make up your mind!
come on, mainstream media. you can't have it both ways. is it "why does everyone hate coldplay?" or "Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me"? you know, there's a reason we don't trust the MSM anymore. and it's cause you can't make up your mind about the appropriate amount of hate to level at this british band.
related is this heeeelarious irony about the pareles article from stereogum.
i just want to note that i wouldn't have a problem with a review of coldplay's newest cd that said "this cd sucks because of x" or "the arrangements on this album are a bunch of hokey bullshit." what i can't stand are the articles that level criticism at coldplay because they are successful. they're only insufferable because they've made millions of dollars. nobody would be bothering writing about coldplay in the nytimes if they were toiling away at the level of relative obscurity (in the US) as a band like travis (which, by the way, mr. pareles cited as having been spawned by coldplay when in fact they were around well before coldplay).
i mean, come on. if you're going to hate on coldplay, do it because martin makes annoying political statements or wears stuff like this on his hands.
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Pitchfork predictably joined in the bashing as well. All this bickering aside, though, has anybody actually heard the new album?
In more interesting news, I'm not sure where this tidbit of info belongs, but certainly it deserves a place somewhere on this blog: Apparently Mae Young and The Fabulous Moolah are lovers. They live together in a house with a female midget wrestler who may or may not be intimately involved. All this apparently revealed in the new documentary Lipstick and Dynamite which i personally cannot wait to see. Did we know this already or are you as speechless as I am?
no, i haven't heard the new album but a couple of people tell me it's kind of boring. but i don't have a problem with critiques of the album - just what i have a problem with reviews seemingly being influenced by the fact that coldplay is so goddamned popular and resenting them for that.
and who the fuck are mae young and fabulous moolah? wha?
Mae Young and the Fabulous Moolah are old-lady wrestlers. There's a picture here.
As for Coldplay -- yeah, I think Thom Yorke pretty well handled this when he called them "lifestyle music" like, what, a decade ago?
I guess a bunch of music writers are feeling good about having discovered the harder-core, more authentic music of, say, The Killers, and have suddenly noticed -- gasp! -- that Coldplay aren't very edgy by rock band standards. That a low-key, atmospheric wuss-rock band could have such runaway success (and occasionally produce a confusingly uptempo yet still wussy song) confounds them, so we get these awful "look how cool I am" anti-Coldplay articles. ugh.
(and for the record Scott, I had not heard about MY&Moolah, and am refusing to allow myself to comprehend it in order to preserve my sanity)
What about if I were to hate Coldplay for their popularity but only cite my unfathomable disdain for the public? Because if I could get away with writing a Coldplay review that didn't actually mention the new album—I'm thinking of just an article of complaints about various aspects of American life, pop culture, and habits that I dislike—I would be one happy mysanthrope.
actually, i was going to mention something like that in the post - why not blame the american public for having shitty taste instead of blaming coldplay for their success? but i guess that's even too mean-spirited for the nytimes, so they just come up with the dumb coldplay article instead.
And the reverse would be interesting. "Once America is a better place full of great people, Coldplay can be a good band."
anyway i don't want to come off like a coldplay apologist, but there are plenty of high-profile bands out there that are much worse than coldplay, yet you don't see anybody writing articles about them in the nytimes or acting too cool for school to enjoy them. it's just silly. it's like deep on the inside they do like coldplay, but feel ashamed for it because they know it's wussy rock and then overcompensate in their hateration.
I think that Coldplay just needs to be classified appropriately as wussrock. Given a choice between Coldplay and Sarah McLachlan, a Coldplay-appropriate peer, I'll listen to Coldplay.
. . . then I'll emphasize that there's nothing you damned terrorists can do to make me give up my country! It is NOT all yellow!
Well, I'll don the mantle of Coldplay apologist. Their last album was solid and they were good when we saw them live. Their first album doesn't excite me tremendously except for Yellow, but it's not bad.
I can understand either consistent indifference or getting sick of them due to their ubiquity, but neither seems to be the tone of all the anti-Coldplay stuff going around.
and furthermore: chris marten looks a lot like the dude from House in that last picture you linked to.
(Hugh Laurie?)
yeah, good point - coldplay was excellent when we saw them in milan.
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