From a purely musical standpoint, Coldplay's distinction could be seen as consulting a tonality more endemic to European rock acts than American ones, and mild references that reach farther back to Western classicism. Comparisons to Radiohead have been made, but it's a tenuous leap. Radiohead's attention paid to unstable harmonics and dissonance is too obvious a gap to ignore, and the lyrical divide is a whole other matter. These musical qualities link to another supposed distinction, which is that Coldplay brings "class" and "gravitas" to a pop-sphere dominated by cheap self-esteem anthems, lovin'-up/breakin'-up jingles indulging Forever 21 culture, and stars singing about how they want to be stars. Much of Coldplay's material, though, fits right into the stampede of self-esteem anthems, singer Chris Martin assuming the role of the empathetic psychologist, handing out second-person imperatives and examples of his own troubles. The rude twist is that these anthems are marinated in a self-congratulating insecurity, speaking out to Poor Ol' You behind an assumption of profundity. Combined with the quality of writing, the result might be more irritating than the back-pats churned out everywhere else.
At its core -- even on the skin -- Coldplay is easy listening, mashed up into baby food for immediate digestion, falsely complicated by a cover showcasing Art, an organ during an outro, a mention of God, a music video with a filter mimicking cracked paint. I will say that well-written instrumental music appeals to me over well-written vocal music. This is something I can't deny, something that is a part of who I fundamentally am. I can tolerate weak lyrics if what surrounds them is to my taste, if the lyrics' delivery is competent, and if the lyrics are sparse and/or vague. Coldplay, however, whose music is pleasant but lacking riskier compositional exploration (and subsequently a reason for being returned to), and whose lyrics are ineludible, forbids a separation. As is the case with pop music, the spoken word is the centerpiece -- and the lyrics here are bad, even pretentious. To be sure, the source of all this may be sincerity. Yet, with the ensemble's dramatic sound and the pandering lyrics, it's hard not to see in every track the image of Martin standing on high, arms outstretched, assuming the identity of the ostensibly humble saint with a well-hidden superiority complex. Reciprocal intent becomes patronizing.
The lyrics are torn from the insides of cards in the Sympathy section, switching between worn-out binaries, allowing a kind of tautological resolution and not much else. In an article I wrote, and am in the process of rewriting, for Rei Harakami, I stressed the importance of music that surprised, even if this goes against an evolutionary tendency, and I would also apply this expectation of unexpectedness to lyrics. The element of surprise is not singly analogous to the distribution of shock (though it can be); rather, it's an invocational quality, ranging from the faintest sigh to the largest reverberation, that separates uncommonness from the commonplace. If someone were to give me a song from the Top 10 I hadn't heard before, expecting me to hum or sing ahead of the song, that would be missing the point, which is that the brain knows the expectations before the mouth. I can't necessarily predict melody or words aloud, but I know there are separate reactions I experience that make clear to me the new from the inevitable (for example: "shivers"). Coldplay's lyrics are so bad that, on occasion, one actually can say out loud what is going to be said. In that sense, the music is cliche before it has actualized itself to the participant.
In "Fix You", Martin sings: "When you try you best but you don't succeed / When you get what you want but not what you need ? When you feel so tired but you can't sleep [. . .] And the tears come streaming down your face / When you lose something you can't replace / When you love someone but it goes to waste [. . .] And high up above or down below / When you're too in love to let it go / But if you never try you'll never know . . . "
Or, in "Lost": "Just because I'm hurting / Doesn't mean I'm hurt / Doesn't mean I didn't get what I deserve / No better and no worse / I just got lost / Every river that I've tried to cross / And every door I ever tried was locked / You might be a big fish / In a little pond / Doesn't mean you've won / 'Cause along may come / A bigger one."
And "Yellow": "Look at the stars / Look at how they shine for you / And everything you do / Yeah, they were all yellow / I came along / I wrote a song for you / And all the things you do / And it was called 'Yellow' . . . "
Lastly, "What If": What if there was no light / Nothing wrong, nothing right / What if there was no time? / And no reason or rhyme? [. . .] What if I got it wrong? / And no poem or song / Could put right what I got wrong / Or make you feel I belong. [. . .] Every step that you take / Could be your biggest mistake. / It could bend or it could break. / But that's the risk that you take."
None of this is remotely imaginative, with the possible exception of "ignite your bones" from "Fix You." Consider the text as poems standing alone, and call them out for what they are: cliche and trite. One might be inclined to defend these lyrics as real, as truth. The problem is that Martin is relaying these realities in the most unoriginal way, so that one would rather dismiss them as outdated falsities. Of course, we've tried our best and not succeeded. Of course, it hurts when we lose something that we can't replace. The task of an artist is not to parrot reality, or to originate total newness, but to resituate the idea in a place different from the object of the idea itself. The above lyrics do not allow that: obvious truths are pushed through an equally obvious filter, and banality is born. "Everything has been written" is a modern claim, and these lyrics are like an unintentional surrender to that notion. It seems as if Martin wrote down a mnemonic device a parent might've stressed to him as a kid, and followed that up with a bunch of empty platitudes in the subsequent five minutes. One line invites a surplus of rhymes that seem to have been conceived for the convenience of like-sounding ending lines and comfortable genericism.
To be honest, I hold these criticisms with some regret. Certainly there is music whose entirety, even its interpretive possibilities, we're willing to throw out, but Coldplay's instrumental side shows more potential than much of the last decade's mainstream. Granted, especially within the last few years, where the American-born rush for LookAtMe-itis has hit depressing heights, and music has become a kind of means to an end instead of the end itself, this doesn't mean a great deal. The last minute of "White Shadows" reflects on some lovely sustained chords. In "Politik" is a neat reversal of roles, where a climax precedes quietness. Funnily enough, the fade-in opener for Viva La Vida, "Life In Technicolor", is probably the best thing to come out of the band's oeuvre, and it's not even their own work. The pre-rock piece (minus the skip-like looping), a composition by Jon Hopkins called "Light Through the Veins", has a private, revolving melody that's small enough to penetrate the most tightly guarded mental places. It's a rare case where a Coldplay song -- or, at least, a song on a Coldplay album -- could stand to reflect on a melancholic mood a bit longer, not least of all because Martin isn't yodeling sentimental appeals. Not even forty seconds in, the band proper disrupts the aggregating atmosphere to save the song from what I can only imagine is the "terror of repetition." Coldplay, yes, has an occasional knack for carving a sharp harmonic form or two; yet they stick to such a static stylistic definition, so that the material blends and loses color. Despite recruiting people including Brian Eno for Viva la Vida, the band seems ignorant of the music's body structure, which has barely been dissected and re-displayed, and is instead giving its time to slight surface sweeps. And, sure, there are points where the lyrics feel a bit clever. But that's really all -- clever -- and then it's right back to bumper-sticker-isms and awkward, cheesy grasps at love.
