspirational posters or some bizarre combination of all of the above? One of the things Coldplay does not seem to be is capable of coming up with an entire song, one with a beginning, middle and end . . . or verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus/repeat-to-fade. There are plenty of two-chord kind of throbs, but they never get to that third or even fourth chord you might reasonably expect from a pop song.
I guess every generation gets the navel-gazing power-ballad producing entity it deserves. Coldplay are this decade’s Maureen McGovern? Maureen McCormick? (unless that was Celine Dion -- they both sang mawkish tune-free ballads in movies about big doomed boats), or perhaps they’re this decade’s Bonnie Tyler. Air Supply? Climax? Journey, but without the upbeat rock numbers . . . ?
I watched that MuchMusic concert and was astounded by the dreary sameness of the proceedings. Every number was a plodding two-chord ballad that started slow and dull and quiet, continued slow and dull and increased gradually in volume, then subsided into plaintive bleating on Martin’s part. It speaks of true devotion on the part of Coldplay’s fans that they can distinguish between the different numbers. Maybe they use the same device I found myself using, which was to identify the songs by their apparent musical antecedents: “Oh, this is the Oasis rip-off . . . this is the sort of fake-U2 one . . .” etc. But it all seemed like way too much work for too little reward.
And as the Jimmy-Jib crane swooped over the audience to show the throng of ecstatic Coldplay fans, I just keep thinking of an exchange from the “Homerpalooza” episode of “The Simpsons,” where Lisa, listening to Smashing Pumpkins, says to Bart, “Their music may be bleak, but they certainly seem to be connecting with the crowd.” Bart says, “Lisa, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.” And that’s probably what’s preventing me from appreciating Coldplay. I’m not in the demo. It seems to help to be 17 and to have written at least a few really bad poems, the kind where you try very hard to express the inner turmoil of your soul and instead turn out unintentionally hilarious, solipsistic tripe riddled with cliches and belaboring the obvious.
A friend of mine, just a few years younger than I am (we have the same cultural reference points) defended Coldplay by comparing their effect with that of Supertramp on him when he was 14. I asked which Supertramp -- the “Crime of the Century” Supertramp, the quiveringly sensitive melodists with the instrumental ability that 14-year-old boys would likely mistake for “chops,” or the later, million-selling Supertramp of “Breakfast In America”? He didn’t answer, and I don’t know how anybody could conflate Coldplay’s dreary dirge-making to the rococo pretension of Supertramp’s fake jazz symphonics. But there’s probably a very specific and individual connection there that I’ll never understand.
Finally, it’s reminiscent of something Ben Folds said in an interview when he released Rockin’ The Suburbs. He said Billy Corgan had grown up in a pretty nice Chicago suburb, and, given how things work in North America, really didn’t have all that much to be as depressed and/or angry about as his songs would suggest. Then, said Folds, there’s Stevie Wonder: born and raised poor in Detroit, lost his sight when he was still a child, and cut some of the most unrestrainedly joyful music ever made. As the reefer line on page one of Slate said of Chris Martin: “You’re married to Gwyneth Paltrow; why so glum?”
