Shots In The Dark: The Backlash Continues

Wednesday, June 15, 2024

The Backlash Continues

Writing in Slate, Hua Hsu takes the piss out of Coldplay. Why is Chris Martin so sad? he asks. After all, Coldplay's lead singer is married to Gwyneth Paltrow (that one's too easy) and has a new baby. Maybe his songs don't really mean anything at all. It's not enough that Martin takes political stands for fair trade and other issues. His songs ought to be more political, to match the band's big sound.

Hsu's argument is smarter than Jon Pareles' silly, self-conscious takedown of Coldplay in the Times a couple weeks back, but I still think it's off-base.

I've listened to X & Y about twenty times in the week since it came out, and it's steadily grown on me. To judge it as an explicitly political record is a mistake (though, to be fair, one Martin might have encouraged, as he's frequently said that he wants Coldplay to be "bigger than U2").

X & Y is an album about love. It's the work of a man who's recently married and become a new father. You can hear it in every song: Martin can't believe his good luck—and he's terrified that it's going to change. He wants to make everything right—to keep it right. Images of repair abound, as when, in the gorgeous "Fix You," he sings, "Lights will guide you home/And ignite your bones/And I will try/To fix you."

Not the most graceful writing, but you get the point—Martin's a husband and a father now. He wants to protect. And haven't we all been in that position, where we can't believe our good fortune, and we know—we know, in our bones—that life doesn't stay so blissful for long, that our happiness is transient and will invariably be threatened by tragedy and illness and loss. In a strange way, the better off things are, the more we stand to lose, and the more we'll hurt when it happens.

So Martin wants to stop time, to enjoy a moment he feels is already slipping away. In the title cut, he sings, "I know something is broken/And I'm trying to fix it/Trying to repair it/Any way I can." And then, the lovely chorus: "You and me/are floating on a tidal wave/You and me/Are drifting into outer space/And singing...."

Is this life? Or death?

That may be a tough view of the world, but such existential anxiety has been Martin's philosophy consistently, ever since Coldplay's first album, Parachutes. On X & Y it is wed to an expansive sound that conflates the intensely personal with an album of arena-appropriate rock. To me, there's something courageous about that; no rock star makes himself more vulnerable than Chris Martin.

We have plenty of bands singing about why George Bush is a crummy president, and that's fine. Let Coldplay sing about love. Isn't that political? Isn't that enough?

¶ 7:22 AM

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