Maybe I’m 20 years behind on this, but have you ever noticed how many people absolutely hate the British soft-rock group Coldplay?
I say 20 years because Coldplay’s seminal (insert gross pun here) sophomore album A Rush Of Blood To The Head was released 20 summers ago, on August 26, 2002. It’s been 20 years since the album that brought us “The Scientist” and “Clocks”—with its Jerusalem bells ringing and Roman cavalry choirs singing—would begin its rise to quadruple-platinum status, helping catapult the band that created it into the pantheon of arena-rock acts.
Coldplay hate goes back to the publicity around their massive hit “Yellow” and debut album Parachutes in 2000. Creation Records founder and tastemaker Alan McGee would almost immediately label the band as “bedwetters’ music,” a sentiment that seems to have stuck to the band through the subsequent 22 years.
Ask any Coldplay fan if they like Coldplay, and odds are you will either hear an outright denial or a simultaneously apologetic and guilt-ridden affirmative, as if it were some moral failing to enjoy the band’s music. While many have characterized the band as “boring”—dating back, at the very least, to criticism of A Rush Of Blood—that doesn’t quite justify such embarrassment.
The truth is, any band can get away with being boring, as long as they manage to seem cool while being so. Some might say they enjoy the “vibe” of the music, as opposed to saying that they think it is catchy or interesting. While I would disagree with the sentiment that Coldplay’s music is generally boring, it is pretty undeniable that it lacks a cool “vibe”. Some might just call it corny.
This perhaps best exemplified by the band’s performance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show. The band skipped out on stage with a crowd holding up bright neon vari-colored slabs in broad daylight, playing through a slate of songs including “Yellow,” “Clocks,” and their most recent hit, “Adventure Of A Lifetime.” As that final song title might suggest, it was a cheesy affair, and perhaps obviously uncool even to the NFL, as they bolstered the performance with appearances by the effortlessly cool Beyonce, Bruno Mars, and Mark Ronson.
Beyonce debuting “Formation”? Yeah, that’s cool. Coldplay playing “Fix You,” the “cry now” song in any montage? Less so. “Uptown Funk” with some slick choreography? Cool. Dancers spinning massive, cartoonish technicolor flowers? Nope.
When it comes down to it, not only are bands in a general sense out of fashion at the moment—leaving aside K-pop boy bands and girl groups—but certainly a band that indulges in grand, mid-paced emotional gestures is currently uncool as opposed to something more apathetic and/or dancier (think Billie Eilish). Our sense of what is cool is largely defined by trends and, perhaps in a contradictory manner, the impression that one does not care about trends or what others think. Somehow, Coldplay manages to fail both tests as a band that is both out of fashion and seems to desperately want you to like it.
Look, I like some of the Coldplay songs. Many of them, even. But it’s hard to deny the “lame” accusations. Sure, they are a surprisingly dynamic band—I would posit that no two albums of theirs sound the same. But they have gone from a band accused of being a Radiohead rip-off to just being a lame pop band, and all while still having 56 million monthly listeners on Spotify (good for #10 in the world at the time of writing).
Let’s compare Coldplay to another much-maligned band of the current moment, Imagine Dragons. Imagine Dragons are currently on tour with Macklemore, perhaps the lamest diamond rapper out there, and make the kind of music that sounds like the aural equivalent of polishing a turd. Their sound has barely changed in the past eight years, as the band continues to be their overly-bombastic, overly-dramatic, overly-polished selves. Most of all, something just doesn’t feel genuine about their brand of angsty rock music.
Coldplay, on the other hand, are the polar opposite. They are earnest and genuine—at least in my opinion. They seem to really enjoy writing and performing a brand of soaring and broadly popular emotional music, whether that is in the joy of “Paradise” or the sadness of “The Scientist”. Indeed, perhaps it is this, the band’s wearing of their hearts on their sleeve while simultaneously creating such lowest-common-denominator music, that makes them so unpopular. Perhaps we all feel the emotions that Coldplay sings about, but the fact is that no one feels particularly special crying to “Fix You,” a masterpiece of sad sentiment packaged in the most consumer-friendly yet somehow effective way possible. No one feels special rocking to Coldplay because they just seem so unspecial themselves.
With no cool factor, obscurity, or eccentricity to latch on to, to like Coldplay is to be the person who buys their clothes at Kirkland. And no one wants to be that guy.
However, as someone who enjoys many Coldplay songs, there is something significant to realizing that one’s emotions are not exclusive to oneself. Perhaps one could call it liberating. There is almost nothing bespoke about your particular sadness or ennui, as many people have gone through similar emotions to the ones you are feeling right now and came out the other side. To claim difference is to ignore the universality of the human experience. Perhaps there is nothing cooler than realizing that many people struggle with similar issues, and that crying to “Fix You” is as powerful an acknowledgement of that reality than anything else. In other words, as a great band once wrote, “nobody said it was easy.”
Who is Chris Martin addressing when he sings, ”I came along, I wrote a song for you”? I don’t know. But it sure feels like he’s written songs for everyone. Whether you view that as a positive or a negative is up to you.