If you ask me my top five favorite albums of all time, I have no issue admitting that “A Rush of Blood to the Head” by Coldplay is in there somewhere. But that also does not stop my oh so very strong dislike for Chris Martin, the band's frontman, and really, Coldplay as a whole.
If anything, how much I love the band’s second album fuels my anger because everything they released after it has been abysmal. I was that sad fifth-grader who somehow heard “Yellow” in 2000 and convinced my parents to get me “Parachutes,” Coldplay’s first album, and it became a CD player regular. Up until mid-2005, I listed my three favorite bands as The Killers, Radiohead and Coldplay, but then June 6, 2005 unfortunately happened causing me to slowly remove Coldplay from the pedestal I had so kindly given them.
What happened on June 6, 2005? Coldplay’s third album “X&Y” came out, or how I sometimes think of it, “X & Why Did This Happen?” I tried so hard to like “Speed of Sound,” which was the first single, but it felt like an empty song. The emotion I felt throughout the first two albums didn't feel present. Once the album came out, the only redeemable song to me was “Fix You” because it actually had heart in it. It’s funny because the band had apparently discarded a bunch of songs they felt were too “flat” and “passionless” before coming to the final form of “X&Y” because I think 99% of the album is still both those descriptors. It was simply disappointing to me, and I clung to their first two albums harder. But I will also treasure this time as being the last before the band started their transformation into multicolored messes.
As someone who did not want to give up one of their favorite bands, I tried really hard when “Viva La Vida” came out, but oh man, there again were those meaningless sounds and words that I had already attempted to endure. I even saw Coldplay live for the first time during their tour for this album. My mom thought Chris Martin was a great performer, but I was too deep in my resentment and grumpily replied “he’s okay.” This also signaled the start of their Life in a Technicolor Mess of Outfits trend that seems to have really taken hold.
And then “Mylo Xylophone” (I know that isn’t the album title, but I’ve been referring to it as such for so long that I can’t call it anything else) happened in 2011. OH BOY. This album was the signed and sealed farewell to them in my life and iTunes library. “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” is the most embarrassing and most Chris Martin title to ever be written. Something about it deeply infuriates me. My thoughts on “Paradise” are my variations of “para para pair of mice/dice/lice/rice/what is my life.”
It was also around the release of “Mylo Xylophone” that Martin told Howard Stern during an interview that the band’s earnings are not split evenly with each member getting 25% between Martin, Guy Berryman, Will Champion, and Jonny Buckland but rather 20-20-20-40 with good old Christopher getting the largest cut. Okay, fine, he may be the main songwriter and the only one the general public can ever name (kind of like Maroon 5, is there even a whole band or is it just Adam Levine, the world will never know) but that still feels inherently wrong to me. I doubt the rest of the band is okay sitting in the back while Dead Blue Eyes earns double than each of them. Also, I would argue that him taking the biggest cut makes him most responsible for what transformations the band goes through, in this case, heartfelt band making some beautiful songs to soulless acquaintances of Beyonce and Jay-Z. Hey, at least Will Champion got to live in the Red Wedding.
Coldplay has become one awful colorful explosion of emotionless noise to me. The one thing they’ve released post-2005 that did not fall under this category was “Ghost Stories,” which I legitimately fell asleep listening to. “A Head Full of Dreams,” their 2015 offering to the masses, is another bunch of flowery nonsense.
There are two people in the world who saw a video of Holi on YouTube and thought “hey that looks fun I want to do that.” One is the person that started Color Runs and the other is Chris Martin for the “Hymn for the Weekend” video. I'm South Asian, so it's beyond infuriating to see a bunch of white British dudes prancing around India in a music video throwing around colored powder. On top of that, they had Hindi writing on some of their equipment during live performances. It was totally all for the aesthetic, don't tell me it's sharing their appreciation of Indian culture or because Martin visited India how many ever times. BULLSHIT.
Everything about their Super Bowl performance was also sad. I think my feelings about it can be best summed up with this tweet:
The Carpool Karaoke Martin did with James Corden felt like he was trying so hard to be relevant and cool, but he seemed embarrassed by his own songs at times and left Corden to do the singing.
I even saw them live a few weeks ago at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and my basic conclusion is people like Coldplay singles post-”X&Y” and flashing lights. The screams that erupted in the stadium were more to do with the light-up wristbands doing something than whatever song started, I promise you that. I also had no idea that you could use fireworks that many times unnecessarily in one concert. It's all just theatrics to hype the crowd and very little about the music. The whole show was redeemed when Michael J. Fox came out to play "Earth Angel" and "Johnny B. Goode" with the band.
I know there are Coldplay fans who have stuck with them from Day One to now, and there are fans who argue that present Coldplay represents a happier Chris Martin or whatever, which is wonderful, but something got lost along the way. The heart in Coldplay got lost for me, and I feel too burned by the colors, mediocrity, and attempts to stay relevant to ever come back from that. Chris Martin as 40% earnings taker is my enemy as a result.
