Take me back to the start...please

I was thinking about Coldplay today and wondering if they discovered the perfect recipe for stardom. People love them, critics admit that they're decent enough, they have MASS appeal. They have mastered musical mediocrity and are rewarded for it. They are often lumped with the likes of The Police and U2, as bands that will be timeless because of their overall appeal. I saw Coldplay in concert once. I went for Rilo Kiley and while Coldplay performed a flawless set, it will not rank in my top concerts ever because it was just simply good. There was no surprise, although it was the tour after "X&Y" and I think we were all waiting for the surprise on this album, the song that took it up a notch or the crescendo into a blasting chorus. It never happened. We were all disappointed. The songs on "X&Y" swelled and then dissolved. There was no climax. I think this pretty much sums up Coldplay as a band. Steady, consistent, linear. If they were put on a chart there would be no peaks or valleys, just a single line to represent their safeness.

I also want to know why people put Coldplay in the batch with Radiohead. How are these two bands at all similar apart from the fact that 1. they both have sold a shit load of records 2. Chris Martin wishes he was Thom Yorke.

These thoughts are all arose because Coldplay has put out their 4th (and my guess is 3rd best) album, Viva la Vida. It's supposed to be inspired by Spain, Martin has started wearing body paint again and strange bandanas to try to change his image (I don't know if change is the right word here, since Martin really has no image, apart from arm candy to Gwenyth Paltrow). But Coldplay can get no better than they were on A Rush of Blood to the Head, when I was in 9th grade and thought his lyrics were so poignant and when their songs actually had a climax. When "The Scientist" so perfectly fit my life that a guy actually typed out those lyrics to me in Instant Messenger and I reciprocated with them a month later. The cliches of high school made Coldplay the perfect band, but the open-mindedness of college leaves them no room; they are too ordinary, nowadays I'd rather spend my time with the obscure and unrelatable than a stereotype.

I also like to remember Coldplay as that band who I saw on Vh1 in the early millenium, walking down the beach singing about how yellow it was. I liked yellow. It was simple and sweet, fresh. Now it's boring and overdone, and mostly over. Coldplay is going to be another U2. They'll make album after album that will sell like Furby's in 1998 and each one will have hit after hit, played on mix stations in every city. Irritated by complacency, the rest of us will (and have already) drifted to more progressive and meaningful music, that may not be timeless by American standards, but whose influence and advancing sounds will shape new artists to come. Coldplay can't do that. There cannot be another Coldplay because this band cannot be a hit twice and because their music will influence no one. It's too homogenized to spawn original creation, it would only be an imitation.