Front Page Reviews & AIR

Being the biggest rock band in the world finally caught up to Coldplay.  I know a lot of people think it’s axiomatic, that a big commercially successful band can’t possibly create artistically credible rock music.  But I disagree.  There are all kinds of bands who have done it.  They just can’t do it forever.  The sad fact is that being in a commercially successful rock band means that you live in a completely different reality from the people who listen to your records.  The rules and limitations that most of us have to contend with in our daily lives just don’t apply to rock stars.  And eventually it catches up with them.  I often heard it asked during the last presidential election how John McCain, who is worth millions and hasn’t set foot in a grocery store in twenty years, could possibly relate to his constituents’ concerns about the rising cost of food?  Similarly, how can Chris Martin, who is worth millions and married to Gwyneth Paltrow, relate to the people who buy his records?  When a band first hits it big, the memories of their pre-rock-star struggles are fresh, and when those memories are coupled with the adrenaline high of making it, it can lead to some pretty heady music.  And even once you’re established, that creative drive that got you there in the first place is still churning, pushing you to create, to experiment, to try and match the gaudy legacies of the bands who have gone before.  But how long can you ride in limos and live in mansions and fly first-class and be pampered and coddled and kissed up to before your perception of reality finally becomes unhinged from the actual reality that is a necessary ingredient in any art form?  That answer varies from band to band.  In Coldplay’s case, the answer is roughly a decade.

Now, let me start by saying that I’ve been the guy defending Coldplay for the last few years while virtually all of my music-snob friends lined up to bash them (I’m a music snob, too, by the way, so no offense intended).  I actually thought each of their records from Parachutes through Viva la Vida was better than the last and that Viva was the best rock album of 2008.  They just happened to make the mistake of becoming the biggest rock band in the world at the exact moment that everyone who cared about music looked at each other and decided that being the biggest band in the world was totally lame.  But that wasn’t Coldplay’s fault.  I’ve also seen them live and I find their earnest attempts to include and cater to their audience exceedingly refreshing in a world of ironic distance, one where appearing to have disdain for your audience is ultra-hip.  And I’d be happy to see them again on this tour.  I like Coldplay.  But, while Mylo Xyloto may not be the end of the road for Coldplay, it's certainly the end of something.

I know comparing Coldplay to U2 is the oldest comparison in the book (and I particularly hate it because, however much I like Coldplay, they’ve never been as good a band as U2 was in their prime), but the similarities between Pop and Mylo Xyloto are just too many too ignore.  Both bands were coming off the second hump of their creative peak – U2 with Achtung Baby/Zooropa and Coldplay with Viva la Vida/Prospekt’s March (it’s telling that both peaks were fertile enough to produce a quick follow-up album made up of glorified B-sides).  And after that, both bands kind of looked around and realized they had nothing left to say.  And when you’re a big-time rock star, you can’t go back to your well of gritty personal struggle to re-charge the batteries.  You’re sitting in a penthouse on the phone with some designer trying to decide how big to make the pool at your third house.  When the batteries die on a big rock band, they tend to die for good.  U2 decided to try and solve the problem through pandering to the pop music world by incorporating some dance beats and reinventing themselves as a crossover dance band (remember the Discotheque video?).  Sound familiar?  Coldplay is doing the exact same thing on Mylo Xyloto.  They can’t even signal the onset of their own irrelevance in an original way (not to mention the fact that Pop was the far superior album).  And it’s sad, because it makes them into the poor-man’s-U2 cliché everyone always said they were, even when they weren’t.

I don’t want to dig too far into the specifics of the album because I’m sure I will sound meaner than I want to, and I really don’t have any personal axe to grind with Coldplay.  I’m not mad at them for making a bad album.  But that doesn’t mean Mylo Xyloto isn’t bad.  The song titles were the first sign that something might be wrong.  “Hurts like Heaven”?  “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall”?  Really?  It’s almost like they’re saying, “We don’t have much left to say, but if we say it really BIG, maybe no one will notice.”  And the lyrics, which have never been Coldplay’s strong suit, finally devolve into the stuff of parody here.  “Major Minus” sounds like a Flight of the Conchords send-up of vague attempts at “watch-out-for-the-man” angst.  Who is the ominous “they” anyway?  And the U2 “Elevation”-esque “WOO-WOO”s don’t help matters either.  The opening “Hurts like Heaven” would be kind of cool if its lyrics weren’t quite so unbearably trite.  But the relentless pulse of the pop-dance-beat pandering gets really tired really fast, and by the time Rihanna shows up for the inevitable club crossover “Princess of China”, I literally threw my hands up in the air.

Yes, the ballads are nice.  “Us Against the World” (again, the overstatement!), “U.F.O.”, and “Up in Flames” are all fine, and if Martin hadn’t already penned a dozen superior ballads on previous albums, they might redeem the whole thing.  But there are no instant classics like “Fix You” or “The Scientist” to be found here.  And yes, Jonny Buckland's guitar work on the lead single "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall" is infectous, it's just that he's basically copping the same lick he played on "Strawberry Swing" off Viva la Vida.  Even Brian Eno – the once-brilliant producer who has been consulting on Coldplay’s last two records – seems to be mailing it in.  Any signs of adventurous, unpredictable, or exhilarating production experimentations are few and far between.  Instead, the album just keeps coming back to that relentless pop pulse.

The irony is that, from a sales perspective anyway, the pop pandering will likely work.  The uncritical teen audience that laps up Katy Perry and Ke$ha’s insipid lyrics will have little reason to knock Coldplay.  But it’s still sad to me that Coldplay seems to have stopped trying.  After years of valiantly straining to make artistically credible albums in a world that refused to grant them any respect, they finally decided to bolt for the less critical pastures of overt pop.  There are, however, some obvious upsides for lots of different people – critics who are no longer forced to pan them (and can feel free judge them by the same criteria they judge other overtly pop albums rather than holding them to any highfalutin artistic standards), music snobs who are happy to see Coldplay stop applying for entrance to their exclusive club, pop fans who are just happy to dance along with the beats, and finally Coldplay themselves, who no longer have to knock themselves out in pursuit of artistic credibility (or feel the sting of critics who keep telling them they don’t measure up).  Who knows, maybe everyone will be happier… except Coldplay fans like me who actually thought of them as more than just another pop act.